Who Benefits? Debate Rages About Whether Workers With Children Are Given Special Treatment At The Office

Candy Lake doesn’t want kids.

She’d like people to respect that, but sometimes feels like an oddity in a world that puts a premium on parenthood.

Lake, a legal assistant at a Charlotte law firm, sees “reproductive discrimination” in insurance costs, taxes and office workload issues.

“I think a lot of people feel like this but don’t think they have a voice because they feel outnumbered,” she said.

Nurse Carol Pfahl has a husband, two small kids and a career she doesn’t want to give up. It bothers her when people without kids complain about the “special treatment” parents get. Today’s parents are raising tomorrow’s doctors, nurses and world leaders, she says.

“It’s not that parents should have all the rights, just that kids should,” Pfahl said.

The two, like many other Americans, have vastly different takes on President Clinton’s proposal several months ago to all states to use unemployment money to guarantee new parents up to 12 weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child.

Pfahl says helping parents spend more time with their babies would build stronger families; Lake says it would be unfair to people who don’t have kids.

Unless you work in Utopia, you’ve probably heard some form of this debate among your colleagues, neighbors or friends.

In some offices, it takes on a resentful tone toward the guy who races out early for a daughter’s school play, when a childless co-worker feels she doesn’t have the same option. Some parents, so worried they’ll be perceived as less effective at work or not available enough at home, stretch themselves into a state of exhaustion, guilt and burnout.

During the past decade, family-friendly policies that centered on child care left some childless workers feeling so slighted, many companies expanded benefits to address aging parents, sick partners and other outside-the-office concerns.

The Clinton proposal has pushed work-family arguments to a new and controversial level.

Plan supporters say it would give parents who don’t have paid maternity or paternity leave a chance to bond during crucial stages in a baby’s life. Critics include business leaders who say it would put them into a crunch; and other workers who say it’s unfair to people without kids.

“Having children is a choice, why should my company or my government support that choice?” asks Andrew Hansen, a 37-year-old marketing manager for an Internet banking software company in Charleston.

Hansen, who’s married and has opted not to have children, says he sees “moderately” growing anger among childless workers. He points to the Internet, where dozens of Web sites invite the “child-free” to mingle, share ideas or vent about how children seem to have taken over the world.

In a 1997 national study by the Families and Work Institute, 40 percent of people polled said they’d feel resentful if their companies offered benefits that don’t help them.

Many bigger companies have addressed the “backlash” of workers without kids by expanding their definition of family emergencies, and by giving workers more flexibility in schedules and paid time off.

Experts in workplace issues say that recognizing all employees have a life outside, whether it involves school meetings, aging parents or running marathons, helps keep office harmony.

“What we’ve come to realize is that we have so much diversity, parents are a part of that, but there are a whole lot of other responsibilities a million different reasons people want time off,” said Joan Hope, who works in First Union Bank’s Human Resources office.

“Perhaps parents and children led the way for everybody to speak up.”

Lake, who’s 33, says treating workers differently isn’t good business.

Families aren’t just people with kids, she says. If parents get paid time off to stay home with babies, she thinks she and her husband, Bill, should get equal time to be together, travel and pursue their hobbies.

“I have nothing against mothers staying home, which is what my mother did. What I resent is that they’d be getting paid unemployment - when that’s their choice,” Lake said.

Ralph Long says parents need to spend more time with their kids, and government and business leaders need to make that easier.

When his family moved to Kannapolis, N.C., from New Jersey eight years ago, they decided to live on one income so his wife, Debbie, could stay home with their son Sean.

Long, a consultant on church building projects, said they took a big financial hit, something some families aren’t willing to do, and others can’t afford.

“There are children out there who are hurting, who are growing up without quality time of their parents,” Long said. “We have a whole generation of kids raising themselves or being raised with the help of paid baby sitters.

“Society as a whole has to realize that children need parents. Sure, adults who don’t have kids will be paying for somebody else’s kids, but you have to look at the big picture.”