Neely: Work Culture Forgets Kids

Our knee-jerk reaction is to blame the parents. When a bus monitor from Greece, N.Y., was viciously bullied to tears last month by 13-year-old boys, YouTube viewers quickly pointed their fingers at neglectful mothers and fathers. When Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University dean, wrote of her decision to leave her job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department because her 14-year-old son was struggling without her, online readers just as eagerly labeled her as an elite careerist. Yet as representations of opposite sides of the socioeconomic scale, both stories illustrate a key flaw of contemporary American society. Much as we revere the power of individual choice, it’s often not the parents who are failing American children; it’s the culture in which the parents work. As Slaughter pointed out in an article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” for the Atlantic magazine in June, parents make difficult decisions in the context of a system that no longer matches contemporary reality/ Jamie Tobias Neely , SR. More here.

Question (for mothers who work outside the home): What is the most difficult thing for you to balance to be able to work?