A few weeks ago, I spent a half hour with my daughter's second-grade teacher, going over my daughter's progress in reading, writing and arithmetic. I had scheduled the meeting with my wife during an open house held for parents after work hours several weeks earlier, selecting a slot in the midday so that I could do it on my lunch hour.
When we set up the conference, we assumed that both my wife and I would attend. We'd forgotten what happened in first grade, when we'd basically split the half-hour session in two; one of us talked to the teacher while the other looked after our daughter for 15 minutes, then we switched. Turns out kids have the day off on parent-teacher days.
As working parents know too well, the schools aren't fully set up to address the realities the double-income crowd faces. The regular school day begins after 8:30 a.m. and ends around 3 p.m., which means parents who work a full day have to line up some form of supervision for the kids, at least in the afternoon. Fortunately, most districts offer after-school programs, but you pay for them. Summers are even more challenging, often requiring working parents to patch together a combination of school-based summer programs, private camps and sitters.
Most vexing are the so-called "in-service" days—days when, from a parent's perspective, the schools are effectively out of service. No doubt the teachers and administrators need an occasional break from having students around to do important planning and professional development. But for working parents, these extra days and half-days off mean either lost wages or increased spending on sitters.
I don't blame the schools for the problem, nor do I think they can solve it. As the incidence of households in which both parents work has gone from being the exception to the rule over the last 40 years, schools have tried to respond, adding before- and after-school programs and other services. Meanwhile, due to the anti-tax ethos in our national, state and local politics, the schools have been forced to do more with less, facing budgetary pressures that now force nearly all schools to cut spending to survive.
If not to the schools, where do we look for help? To find a solution, we must look at the conditions that make it necessary for both parents to work—that require many workers to take on second jobs just to meet basic needs—that have resulted in wage stagnation for millions of American workers who work harder and longer but keep falling behind.
In the worst economy in nearly a century, Barack Obama has inspired hope by expressing concern for the plight of workers. His promises to cut taxes on the middle class, to increase spending on domestic programs, to modify trade policies to keep more jobs in the United States, represent big improvements on the policies of his predecessors.
In addition to pursuing policies that drive wages up and unemployment down, I hope that Obama will also address a shortage that, while directly linked to stagnant wages, diminishes the quality of life as much as a shortage of money: time.
As they prepare for his inauguration, Barack and Michelle Obama have struck a chord with parents as they publicly agonize about the impact his new job will have on their daughters. Michelle Obama has said that she, as First Lady, will be foremost "the mom-in-chief," advocating for policies that help parents raise healthy, happy children.
Given a mandate to usher in sweeping political and cultural change, Obama has a chance to challenge prevailing American attitudes toward work—attitudes shaped in large part by a weirdly romantic distortion of the much-vaunted American work ethic celebrated in our recent pop culture and exploited by capitalists hoping to squeeze increased productivity from laborers. As he attempts to rebalance the needs of a free market with the needs of workers and the families they support, he should remember that there are ways to improve the lot of many beyond putting more money in their pockets.
