I’m not very good at New Year’s resolutions. It’s never made sense to me to pick an arbitrary date and pretend I’m going to start doing something—or everything—differently from that point on. Any gym owner can tell you how the weight room and spin classes swell each January, only to return to near-empty by […]
work-life balance
The Trouble With
Parental Leave
Parental Leave
A few weeks ago, at Working Mother’s annual “WorkLife Congress,” I attended a breakout session that made me think of Adam Pertman. I’d had a conversation with the adoption reformer a few months ago about the status of employer supports for adoption—see my last post for some of what I learned. The breakout session I […]
Employers: Time to Get Real About “Real” Families!
“Most children adopted from abroad have some level of special need, and most adoptions in America are of children from foster care. You have to convince me that bonding and taking care of your baby requires you to have six weeks, but taking care of, say, a sibling group with special needs only requires two. […]
How My Parents Put the Lie to “Mad Men”
The whole concept of “work-family balance”—or however you choose to phrase it—often feels like a peculiarly modern concern, born of feminism, economic changes and other factors that led to the predominance of two-earner households and/or single parent homes. But of course, this is a strictly middle class view; many families have had to struggle along […]
The Quiet Epidemic That’s Ravaging U.S. Workers
One of the most entertaining things I learned at World at Work’s “Future of Work” forum in Nashville a couple weeks ago is that March 31 is now officially national Vacation Commitment Day. Citing an “epidemic of vacation deprivation,” a nonprofit advocacy group called Take Back Your Time has devised the special day to launch […]
Nuisance or Catastrophe? How You Feel About Snow May Depend On Your Job
There’s nothing like a little snow to throw the whole precarious balance of work and life right off its metaphorical fulcrum. Ok, a lot of snow. Here in New York City, we’ve had our small share of shoveling, and a lot of cringingly frigid weather of the kind that makes city officials warn ominously that […]
