Normalizing career breaks and flex work

Because we can have it all, but not all at once.

As I write this from the kitchen table, my two-year-old daughter is playing with her paw patrol toys next to me on the floor. She is home with me every morning while my son goes to kindergarten. While this was not my original plan (she was supposed to attend a local daycare but it didn’t work out) I have been pleasantly surprised by how much writing I am able to get done with her home. It’s a different way of working. Some days it’s easier than others. I have gotten used to frequent interruptions; I have honed my ability to leave off mid-sentence, help her go pee on the potty, then pick right back up as if I had never stopped. She has also honed her ability to play independently while I work. The more we practice, the better we get at this little morning dance of ours. In the afternoons, our long-time nanny comes and watches the two of them (kindergarten for my son ends at noon!) and I am able to do deep work for a few hours without interruptions. I am unquestionably more efficient during these afternoon sessions, but my mornings are also surprisingly productive, albeit a bit slower. 

The more I read about hunter-gatherer societies, the more I realize that women have been seamlessly blending work and childcare for hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, the nature of work in these societies is different and everyone works far less than the average American, but they are able to do so while simultaneously caring for children. It feels imminently balanced (dare I say “natural”?) and perhaps we can learn something from it. 

Just like in contemporary America, women in hunter-gatherer societies do three kinds of work: economic labor, domestic work, and childcare. The economic labor in hunter-gatherer societies is foraging work: both gathering and hunting. This is what people do “for a living,” if you will. They are paid in calories instead of dollars, but it’s similar in that it is the essential work required for survival and they need to leave home to do it. Women usually forage for about 3 or 4 hours per day, 7 days per week. They work in small groups and they bring nursing babies with them in slings or on their backs. Weaned children (usually 2-3 years or older) are left in camp to play in a multi-age playgroup, usually within shouting distance of at least one adult who remains in camp as the “babysitter.” 

Domestic work involves maintaining huts, collecting firewood and water and processing foods gathered during the day. Women in most hunter-gatherer societies spend another 2 or 3 hours per day doing these domestic tasks. 

The last category is childcare. The amount of time a woman spends in active childcare varies depending on the age of the child. Women’s foraging returns are typically lowest in the first year after a baby’s birth when they spend the most time engaged in direct childcare (mostly breastfeeding) and some anthropologists believe this is the reason for human pair-bonding (hunter-gatherers are monogamous and husbands make up for the caloric deficit in the first year through their own foraging efforts). According to one study of the Agta, women with children under the age of 2 spend about one third of their waking hours engaged in direct childcare but this number declines to about 10 or 15% after the child is weaned. That’s quite low by contemporary American standards, even for full-time working mothers!

Here’s the kicker: everyone in camp, including mothers of children of all ages, spends at least one third of their waking hours in leisure. Leisure is defined as rest, sleep, play or socializing. It does not include domestic work, childcare or foraging work. What I find beautiful about the hunter-gatherer model is that equal leisure is the starting point. The nature of the work varies depending on age, sex, and reproductive status but leisure does not. Their society makes allowances for the intensive work of breastfeeding and childcare in the early years of motherhood, without letting it encroach on a woman’s right to rest and leisure (or her ability to return to being a more productive contributor when her child is older).  

Our lives in the contemporary West are so different now and there’s no going back, so what’s the point of studying the hunter-gatherer model? I believe that if humans were able to live successfully and happily according to this model for 99% of our existence as a species, then there must be some forgotten wisdom that we can reabsorb into our contemporary post-industrial lives. In many ways, this is the lifestyle that our Homo Sapien brains and bodies are best adapted to and I believe our abrupt departure from it can explain many modern physical and mental illnesses. I am not advocating for a wholesale return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but when it comes to motherhood, I see three lessons in their ways of doing things: 

First, women are self-sufficient providers. There is no equivalent in hunter-gatherer society for the contemporary Western stay-at-home-mom who is totally dependent on her husband’s income. (In fairness, it’s worth noting that there is also no hunter-gather equivalent to a mother who leaves her children for 40+ per week to work outside the home, but I will get to that later). Except in the first year after birth, when a new mother depends more on her husband and the community for support, a hunter-gatherer mother is mostly self-reliant. This is critical because it helps maintain equality between the sexes in these societies. Women’s gathering work is just as valuable, if not more valuable, to the survival of the family and the community, as men’s. As such, women have an equal voice in all group decisions, such as when to leave camp and where to move. Women can, and do, leave bad marriages. Some choose never to remarry. They are able to support themselves through their own foraging efforts along with some vital help from the community. No one in hunter-gatherer society ever goes it alone, but no individual woman is ever dependent on a man for her survival and well-being. To me, this is a strong argument in favor of encouraging mothers to stay in the workforce after having children, and for building a work culture that is more flexible and accommodating of motherhood (more on that to come). 

Second, women reduce their foraging workload in the first year or two after the birth of a baby in order to accommodate the intensive work of childcare and breastfeeding. During this time they are supported by the community. The American Pediatrics Society recommends exclusive breastfeeding for six months (and The World Health Organization recommends breastfeeding for two years), but except in the most progressive countries (think: Sweden) virtually no nation actually makes any kind of real allowances to accommodate the intensive work of breastfeeding. Some research has estimated that the time required to breastfeed a baby is roughly equivalent to a full-time, 40-hour-per-week job. That sounds high to me, but if we look to hunter-gatherers as a model, they are spending  as much as one third of their waking hours breastfeeding. I think this is a strong argument for having longer paid leave and flexible work-from-home options for mothers in the first year after a baby’s birth. It is simply absurd to recommend that women breastfeed for years and then make no accommodations for this in the workplace. 

Third, work is flexible and child-friendly. I believe that most women want to continue work after having children, but are pushed out of the workforce by unaccommodating, patriarchal policies and norms around in-office, 40-hour work weeks with zero interruptions. After my daughter was born, I asked if I could come back part-time. The company had recently rolled out a “policy” offering new parents the option to return to work at three fifths time for the first year after the birth of their child. Unfortunately, the “policy” had an asterisk saying that, ultimately, the option to return to work part-time was “at the discretion of the manager.” The manager said no, so I quit. When we ended up in a financial tight spot about a year after I had quit my job to care for the kids, I asked for my old job back. The answer was no. In fact, the company has a very “generous” policy offering new mothers who want to rejoin the workforce after a career pause the opportunity to participate in “returnships” (I swear this is a real thing: you can look it up here). The policy says that women who have at least five years of work experience and who have been out of the workforce for a minimum of one year can rejoin the workforce by starting all over, serving coffee. In other words, we don’t care if you have a Stanford degree, an MBA, and ten years of professional experience. If you have a child and you opt out of working to care for that child for say, 14 months, and then you have the audacity to want back in, well then you have to start your whole goodman career over from square one. These wonderful “returnships” can facilitate your re-entry into the workforce (because your brain has probably completely atrophied and you have probably lost all of your professional skills in just 14 months at home with a baby) and the best part is, we the patriarchy get to call ourselves progressive; give ourselves a big pat on the back if you will.

I hear this story over and over and over again. Here’s a passage from Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, about how the desire to participate in a two-week creative writing fellowship forced her out of her editing job:

“I’d had to use vacation time to care for my daughter whenever she was sick, and two-year-olds in daycare are often sick, so those days dwindled quickly. I asked my boss if I could transition to freelancing for the company. The answer was no. I asked if I could transition to part-time, without benefits, since we were on my husband’s benefits anyway. The answer was no. I asked if I could stay on as a full-time employee, but take some unpaid leave for a writing residency. The answer was no. I had a difficult decision to make…I quit.”

Women can make major contributions to projects and companies while also taking care of children, just not in the way our patriarchal work system is currently designed. Rather than pushing mothers out, the workforce needs to flex to accommodate them. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Australia and many other countries globally, parents can request flexible or part-time arrangements after their parental leave is over and such arrangements are strongly protected by the government. These countries offer a combination of shareable paid leave, flexible return-to-work arrangements and legal protection to help mothers lead a balanced work and family life. In the United States we offer none of the above. Zero. 

Not all European mothers speak highly of the part-time and flex-work options available to them. I’ve gotten into many debates with my french sister-in-law over this topic who believes that part-time work is a trap for mothers. She has many stories from colleagues who have opted to work 3 or 4 days a week and who end up just cramming 5 days worth of work into those 3 or 4 days. They are paid less, passed over for promotions and left trapped in stressful middle management jobs while their male counterparts rise to leadership positions. I am sensitive to this argument, but I think the solution is to work on changing the work culture, not to zap flexible work programs. It’s essential that women not be penalized for slowing down in their careers for a few years when their children are young and mothers and employers must both take measures to ensure that they don’t fall into the trap of part-time pay for full-time work. 

I have personally been deeply influenced by Dr. Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and her “alternative life map.” According to Carstensen, despite the fact that we have nearly doubled the average length of our lives in the 21st century, we are all still planning and living our lives as if we had only 50 years to live and work. We are putting enormous pressure on ourselves to work our hardest in our careers at exactly the same time we are having children, so that we can save more money for longer and longer retirements and do…nothing? What if, instead, we expected to be productive and to continue working later into life, but with more breaks? As she puts it,  “I’ve been encouraging people to retire early and often. That is, to just stretch out our working lives so that we work more years but we also take breaks throughout our working lives: sabbaticals, time to re-train, time to try different things, time to just take a break and rest. I think our whole model of work is built on these lives that are half as long as the ones we have today (source).” 

What better reason to take a break or scale back than to spend time with your children when they are young? The truth is, we have plenty of time to have and do it all - kids and multiple careers, should we so choose - but not all at once. Part of this means that employers have to stop penalizing people for having resume gaps and career breaks. We need to stop pretending like a mother who takes a few years off has completely lost her entire skill set. We need to implement paid leave and put pressure on employers to allow parents a flexible return to work so they can keep a foot in the game without feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the concomitant demands of childcare and full time work. We need to fight against the decline narrative and age-ism and start normalizing going back to school at 50 and starting a new career at 55. Parenting is hard, but life is long, and we don’t need to do all of the hardest stuff at the same time.