Find Happiness in Strong Moments, not Balance

As an uncoordinated person, the word “balance” makes me uneasy -- I envision standing on one foot and falling over.

This week, The Huffington Post says that if we want more happiness we should stop striving for balance and seek something else instead: "Strong moments” -- those great surges of positive emotion when you hug your kid, make your spouse smile, have an epiphany, win one at work.

This is a great antidote to the unhelpful idea that more choice is making women less happy (raised most recently by Maureen Dowd). What is making women less happy is a failure to say NO to some of those choices. To say “I do not want to do that” and cross the undesirables off the schedule. See our BlogHer video for more.

We women need to grasp what men seem understand more naturally - that’s it’s really better for everyone if we are honest with ourselves. That it’s OK to say: “Of the 5 things my kids want to do, I like to do 2 -- the other 3 drive me nuts,” and then act on that realization and do the 2 you like knowing your genuine enjoyment is good for your kids. Or, “I have 6 meetings on my schedule next week. How many really make a difference? How many can I decline?”

Researching Getting to 50/50, we read fascinating research that says even today's thoroughly modern women lack the same sense of “entitlement” that men have. Women do not feel as entitled to do what we want and to say what matters (e.g. that conference/trip/fundraiser is a complete waste of time).

Carmen, a mother and doctor at a big university hospital told us how she struggled for years to find a mix of work and family that made her happy. Cutting her time at work didn’t help if it meant that Carmen’s average hour at the office was more dreary. So she negotiated with her boss and rearranged her job - to spend more time on patients who needed her skill set and less on work she felt did not matter. With more strong moments in her work day, “I’ve been so happy” Carmen told us.

Jennifer Aaker, a professor at Standford’s Graduate School of Business, is doing great work on the nature of happiness and the many ways we define it -- and can cultivate more of it. Aaker points out that how you perceive your access to free time is a big issue in whether you report feeling happy.

How to expand your free time - actual or perceived? Believing that your spouse has your back helps a lot, sensing that if you can’t get to X or Y, you can count on your partner.

And so does what Aaker calls “filtering.” Sifting through the day and looking for “doubles, triples and home-runs” -- activities that let you simultaneously engage two or more priorities in your life: Jogging with your spouse, community work that welcomes the whole family, colleagues who do playdates.

So I’m looking for a parent-child yoga class in hopes of getting limber and engaging my daughter’s love of the tree pose -- she’s better at “balance”.

By Sharon Meers

Sex, Love and Labor Statistics

On NPR this week, I was asked if there’s any good in the new statistics showing that women now outnumber men in the work force. Maybe. If it lets us embrace women as breadwinners, I said, that would be healthy. Even healthier: If men do their part at home and free women to keep the kinds of jobs that pay well. Listen

But, like many things, this all comes down to love and sex. Some people get uneasy when women make more money and men do more childcare. Why is that? I’m guessing it’s the same reason that, until we wrote our book, I’d never heard these two facts:

1) Growing your earnings power helps you get -- and stay -- married if you are a woman.

2) When husbands do more at home, couples have more sex.

(For details on point #2, see http://gettingto5050.com/book.htm)

Let’s shake off our male-female identity angst so we weather the downturn more happily and set up for a better future.

Two career bets are safer than one. Dual-career men and women can each be more agile, less vulnerable members of the labor force. A wife who can keep the family afloat gives a downsized husband better options – to find the right next job, change careers, start his own business.

And when a man values his wife's career, he’s more willing to step up and do his part at ho, me. When a mom values her husband as an equally qualified parent, she’s more likely to step aside and let him do things his own way (and dad’s more apt to enjoy parenting).

We need to move from women having more jobs to women having better jobs – because female earnings matter to families not just in a recession but in the recovery too.

We’re fooling ourselves if we think we have free labor markets when “girl-jobs” (less pay, some time for kids) and “boy jobs” (more pay, no time for kids) persist. We’ll all enjoy more prosperity when the best person for the job can both win the post and keep it -- whether man or woman, dad or mom.

By Sharon Meers

Can Open Minds Be Contagious?

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine echoed a theme of a great new book: Is happiness - or it’s opposite - catching?

In the Times, researchers say that the company we keep matters a lot -- it drives our health habits and our moods. And in Hell is Other Parents, Deborah Copaken Kogan shares engaging and often hilarious tales that show the same is true of parenting.

From labor and delivery in urban hospitals to the micro-politics of playgrounds, Kogan explores the transmission of parental anxiety. The sugar-phobic mom covering her kid’s ears lest existence of cookies be revealed. The dad who is so eager to make a point he’s happy to insult your child’s hero to do it. Parents who see every test of grade school as a verdict on their own worth.

As a mother of young kids, reining in my own child-rearing neuroses is a 24/7 job -- at which I frequently fail. But Hell is Other Parents reminds me to keep trying. The best thing we can do for our kids is to build a positive culture around them. The Times talks about playing up-beat music on the way home for family dinner -- to get our own contagious moods in the right place. Quarantining our parental angst can help a lot too. Letting go of our personal dogmas makes room for a healthier habit: Opening our minds.

At our Getting to 50/50 book talks, we get two reactions about men and women re-negotiating the work/life split. When we say men can be equally good parents (and that women’s jobs are equally important), we hear either “that’s obvious” or “no way.” We think it’s neither - not a snap nor impossible. In our own lives, it takes daily re-examination of how we do things. But that’s the fun of it.

“”I will not be domesticated,’ my husband actually said that to me early in our marriage” a mother of young kids told me today. But with an open mind, this working mom evolved her approach (less particular, more encouraging), saw her spouse would willingly do domestic stuff if free to use his own style - and bit by bit her welcoming approach paid off in a husband who supports her career and happily does his part with their children.

Maybe we parents will have less hell and more haven this way: Drop our judgments and certainties (with our spouse/siblings/friends) and make broadmindedness among parents a viral virtue.

By Sharon Meers

Obama-like Hope

"Bring back the hope." A fellow working mom gave us that charge as we embarked on writing our book Getting to 50/50 a few years ago.

So we were duly flattered when The Huffington Post recently called Getting to 50/50 "Obama-like" saying that we'd taken a "clear-eyed" look at the research and laid out a game plan that was "refreshingly upbeat" for working parents who want to change both their own lives and the places they work.

But no one can succeed in bringing more hope to working parents until we re-think the very way we talk about this topic. Let's start with what we put in headlines.

This week, David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote a great piece about both the promise of change and the cost when we don't make change happen fast enough.

Citing new research by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, the piece points out that when women set the standards in a profession, innovation occurs in how people work. Goldin points out how much obstetrics -- a 24/7 job if there ever was one -- has evolved as women have become a large part of the leadership in that field. Group practices are now the norm and the sharing of work allows OBs to address two kinds of needs: both those of their patients and those of their own families.

But this useful news -- that changing your workplace is possible -- is in the last half of the article. It is buried behind a lot of discouraging data on how much your income will suffer if you don't change the way you work and feel compelled to quit your job for a while. And the headline? Financial Careers Come at a Cost to Family, implying that people who want families should avoid finance and other un-reformed fields - rather than sticking with them, leading change and altering the way demanding work gets done.

In Chapters 4-6 of our book, Getting to 50/50, we profile many forward-thinking parents and employers who've re-engineered work to produce both top-quality results and time for family. On our book tour, we've talked to over 2,000 men and women at companies and campuses across the country. We see lots of evidence that jobs can be made family-friendly enough so that men can be full parents and women can have full careers. Let's focus our eyes -- and our headlines -- on that.

By Sharon Meers

Work and home angst in a difficult economy

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty staunch advocate of my working. When the kids were little many of my friends would feel guilty for missing out on circle time at nursery school or not going to gymnastics class with the kids. I (almost) always felt like going to work was the right thing for me and my family, and as long as I did not miss out of the BIG IMPORTANT kid things, then it was ok that I work. I do sometimes feel badly that I don't often see my friends and my husband and I rarely have quality time together, but I have not felt like the kids, or I, was missing out. This was in part because my job generally gives me enough flexibilty that I don't have to miss the BIG IMPORTANT things.

But now work is getting harder. And more stressful. And the stakes seem higher when everyone in our community is losing their jobs. Last week I had a real working mom conflict moment. My daughter won a big award at school and the ceremony was at 9am. Both my husband and I planned to be there. But at 8am I got a call that I had to be at work for a 9am meeting. Now, in a better economy, perhaps I would have said that I was unavailable. But in this environment, telling them I was going to miss a pretty important meeting did not seem like a good idea. First, I cried in private. Then, I very sadly told my daughter that I could not attend the ceremony. I explained that I really needed to go to work, that I want to keep my job, that the family is dependent on my job, and that I was very proud of her and that her dad would share the pictures of the ceremony with me.

I expected some tears. In the past when I have missed certain events, she definitely let me know that she was angry and that it was unfair that I wasn't available. Sometimes she would tell me that she wished I didn't work or that it was unfair that all the other moms were at school but me. But, amazingly, this time she understood. And while I felt badly for not being there, I was extremely proud of her for giving me a hug and telling me that it was ok, dad would be there, and she knew I had to go to work. And I again felt good about working, and having her understand that hard choices have to be made, and that those choices did not mean that I loved her any less, or was any less proud of her. We had two things to celebrate at dinner: her school award, and her growing emotional maturity. To me they were equally important.

JStrober

Our Louse-y Holiday

Last week, my husband and I passed our first test in nit-picking. Not the metaphorical kind, the real McCoy. What you do so your kids can get an "all clear" from the school nurse and go back to class.

On December 25, while many parents were pulling presents from under the tree, my husband and I were pulling lice from our 4-year-old's hair. With no nuke-the-critters shampoo on hand, we were left to douse our daughter in conditioner and go follicle-to-follicle, hunting down each louse.

Our biggest challenge: convincing a pre-schooler to sit for hours so we could comb through every inch of her scalp. "So what mommy? I like bugs." A Cinderella DVD was the required bribe for stillness, high-pitched mouse songs oddly appropriate to the task at hand.

Hunched over ringlets, with crooks in our necks and tired eyes, my husband and I found ourselves smiling. "How primal is this!" Like cave-dwellers before us, we scouted out 40 little grey beasts (though we flushed our lice down the toilet, didn't eat them : -)). My ability to see the humor dimmed slightly on learning that my daughter's lice had colonized my head too.

I recall a day 30+ years ago when my little brother came home with lice. A mood of shame descended on our home as my fastidious mother faced down the army of icky little fellows and we all felt there had been some failure in cleanliness. There didn't seem anything fun about it.

While I can't say I'm hoping for more lice, it hasn't been all bad. After weeks of checks, rechecks and yanking suspicious items from each other's scalps, my husband, son, daughter and I have a new perspective on each other. And I having my husband patiently comb through my hair felt strangely calming - a kind of bonding we just don't do in modern life.

Maybe it helps to know that lice are not a report card ("They prefer clean, dry hair," a louse expert told me, "can't attach well to oily hair. Not much you can do except tell your kid not to share clothes or hug their friends - good luck until she's 12!") In this time of unexpected challenges, I'm going to thank our louse-y friends for reminding me that adversity is more fun when you face it as a group sport.

SMeers

Thoughts on Michelle Obama and 50/50

In Getting to 50/50, we talk a lot about the benefits to men of their wives working and earning money so that men can take risks and pursue their dreams. It seems to me that the Obamas are actually the best poster children for our 50/50 dream. They have both pursued careers, but often it was Michelle Obama making the bulk of the income for their family, while Barack was a community organizer, professor and public servant. Would he have felt more pressure to make money to support their family rather than follow these passions without a wife who participated in the breadwinning? I actually imagine that a key to his success was that she took care of the basics so that he didn't have to and could concentrate where his talents were best suited....in public service.

I actually know quite a few folks who would make fabulous public servants if they didn't have to maintain private industry jobs to support their families. Many lawyer friends would love to run for public office, work for the U.S. Attorney or join the Obama administration, but they have mortgages to pay that makes these changes very difficult. It would be great if working for the government paid more so this would be less of an issue. However, in the meantime, we can think about Michelle as the earliest investor in the Obama presidency. Clearly marrying Michelle was Barack's smartest career decision to date.

JStrober