PanaTimes

Monday, May 29, 2023

The mothers working from home without childcare

The mothers working from home without childcare

Although many children have returned to school and nursery, not every mum has the help she needs yet.

For most of the first year after her daughter was born in early 2022, Katie Szerbin worked from home, managing customer service calls all day, without any kind of childcare. Each time her child began to cry, the 30-year-old mother from New Jersey, US, had to leave the room. If she didn’t, the customer on the other end of the phone line – and Szerbin’s supervisor, often listening in – might hear the baby in the background, and question her professionalism.

“My calls were usually less than five minutes. It was something I just had to suffer through, and hope the people on the other line couldn’t hear her crying. It was heart-wrenching,” says Szerbin. “It wasn’t as bad when she was an infant. But soon she was walking, getting into stuff, needing attention. I'm talking and trying to concentrate and she's grabbing my headset or trying to grab my computer, or pulling at my shirt trying to get me to hold her. You're completely distracted. Even if you're trying really hard to ignore her, in your heart, you can’t.”

The balancing act was, in part, a financial choice – compensated at about $17 (£13.70) per hour, the maths worked out that Szerbin would “basically be working just to pay for care”. So, her only option was to do both jobs at once. It wasn’t easy on her or her daughter, and it only got harder as time went on.

The widespread closure of schools and childcare centres during the pandemic left many working parents like Szerbin in an impossible situation, trying to juggle remote jobs and a lack of childcare. And although many children have been able to return to outside-home care as Covid-19 has waned, not every parent is out of the woods: some caretakers still face simultaneous child supervision and job work, which is pushing them to the brink.

In some cases, the issue is just as acute as it was during the height of the pandemic. In the US especially, an ongoing childcare crisis has left many parents in an untenable situation: the childcare industry experienced a massive haemorrhage of workers and facility closures in 2020, and recovery continues to lag. The Center for American Progress reported more than half of all Americans live in a childcare desert, and even in places where it’s available, rising costs keep quality care out of reach for many families.

Many mums report struggling to balance professional obligations with childcare


In many ways, says Mona Zanhour, an associate professor of management at California State University, Long Beach, the remote work revolution has been good for mothers, allowing women who might otherwise have had to drop out of the labor force altogether to keep earning. But for some mums, she says, “it’s a double-edged sword. Technology is allowing us to work and parent and live our lives all at the same time in the same space. But it becomes its own monster when we add the childcare crisis”.

All this leads to some parents – usually mums – continuing to work from home while simultaneously caring for their children, says Zanhour. Many of these parents are forced to hide this fact from their bosses so as not to seem distracted or unprofessional, leaving them stressed and fearful. And, she says, a woman trying to be her work-self and parent-self at the same time, will often struggle with both and ultimately burn out.

Kristen Carpenter, a mum in Pennsylvania, US, who mostly does her job in healthcare from home, worries that her lack of childcare has had a deleterious effect on her five-year-old son. “He’s in Kindergarten for two-and-a-half hours, then comes home and is on a tablet for the afternoon, or watching a movie, or just doing things that aren’t productive because I have to get my work done," she says. “He’s super unmotivated to do anything else.”

Carpenter herself has experienced negative impacts, too. She doesn’t feel as focused at work as she once did, and struggles to be as productive as she’d like. “I definitely don’t get my ‘40 hours’,” she says. “I feel like when he’s here with me, I can’t fully concentrate. And when he’s at school, I only have two-and-a-half hours, and then I have to get him off the bus. What can I get done in that time? Especially when the whole time I’m just waiting for my alarm to go off to get him.”

Many of the 53 women Zanhour interviewed also reported feeling like they were constantly behind. “They end up really sacrificing sleep, sacrificing their personal health,” she says. “They wake up early before the kids to attend to their emails, spend their days going back and forth between the two roles, and after everybody sleeps, they’re trying to catch up.” And when, inevitably, they can’t, “they experience it as a personal failure”.

He’s in Kindergarten for two-and-a-half hours, then comes home and is on a tablet for the afternoon, or watching a movie, or just doing things that aren’t productive because I have to get my work done – Kristen Carpenter


Szerbin says she was constantly making minor errors at work, because her attention was divided. “It wasn’t something I would necessarily get in trouble for, but it made me feel so guilty and embarrassed because I know I was capable of doing it without those simple mistakes. And I can’t come out and say, ‘it’s happening because I’m taking care of my kid’, so then there’s the added concern and worry of, ‘are they going to bring this up? And I going to get in trouble? Am I going to lose my job?’”

Another issue compounding the situation is that some parents feel forgotten now that so much has otherwise returned to ‘normal’ in the working world. At the start of the pandemic, when schools closed and work went abruptly remote, there was a lot of understanding and empathy for working parents, explains Zanhour, who co-authored a study of working mothers’ experiences during and post-pandemic. “What we saw from our data is the empathy ran out pretty quickly.”

Along with stress, anxiety and burnout, all these factors have forced some mums to change their career paths entirely. Szerbin took a full-time, in-person job, while her own mum cares for her daughter. It’s not a perfect solution, she says. “My guilt has just progressed to different guilt. Now I feel guilty that I’m working and not taking care of my kid.”

Others, like Carpenter, remain stuck without any solution. She is counting the days until her son starts first grade and is in school all day. In the meantime, she’s muddling through. “I get angry,” she says. “I’m completely overwhelmed.”

In the meantime, some working parents may find themselves stalling out. There’s no simple solution, says Zanhour. Solving the problem will require “redesigning workplace culture so that motherhood does not have to be at odds with professionalism”, she says. It may be a long road. For now, a little more empathy might go a long way.

Newsletter

Related Articles

PanaTimes
Close
0:00
0:00
If you donated to BLM, you got played
Pfizer, the EU, and disappearing ink - Smoke, Mirrors, and the Billion-Dose Pfizer Vaccine Deal: EU's 'Open Secret
Actor Tom Hanks told Harvard University graduates to be superheroes in their defense of truth and American ideals, and to resist those who twist the truth for their own gain
The Sussexes' Royal Rebound: Could Harry and Meghan Markle Return to the UK?
A provocative study suggests: Left-Wing Extremism and its Unsettling Connection to Psychopathy and Narcissism
France Arrests 10 on Suspicion of Failing to Respond in Time to Migrant Drowning
Neuralink Receives FDA Approval for First-in-Human Clinical Study
Saudi Arabia and Canada Restore Diplomatic Relations
Bernard Arnault Loses $11.2 Billion in One Day as Investors Fear Slowdown in US Growth Will Reduce Demand for Luxury Products
Russian’s Wagner Group leader: “I am not a chef, I am a butcher. Russia is in danger of a revolution like in 1917.”
TikTok Sues Montana Over Law Banning the App
Ron DeSantis Jumps Into 2024 Presidential Race, Setting Up Showdown With Trump
Last Walmart in North Portland Closing Down
Florida's DeSantis seeks to disqualify judge in Disney case
Talks between US House Republicans and President Biden's Democratic administration on raising the federal government's $31.4tn debt ceiling have paused
Disney has canceled plans to build a new campus in Florida worth almost $1 billion
Biden Administration Eyeing High-Profile Visits to China: The Biden Administration is heating things up by looking into setting up a series of top-level visits to Beijing by top officials in the coming months
New evidence in special counsel probe may undercut Trump’s claim documents he took were automatically declassified
A French court of appeals confirmed former President Nicolas Sarkozy's three-year jail term for corruption and influence peddling
Debt Ceiling Crises Have Unleashed Political Chaos
Weibao Wang, a former software engineer at Apple, was charged with stealing trade secrets related to autonomous systems, including self-driving cars
Mobile phone giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 jobs globally over three years as new boss says its performance not good enough
Elon Musk compares George Soros to Magneto, the supervillain from the Marvel Comics series.
Warren Buffett Sells TSMC Shares Over Concerns About Taiwan's Stability
New Study Finds That Secondary Bacterial Pneumonia Is a Major Cause of Death in COVID-19 Patients Who Require Ventilator Assistance
King Charles III being crowned.
'Godfather Of AI' Geoffrey Hinton Quits Google To Warn Of The Tech's Dangers
A Real woman
Vermont Man Charged with Stalking After Secretly Tracking Woman with Apple AirTag
Elon Musk Statements About Tesla Autopilot Could Be 'Deepfakes,' Lawyers Claim. Judge Evette Pennypacker Does Not Understand How Far and Advanced This Technology Became
Ukraine More Prepared for Counterattack as Reinforcements Arrive
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Discuss Migration, Defence, and Ukraine
Tucker Carlson is back, soon!
AT&T's Successful Test of Satellite-Based Phone Call Raises Possibility of Widespread Coverage
CNN: "Joe Biden is asking for four more years — when 74% of Americans think the country is heading the wrong way“
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Cuts Short Live TV Interview Due to Health Issue
US Congresswoman threaten Twitter Files journalist with arrest
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh slams New York Times' pro-government stance and treatment of sources
Enough is enough: it's time to end the war in Ukraine. While Russia may be to blame for starting it, Russia is not the one refusing to stop it
Fox News Settles their case with Dominion Voting Systems for a staggering $787.5 MILLION
The land of the free violence
Speaker Kevin McCarthy
21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira has been arrested for leaking classified Pentagon Documents
The Supreme Court will allow a 12-year-old transgender West Virginia girl to compete on her middle school’s girls' sports teams amid a lawsuit over a ban
Iran and Saudi Arabia hold first diplomatic talks in seven years, brokered by China
Bank of America cuts short conference after outrage at Ukraine comments
Mitt Romney calls Trump indictment 'overreach,' says charges were 'stretched' to suit a 'political agenda'
The G-7 aims to make global crypto regulations tougher
Russia arrested an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal on espionage charges
Don’t Dismiss China’s Peacemaking Bid
×