 We'll go ahead and start. Thanks. You what? I don't, yeah, exactly. I'm not going to begin this with prayer, although this is a religion-y type piece. I appreciate you all being here. This is the New America Foundation. It is National Work Family Month. Congress designates October each year. So this is a perfect time to be gathering. And New America, one of our board members, Ann Marie Slaughter, had an Atlantic Monthly cover story about why women can't have it all, which has gotten a lot of attention in the work-life field and has led some men to ask the same question about, can we have it all, and some of the challenges in the work-life balance that we face. I'm grateful that Liza Monday and Brigitte Schulte have agreed to be with us today. Liza, as many of you know, is a writer. Both are fellows here at New America. I direct the workforce and family program here at New America. Both are fellows here, and Liza's work, so Richard Sacks led to a Time Magazine cover story in March. And there's a book that many of you have seen in outstanding work that's gotten a lot of attention and deservedly in the field. And Brigitte's working as a fellow here, as well as coming from the Washington Post. Well, her book will come out at some point next year, perhaps, or soon after. And we'll chronicle both developments and challenges in the space as well. And I'm really looking forward to it as well. Thanks for joining us. Let me just tell you a second about my own background and sort of what led me to write this book that, at some level, brings us together today, which is Practicing Balance, How Congregations Can Promote Harmony and Work and Life, which is I've been a program director here since 2005 in the workforce and family program. And a lot of that work has driven the work-life field of New America trying to think about the challenges that families increasingly face, that all Americans face in a challenging economy. And what do you do about it from a policy and from a personal standpoint? At the same time as a lot of that, I was also going to seminary and did a master's and doctorate largely at night while I was working and became a pastor and now head pastor of a church in Bethesda. So really the last decade, I've had this sort of somewhat wacky but highly rewarding bivocational life of preaching every Sunday. I'm getting ready for my stewardship Sunday this coming Sunday on Deuteronomy 14, as well as having been a lawyer on Capitol Hill and then acting assistant secretary for labor and administration and then while going to seminary. So there's like a lot of work. Well, I'll get to the family in a second. A lot of work conflict in my own space that sort of says how do you, having two callings to me both as a pastor and then also as a lawyer and policy person, how do I bring it all together? And then I got married to a woman who also was in government. And then the day that we were pregnant with our first child, she signed this lease to open this baby and maternity store in Bethesda. So she was being this entrepreneur literally the day we found out we were expecting our first child. And so it became this sort of interesting space where she was trying to run this store, which happened to be in a parent space. We were consigning baby clothes and maternity clothes, which was exactly perfect for the life stage we were starting. And incidentally from the program that I was running here, which is work-life stuff. And then we had another kid. And then we got pregnant again and went to the doctor and looked at the ultrasound there. And the doctor said, I see one heartbeat. And now I see a second heartbeat. And I almost fell to the floor. And so we'd already had two boys. And here we had these two identical twins. And so we had four kids under five. So during the same time where we were doing this wacky life stuff, as I sit here today, I have a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and two 21-month-old girls. So work-life conflict is a significant issue in my life. And so when I was trying to put it all together about how the policy met my own sort of personal spiritual practice and vocational life as a pastor, and then my own life about how does all that fit in with all these kids and my wife's own store, which was also dealing with all these parents who would come in and consign these clothes or buy clothes either because they were pregnant or because they'd had their last kid in their run and finally get rid of all this stuff, it became so natural to say, well, let's think about how this fits together or doesn't and what you do about it. And so in short, that's the inspiration for my own work in this space. And my friends here, I know their inspiration is part out of their own context and their own life and what they've observed and what they've experienced. So as we start today, we bring together the religious with the policy and are going to have a conversation between us and then we'll open up to your questions and input on some of the topics about the challenges working families face. That's the title of our gathering today, why they still can't have it all. Out of your own context, this is a topic that we can all relate to because whether we have a family or children or we have any care responsibilities, anyone who is either working more hours than they'd like or in this economy, fewer hours than they'd like is trying to figure out how work and life fits together in some significant way. So I've shared some of my personal story for just a second. I know I'm not alone and I know this is a, you can extrapolate nationally and see that there are issues around the nation that are significant in the work life space. And so I might start by turning to Bridget for a second and just to ask her thoughts on is this, am I alone, am I correct that I'm not alone? Is this a national problem and what are you seeing as you conduct your research? Absolutely, it's a national problem. And I started my own journey very much the same way through a very personal story and I can get into that later if anybody is at all interested. But from that initial starting point, I've done an awful lot of research and it's really clear when you look, there's sort of three things that I wanted to talk about. Yes, everyone is feeling stressed, mothers and fathers are feeling stressed and children are feeling stressed. When you look at the most recent American Psychological Association survey, they do this every year, stress in America. They say we are chronically overstressed as a nation. So when you look at the everybody picture, a lot of that has to do with some of the things that David was talking about, economics, the economic uncertainty, technology has absolutely changed our lives. We've got work that's not only anywhere, any place, but all the time, everywhere. Work follows this home. We've got people who talk about work and life as weasier anymore. We don't really have separate spaces. It's all kind of this big work-life blur anymore. So everyone is feeling that stress. If you look at surveys, the General Social Survey has asked people for, since the early 1970s, do you feel rushed in your life? And you'll see the trends increasingly going up for everyone over the years, but really interestingly looking at what's happening with men and women and mothers and fathers. I'm gonna first start talking about fathers, because I think this is one of the most interesting things that, interesting, it's sad, but it's also hopeful. It's one of these things that has two pieces of it because it's part of the problem, but I also think it's part of the solution. Men are reporting that they are feeling as much or more work-life conflict as mothers have for the past 30 years. No one has really listened to mothers if you look at the state of our policy, even the state of our national debate, and the fact that in 2012 we're having national magazine cover saying women can't have it all, or can we have it all. The other thing that you're finding, the Pew Research Center has a really interesting poll where they've asked people 18 to 34, what's the most important thing to you, your career or your family? And what you'll find is that both men and women are increasingly saying that both are important. So can we have it all is a really good question because it's really clear that both men and women do want to have it all. And when it comes to this feeling of being overwhelmed for children, it's increasingly important to look at this as well. There was a story yesterday in the Washington Post health section about a doctor talking about children coming into his office with the effects of stress, the stomach aches, the anxiety, the headaches, the inability to sleep. There are researchers who've looked far and wide and they'll talk about, there's one researcher who found that children today or students today are more stressed out than children were during the depression. So that's really something. There's other research that looks at the pressure that children feel being over scheduled and the testing regimes that we have feeling very pressured to achieve and what was really interesting, she had spent most of her life looking at inner city children and the stresses from poverty and broken families and broken lives. And that is incredibly stressful really when you look psychologically as well as emotionally and physically. And what she did is she went, she asked the same question for very affluent kids and found that those children are actually more stressed out than inner city kids because of the stresses that we put on our kids to achieve. So you're not alone. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. One of my favorite quotes, I'm just going through this quote sheet which I meant to give out to you all before this started but I may read you to you two of my favorite quotes here. One is from a Billy Graham book, one stressed out secretary tells her boss, when the rush is over, I'm gonna have a nervous breakdown. I earned it, I deserve it and no one's gonna take it from me. And then Lily Tomlin's famous quote from 1977 in People Magazine, the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. This is always sort of funny. The gender aspects are interesting. I'm, we know it's a national challenge. Let's go, and I wanna break down some of the cost in a second, but I'm fascinated out of my own context with the new gender surveys that talk about the challenges that men are facing both in this space and more generally. And so I might ask Liza for any thoughts around the general, you know, national challenge of work-life balance and what you're seeing about how pervasive it is and particularly other things going on in some of the gender research that you've looked at about the challenges that men might be facing that might say, well, an issue like work-life balance which perhaps came out of the women's movement and the involvement of women in the workforce after World War II and staying there and then entering in new ways in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Are there other challenges for men which could be hopeful because in order for policy to change, you largely need both genders involved. Any gender things to comment on? Well, I guess, you know, I have a number of different thoughts just sort of thinking about anecdotally for a second some of the reporting that I did in my book. And my book looks at the growing percentage of women who are the breadwinners and their households and who are out earning their male partners and it's just about of working wives. It's just about 40% now working wives out or in their husbands. One of the families that I interviewed that I thought was really indicative is a family in Michigan who, six adult siblings and their dad was an engineer for Ford in the 1960s and 70s. He supported six kids. They had actually six kids in less than six years. So before the mom was 25 and he supported the whole family as a sole breadwinner working as an engineer at Ford. He didn't graduate from college, didn't have to back then and he worked a lot of overtime. So he had, as his wife said, he had his hand raised every time they needed somebody to work overtime. So he has a great relationship with his adult siblings but they all acknowledge that he never saw them when they were growing up. And so in adulthood, five of the six adult siblings are in female earner households. One of them is a divorced single mom. One of them is a lesbian woman in a relationship where they're both earners but three of them are in marriages where the woman has emerged as the primary earner and in all of those instances, it was because the men in those relationships felt so pressured by their workplace and they felt as though the workplace was so, the corporate workplace was so unforgiving of them as fathers who wanted to be more engaged than their dad had been, that they are the ones who opted out in some cases to be either stay at home dads or secondary earners. So they felt as though they were being, basically offered no options for work-life balance and they, you know, I mean, that's such a significant, I think, generational change is that they love their adult dad. They have a very good relationship with him and he tells guys, he talks to don't do what I did. You know, you wanna be able to see your children go up and one of the husbands who decided to be a stay-at-home dad, when they started out, they were both, he and his wife, they both have college degrees, master's degrees. They were both working and earning and living the life that we're very familiar with. You know, she said, if somebody got sick, you know, we'd both pull out our planner and see who could stay home. They had their daughters in daycare and he was in a workplace in the financial services world where his bosses wanted him to work 70 or 80 hours a week. And he said to them, you know, I just won't do that. I've gotta pick up my kids from daycare. I've gotta be available. And they said, okay, you can work a 40-hour work week for as long as it takes you to find another job. So he did that for a while and there was so much turmoil and unrest in the workplace because somebody was going home at five that he had to leave early. And what they found, he was just gonna be at home for a couple of months and what they both found was that it was so, as his wife said, it was just so much easier. We didn't have to pull out the planners anymore. And so, I mean, so all of these couples arrived at that relationship by their own sort of their own paths but it all had to do with men being in really unforgiving workplaces. I guess one of the ideas that I wonder about in my book is whether in some cases it can be easier on couples when one of them sort of drops back and you're not both trying to prevail in the rat race simultaneously with kids. And just going forward sometimes it's gonna be the woman and sometimes it's gonna be the man. I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the answer is but that was just one phenomenon that I encountered fairly often actually. It's a very interesting model of returning to what's a traditional model of one parent of specialization at some level. Of one, as you call it in your book. Just a couple of thoughts. One, the, you know, out of my own sort of experience I recognize what many researchers have said which is that the fundamental mismatch between the needs of families and the structure of the workplace is that you have over a generation situation where in the early 70s you'd have two thirds of families having one parent at home. And then by the late 1980s, 90s, 2000s you'd have roughly that reversing. So 58% of families would have both earners or more in the workplace depending on the statistics. And then if you look at families that are headed by a single parent who works often headed by women then you push close to 70% of families with kids having both or the only parent in the workforce. And that's such a reversal of a generation ago. So essentially you have let's say two parents in the workforce but there's still the needs at home. So you have three jobs but only two parents. And so the needs of the families outstrip their resources. And so that creates this fundamental mismatch and the American border policy scene hasn't changed dramatically even though the needs of families or the structure of them has changed dramatically over a generation. That becomes the reason you have 80% of Americans having some unhappiness with their lack of balance and the majority of Americans saying they don't have enough time for themselves and all the statistics that you see occasionally or on USA Today cover stories, front pages or in the books that we're all looking at that say this is a significant problem for the majority of Americans due to changes in the workplace. Let me talk about the religious side for just a second here. I know within this group there are folks who are interested in strictly the work life space but many of you are interested also in the religious space. And so in the religious space I'm fascinated by the implications for churches and synagogues and mosques and other places of worship of this work life balance space. One is just thinking about the spirituality of members because people who come to churches or synagogues and mosques and places of worship are coming at some level to draw closer to God but many cases are coming for the desire to be supported, cared for, nurtured and they bring all of their stuff with them and this conflict comes with folks to church. And so there's a significant spiritual longing I think for peace and for tranquility and for something different from the rat race. Something you don't find at work in terms of there's a lot of meaning found at work but not a lot of peace. And so to meet the spiritual needs of people in pews is a significant calling of any clergy person and any tradition. And so I think it's incumbent on congregations to take seriously their calling to meet the needs of congregants and any denomination, any faith background and that includes to be spiritually strong which includes dealing with the stress that they feel and often that is as a result of trying to make it all work together. Secondly, there's a significant volunteer issue and Sally and others have written on this. You used to see large cadres, particularly of women, volunteering in churches and then comprising a majority of the volunteer ranks in religious institutions and now that women are in the workforce this isn't a recent phenomenon for most of us in the room but from an American history phenomenon it is it just undercuts the volunteer aspects of churches and is replaced in some level by retirees. You've got people who are living longer and who are now making up the large percentage of volunteer ranks in many religious places but the lack of volunteers in many congregations is a significant issue as a result of this imbalance. People just don't have time to spend on volunteer activities. This is the bowling alone problem that people aren't as involved in civic activities as they used to be and that involves volunteering in religious institutions. This has a then another implication which is you lead to then totally stressed out clergy. So more and more falls on the backs of staffs in religious institutions or in other 501 C3s but particularly religious institutions who are trying to wear a zillion hats and you have then this spike in unhealthy practices among clergy folks. So in all Abrahamic faith traditions, all three Abrahamic faith traditions but really in most faith traditions you see this rise in stress, in obesity, in mortality among clergy which tend to have the highest ranking of job satisfaction of any profession but also have an increased health challenge and so there's this massive campaign in the Presbyterian Church USA which is my denomination for folks to take care of, clergy to take care of themselves and for churches to take really seriously work-life balance and so you're supposed like the United Methodists to have this campaign to take all your vacation or every month I get something from the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church USA all about my own need to take care of myself physically and so it's an interesting volunteer challenge which has collateral damage among the staff of congregations and then finally just thinking about the membership of churches. There's this huge problem in most denominations including non-denominational churches and Southern Baptist but particularly in mainline Protestant churches which includes the Presbyterian Church in terms of the grain of American religion we're becoming older so the average age of a PCUSA member is 61 and there's a challenge in terms of how you bring in new members to many denominations and the problem there is well you've got these families who everyone is trying to attract every church, synagogue and mosque wants to have more families with kids that's the target audience for most outreach campaigns but what are they dealing with? Work-life imbalance scheduling is a major problem it's hard to schedule choir practice at our church at 4.30 on Tuesday because kids now have school which extends their activities later in the afternoon. The number of after-church activities that have been cannibalized at our congregation by lacrosse practice I can't even tell you or soccer games on Sundays now is huge so all the work-life conflict spills over into the ability of churches to replenish their ranks by attracting families with kids and so if a church or synagogue or mosque is gonna do that it's gotta figure out how to take into account all the work-life balance challenges and so this is why there's some demand for this kind of talk within the congregations because it's such a pervasive challenge for them. Let me shift back to the gender piece for just a second and just I'm fascinated by the number of articles that come out on the work-life conflict that men face I mentioned at the beginning how a lot of this comes out of the women's movement when we have this room this stage is comprised majority of women I had a child care at least I did a child care event last year where we had 138 women and four men that showed up to one of our child we did these quarterly events on the child care and development block grant and it was an unbelievable skewing towards women in terms of an interest in this issue and that is obvious that so much of the conflict of being a mother and working is it makes it a big issue for women and Ann Marie's article on why women can't have it all really resonated for that reason. However, there's this, as Bridget talked about and as Liza alluded, there's all sorts of research that looks at the challenges that are incumbent on men in social policy including this one. So last summer there was a great cover story in so yeah, Ruth Koenigsberg's cover story Chore Wars in time last August of 2011 looked at the competition between men and women at home tear up Parker Pope's New York Times article looking at how men are struggling with as much as or more than mothers in trying to fulfill their responsibilities at home and in the office. In dual earner couples, 60% of fathers report experiencing some or a lot of work-life conflict today up from 35 in 1977. 35% in 77 is 60% today. And the amount and percentage of men, now this is not fathers and dual earner couples, men overall experiencing work-family conflict has risen from 34% that same year to 49% in 2008 which is now ahead of women. That's higher than the percentage of women and that's in part because society while not having arrived has improved, I think some of its attention to work-life conflict that women face. Actually, let me turn to Bridget. I've got more thoughts on that but you have a sense of this as well. Has, am I right in depositing that society has not that for men trying to make it all work together there are other challenges that maybe women had faced 20 years ago that I think men currently are because workplace in society has not taken this seriously the challenges that men face in terms of such conflict. Well, absolutely, and I'd like to add a little bit too when you guys were talking a little earlier about the separate spheres and Liza you're absolutely right when you talk about this unforgiving workplace. I think that's really the key. That's the key to so much of the overwhelm for women. It's absolutely the key to why men are starting to feel this, the same sense of overwhelm. The workplace as we know it really has not changed since really significantly since 1938. That's the last time we had any major legislation to get the name wrong, it's flown out of my head. Fairly with standards act, thank you that sort of codified the 40 hour work week. It said if you were a professional worker you could work more hours than that. There was no cap on hours. You're not protected if you were an hourly worker. If you work more than that you got overtime. So sort of what's happened is we've moved into a knowledge economy. There is no cap on the hours that we can work and what's happened is because there is no cap there's the sense that of total work devotion that the best worker is the one that is their earliest, that is their the latest, that is sitting in that chair that is showing your boss I am here for you, I will travel on a plane, I will jump, you say, you know, I will jump, you say hi. So that's the kind of workforce that women entered in the early 70s and that's an incredibly crushing environment for someone who's also primarily responsible for home and children. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, yes there's been incredible increases in mothers working where you really have, if you just look at school age children close to 80% of kids with school age kids have mothers who are working in the workforce. But then when you look at, well, where are they in the workforce? Very few CEOs, I think only 14% in senior management. Women are kinda stuck, we're all kinda stuck down here. And then the sense that you can't have it all, you've got the phenomenon of highly educated women opting out then. I can't do it, I can't be the kind of mother I wanna be, I can't have the kind of job that I wanna have. And so you create this all or nothing kind of workplace. You know, it's not a matter of having it all, it's or both, it's one or the other. So that's what women have been struggling with. At the same time there've been pressure on men to say you've gotta help out at home, you've got to be a more involved father. And when you look at the time studies, you know, sort of in a vacuum it looks great. Men have tripled the amount of time they spend with their children from the early 60s. Awesome, they've gone from two hours to seven hours a week, which isn't a whole lot. When you compare that to mothers, mothers have gone, this is a thing that blows my mind, this is part of one of the central things that I've been exploring in my book. When you look at mothers, working mothers and at-home mothers, they've both ratcheted up their hours that they spend with their children. From what you have, I think it was about 10 hours, about the same time that men were spending two hours, women were spending about on average 10 hours with their kids, now it's 14. And you've got working mothers today spending as much or more time with their children as stay at home mothers did in the early 70s, which seems absolutely outrageous. How can that possibly be? You've got at-home mothers who've also ratcheted up their hours. Now you mentioned chore wars, this is a really important point. You know, you'll have time studies, people say, well, men and women work about the same amount of hours. That's not exactly true. Working mothers have about a 10-hour workday. And that's about an hour longer than they had about 10, 20 years ago. Everybody's work hours are up. What's different is the kind of hours. Men have more work hours at work, which we value, which we pay, which then you'll get a social security benefit. You'll get pension. Women have tended to be the ones that have dialed down, either opted out, gone to part time, reduced their hours, taken the secondary track. So they spend more time, they spend twice as much time in house care, twice as much time in childcare. Now why? And you know, we're looking at this. So the pressure is on men to try to change and be more active at home. And when you look at surveys, there is a real yearning that men, like what Liza's finding, that men want to be more involved. I've talked to several who talk about their own fathers who weren't there. And that's not the kind of father that they wanna be. Why is there no change? We're stuck. And we're stuck because of that unforgiving workplace where we think you have to be the ideal worker with 24-hour, seven days a week, total work devotion. We expect that for men and women. We give women a little bit more of an out when they can't do it. When you look at, there's a lot of social science that looks at, well, what really is holding women back? There's all sorts of really great research, great statistics over the years that women are graduating more from college and we should be more at parity. And why aren't we? Well, what happens is she has a baby. And then you hit what researchers call the maternal wall. And they've looked at the pay gap. And at every single, they've tried to cut it every single way, trying to figure out why are women earning less than men? What they'll find is that mothers are the ones that earn less than people without children. And there's a 5% pay gap no matter what, they can't figure out what it is, so it's gotta be kind of a maternal discrimination. When you look at research, they'll find that there's a general feeling that if you're a mother, you're not as committed to worker. And if you are a man who wants to be more committed to the family and be more at home, it's really fascinating what they do and they show identical resumes with a few details tweaked. And what they find is that men who wanna be more active at home are seen as weak, or they're seen as wimps. They're seen as less committed as mothers. And they are punished in terms of promotion, in terms of pay raises, in terms of the kind of good work that you're going to get. So it's much harder for men because of the ideal worker norm, sort of the culture of work. It's much more difficult for them to step out of it and try to do something different. But that's really the key of where things have to change for all sorts of other things to come, even now. It's great. I wanna pick up on the Fair Labor Standards Act a little bit later and I think it's very interesting we need to dial down on the cost of, if you make sure you heard her, that while we are spending more time, couples 11 hours more now than 1985 in terms of hours in the workplace and American hours are increasing where many industrialized countries like France have taken a different approach. The amount of time that parents are spending with kids is rising. It's not falling. At the same time, people are spending more time at work. And so there's a cost to that and we'll talk about what's getting squeezed out in the meantime. Well, let's talk about men a little bit more for a second. Any comments on some of the costs that you see to the pervasive challenges of work-life imbalance or anything about men in particular that or some of the gender implications of what you've studied that you wanna comment on? Well, I think you all have really sort of covered it. Anything that I could add would be, again, sort of anecdotal. I was talking to a group of women recently who are all CEOs and who had started really interesting businesses like the woman who started Claire's. And she's like in her early sixties and it's funny because she's been a really powerful CEO and yet she said, you know, I like girly things so I started Claire's. And so it was really interesting to hear them talk and one of the things that they had all been at a certain sort of early adopters, they had all emerged as the breadwinners in their households and most of their husbands were stay-at-home fathers. But some of them were younger and one of the things that the women talked about is one of the things they would do is try to race home at the end of the day to make sure that they were there by like 745 or like 10 minutes before their kids went to sleep. They at least wanted to see them before they went to bed. And what their husbands would say to them and they had all experienced this is if you can't come home earlier than that, don't come home because the children get so sort of wound up that it screws up their schedule. So if you can't get home early enough, just stay away until the kids are actually asleep. And obviously they struggled with this. And so it was interesting to see, when the men were running the households and trying to keep things on a schedule and do a good job, the women were wrestling with sort of being banned until they could get home. So they would just have to get home. They were banned from their houses until they were told them where to sleep. And so it was just, I don't know, it was just sort of an interesting and sort of unexpected pattern that they all had experienced. How old were the kids? How old were they? Well, I mean, this had happened at various times. Some of them still had young kids, but it had happened to all of them. So it's sort of difficult for everybody. I don't know. The one thing that I wondered, it sounds like you want to get to this later, when you talk about the 40-hour work weekend, and obviously, because we have declining labor unions don't have nearly the power that they want to. I'm pretty sure that back in the 80s and 90s at the post, there was an effort to have reporters declared hourly workers so that we could get overtime. And I don't think it worked. But you wonder if we need a big overhaul where corporations are just told, okay, after 40 hours, you're gonna have to start paying them. And if that would just kind of, if there would suddenly be a big change. We've talked to some in here. We haven't gone very far with it, but whether you, so in 2005, they redid the Fairly Restanage Act, and part 541 in terms of the definition of overtime, whether you redo that again to create a universal and mandatory overtime. So the distinction between an exempt and a non-exempt worker is driving, there's tons of lawsuits. One of the biggest labor areas of lawsuits is misclassification of a non-exempt worker as an exempt worker. If you'd eliminate the distinction, you'd cut out a lot of lawsuits from every sort of business, and then you just create like, what's the standard hours per occupation? So you'd have a standard investment banking number of hours would be different from some other occupation that did not work as many hours. But if you worked above what the standard in the industry was, you'd be entitled to a time and a half. I don't think this will pass as a thing. But it's an interesting area to look at about if you took the Fairly Restanage Act and tried to update it for an extreme hour culture, at least where exempt workers are working truly extreme hours to their detriment without being compensated potentially, that would be interesting to see. You know, if I could just add one thing to that though that can actually, I think, really address some of the really unforgiving workplace aspect of this. There's really interesting new research and kind of rediscovered old research about how you're really most effective and most productive and most efficient at work. And there's lots of research that all of these extreme hours that the United States puts in among the most hours of any country in the world. And we really don't have the payoff for it. But what's really interesting is you only get so much out of your work. And then after a while, what they found is when you work more than say 40 hours a week, you tend to go into busy work. You tend to go into administrative stuff. You're not all that efficient. For a knowledge worker, there's some good research that you kind of can't do more than six hours of concentrated work a day. Henry Ford really created the 40 hour standard. And it was a, you know, back at the turn of the century, he had his assembly plans and he was doing a lot of in-house research. He wanted to know how can I have the most efficient workers? How can we be most productive? And at the time, people were working their laborers, you know, 10, 12 hours a day. It was insane. And what he found is that after eight hours, they were so burned out, they were so cranky, they made so many mistakes it ended up costing him more money. And so he instituted the 40 hour work week. And the national, you know, the manufacturers associated at the time, they went crazy, it's like, how can you do this? And people are gonna slack off, this is awful. And then when he discovered that he could have as much output in five days as in six, he shuttered his factories on Saturdays in 1926. Again, another scandal and people freaked out. But over time, they saw that he was so profitable and cut down on mistakes, happier workers, more efficient. And so what's difficult in the knowledge economy is how much is enough and when are you done? And those are really different kinds of questions. But there's really great evidence that if you are very clear in what your mission is and you define your job six hours a day, you get an awful lot done. So let me build on that and just do a huge historical sweep to where we are now, like literally beginning with the beginning of the creation of humankind to where we are now in terms of work, life and balance, okay? So regardless of your biblical knowledge for a second let's just play trivia for a second. Is work depicted initially in the Bible as good or bad? Okay, what's one of the first stories of creation if you know your book of Genesis in the Bible that talks about work? Or the Garden of Eden, just go back to the Garden of Eden. Well, okay, go to the very beginning for just a second. Go back to the very creation. So let's start. So six days God creates the world. What happens on the seventh day? All right, so the beginning of Genesis two, right? So God rests on the seventh day. So that's significant. So the first idea of work, life, balance is this concept of Sabbath, which the seventh day God takes off and rests from all his works. This is the word all is significant that it's not just a little bit of rest, it's a complete rest. And that's, I think, significant. All right, so you've got the institution of Sabbath then you've got the Garden of Eden. If humanity is created and the fall of humankind happens then what is the punishment for humankind as a result of eating the apple? Toil, right? Toil! They all work, all right? So if you look at your medieval paintings, heaven is depicted as like, you're sitting around your desk for 14 hours a day or are you not at work? You're not at work. Heaven is depicted as someplace free of essentially work and labor. We wanna do a funeral. We always say they're resting from their labors. That's a phrase that comes up in most funerals I do. So the Garden of Eden concept was one where humanity is freed from work in an idyllic, seventh day type rest and the punishment for falling is they've got a toil, okay? Which involves some work-life conflict because the punishment for women involves pain and childbirth at some level and regular work for a second. Do you have a question on there? Yeah, good. I like it. I like it. Caring in stewardship, the concept of stewardship fits right in from the beginning there. That's how you translate, but yes, there's a concept of stewardship implicit there. But it's not really a punishment piece, right? They're given some responsibility and that I think is a significant part of what I would talk about for the religious solutions on the work-life balance space. One of the things I care a lot about is the good steward of the gifts that God has given and that concept leads exactly back to the same time that she mentioned. All right, so you got work depicted as negatively in the Bible. Then the apostle Paul, so when the New Testament gets written, this just using a great Christian concept for a second, but there are parallels in Judaism and when I talk to Muslim friends, it's interesting to talk to them as well. Jesus has this example of where he rests. There's a bunch of examples where Jesus goes off and prays and takes disciples with him and cares for himself, even though in a Christian context, you'd say Jesus is fully human and fully God. He doesn't necessarily need to rest or maybe he does need to rest because he's fully human too, but at very least just like God models rest on the seventh day of creation, Jesus models rest a bit by going off and praying. The apostle Paul, most of the New Testament is written by this guy named Paul and Paul is this total workaholic who is both this tent maker and a pastor who I can relate to and he runs off and does a ton of things always on the move except when he's in jail and even when he's in jail, he's also working because he's writing. And Paul lifts up this idea in this letter to the Corinthians about the importance of work and not being truant from the work of people. The God is given folks. From Paul, which is largely right after Jesus' death, so the first century AD, the church develops this approach to work as being pretty negative, going back to a, you know, I mean, stereotype the garden of Eden for just a second. And a lot of the monks and a lot of the medieval writings, Meister Eckhart and Aquinas and other folks will depict work as being largely negative. By the way, the Hellenistic culture that Jesus comes into, the goal of moving through the ranks in Greek culture is not to work also. So you have a slave class that does the work, the goal is also not to toil. And the religious focus is, if you're gonna become like God in any way that's possible, it is not from engagement, it's from detachment. And so there's a real focus on monks just separating from the world and being a little bit detached and not working, okay? By the way, in the ninth century CE, King Alfred the Great said that eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours of play make a just and healthy day. And in 1496, Henry VII reported the order that the work day for field workers be capped at 14 hours a day. All right, so then you get to the reformation, okay? So in the 16th century, Martin Luther and then Sky John Calvin who is there's influential in my tradition which is the reformed Christian tradition coming out of the reformation. So a bunch of Protestants thought that we needed to reform the Catholic Church. This is relevant at the end of October because Reformation Sunday is the last Sunday in October. There's a focus on reforming the Church. And part of that was to uphold the work of the laity which meant that everyone in this room, well, actually there's some other clergy in this room, used to be that there was a focus on the sacredness of the vocation of the clergy separate from that of the laity or non-clergy, okay? So if you're not a minister, your work is not as sacred as ministers would be, okay? Ministers set apart for particularly sacred work. From that though, Calvin and Luther said, no, we want people to be able to experience God directly. So we don't just let the clergy read the Bible, we translate the Bible in language that people can read and you let them read the Bible. We look at the Church and we see it as corrupt and there's too much power concentrated in the hands of too few clergy, largely in Rome and we need to decentralize a bit and we need to find a way to break apart and have churches organized so that we root out some corruption. Also in this was the idea that let's lift up the work of non-clergy. So Calvin in particular, but also Luther, focused on all vocations done in the name of God or any work that's done in the moral way or a good way can be a calling from God and that can be sacred work. That's some really important work. So Calvin starts writing all these letters and Calvin, John Calvin is this, again like Paul, super overworked Bible-casional dude. So again, as the Presbyterian I can completely read, he's this lawyer from France who goes to Geneva and becomes this minister as well. So he has this legal ministerial background. He writes his great work when he's 28 years old, super influential still in the church today. He's obsessed with idolatry. So the first commandment in the Bible is you make no other gods before me essentially and the fourth commandment is gets into the Sabbath. So don't worship yourself, don't make an idol, only worship God. On the other hand, he's also obsessed with idleness too that the idea that if God would have come and find him not working, would he be seen as worthy? He didn't think people should be sitting on the sidelines of life, neither did Paul. So there's this thing going on with Calvin where he doesn't like idolatry nor does he like idleness and he ends up marrying this woman named idolat. All right, so he marries this woman named idolat. He doesn't have any kids who survive and he has this family life that's imbalanced because he's always at the office because he writes the civil codes in Geneva, he preaches all the time. And two of his main concepts would influence America and from this I draw a little, you may have read Max Weber's, the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism but I'm gonna even go back further than that which is to say that there's two religious concepts from Calvin. One is the idea of calling which I mentioned that God calls people to do important work and one is this idea of predestination that God elects people to go to heaven or some to go to hell. You may have heard, raise your hand if you heard predestination. A lot of folks have heard predestination. Calvin did not believe you could tell who was predestined but the people and the generations that followed him took his two doctrines and combined them and said we need to try to figure out who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. And there are all these Puritan preachers in the early American colonies who try to figure out who God has elected and they look for signs of being favored by God and success in life is a sign of being favored. So people who are really crushing it at work and are doing really well in the 17th and 18th, you know, 16th, 17th, 18th century in the colonies must be chosen by God because they're doing so well in succeeding in work. And if they're succeeding in work and they're being chosen by God, they're going to heaven. So people said, well, I'm gonna work super hard in my job because that will evidence to everyone that God's chosen me. And so it creates this Puritan ethic where people start working really hard in their jobs. There are all these ministers, Richard Baxter, Matthew Henry, John Cotton, all these folks who start preaching the idea of you don't wanna be idle, you don't wanna sleep a moment longer than you need to, you don't wanna let things distract you, you're calling, you need to get into a calling, a warrantable calling as Cotton would say and you need to drive it and you need to stick with God's calling and that's gonna evidence to folks that you are one of the elect. All right, so this starts influencing all these early Puritans, including Josiah Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's dad, who is this total Calvinist who goes to these sermons and listens to all these preachers talk about the importance of hard work. And so when you read some of Ben Franklin who is not all that religious, some of his work about early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthier, wise or waist down. There's a bunch of all the Franklin stuff about work in poor Richard Zalmanac. It's interesting to drive it and think about how he might be influenced by his Calvinist father and all these preachers his dad's listening to about the importance of work. Is that man, are they talking specifically? All about guys. No, no, no, it's not women. Well, women have a different calling is, but women are working hard in a different context as well. At home? Yes, but on the, yeah, yeah. But you're not gonna exclude women from heaven as a result of the, that's not a gender division, but you're right, in the professional context they're largely talking about it. But let me just take it to get back for just to drive it home for just a second and then I'll stop my religious thing for a sec. But it's interesting to think through, if you go through the Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century, when people start noticing and commenting like Weber did on the number of countries that he would look at that were successful, that were influenced by this Protestant work ethic, you enter the 20th century and you get to this idea of 1938 and the progressive era in the early 20th century and the Fair Labor Standards Act about we need to do something to deal with this culture of work, particularly we consider exploitation of many workers. And so the 20th century has in the 1930s and then in 1993 with the family of medical leave act some attempts to do something about work-life balance. But the last thing I just say on it would be there was a hope after World War II that maybe I'll just let me turn to Liza and Bridget and just ask about your thoughts on technology for just a second and how technology impacts work-life balance. There was a thought after World War II that the improving technology that people had would allow people to work till noon. Winston Churchill was big on this that people would just be able to get all their work done by noon because we're radically so much more productive and they'd be able to stop and just hang out all afternoon. And so that is obviously not taken. We have taken the post-World War II productivity gains of through technology in terms of more pay and more hours as opposed to more leisure. But you all who are involved in how do you separate yourselves from work, many of you carry electronic devices? Let's talk for a second. Let me turn to Bridget and then Liza. Just thinking about technology for a second. Well, you know, but it's interesting what you were saying that there were conferences going on at the end of the 50s and early 60s that it was like the number one crisis in America all of this free time and what were we gonna do with it? So you're right. There was a real very widespread feeling that there was gonna be this coming kind of like very open space and what were all of the riffraff gonna do with all this free time and would we have crime waves and how would we get them to pursue the higher arts of liberal thinking? And Juliet Shore and the Overworked American, she very much writes about this trend and she said, what we did is we traded leisure time for stuff and that we got into this cycle of work and spend. And if you look at our, you know, how do we measure productivity? Consumer, you know, how do we measure our economy? It's driven by what 70% consumer spending. That's how we grow is we buy more stuff. You know, when you look at our houses, our houses have gotten so much bigger. Our standard of what we consider kind of the baseline has just gotten so much bigger and you know, more demanding from a material standpoint and then you layer technology over that. I was reading the study just about how pervasive technology is. It's like, I don't even know if I should say this if we're, you know, we sleep with our smartphones, we take our blackberries everywhere, we even shop on the toilet. You know, it's just, you know, all the time. You know, now we've got work spend and then technology over it. There's just kind of like this constant breathlessness. What do you think about technology as you? You know, well, just a lot of stray thoughts. I mean, it's funny, I've been interviewing some futurists for a piece I'm working on about sort of the workplace of the future. And there are still futurists who predict that soon there will be, we won't be a working culture that, you know, technology is gonna be, we're gonna have robots and we're gonna have automation and so the big question is what we're gonna do with all this free time. So someday it sounds like we're gonna get there. But, you know, it's funny, I mean, I've been at The Washington Post long enough that I can remember when we, you know, you could only work in the office in terms of like having access to your piece if it needed any editing, you know, you couldn't, you had to be there. And then there was this gradual transition. Some people could get access from home but they were still very uncomfortable with anybody being able to get into the, and then sort of at a certain point, you know, you could sign on anywhere and get in there and work. And so this gradual evolution to, you know, what we all experience now where you're kind of working all the time. And the benefit has been there is a little bit more flexibility to go home or to go to a, as Mitt Romney would say, be home to make dinner. And then, you know, get back to work at nine o'clock or be editing. I mean, I've been writing stuff at 10 o'clock at night and sending it like to somebody at CNN and this poor editor is, oh, I can take it at midnight. And so the sense of continual work. I mean, technology has really allowed us to, I mean, I don't even know how you would cap a 40 hour week anymore because it's just allowed work to become pervasive. And maybe that's better. I don't know. I mean, maybe it does give us more flexibility but it does mean that it's there all the time. So let's, yeah, let's talk it and then maybe we'll open this up here for a bit. There's a lot more to say on a lot of subjects but it'd be great to involve you in the questions there. The technology piece is, well, the post had a cover story. Is Cilcilia here? They had a, she had a cover story on some corporations in the DC area like the advisory board, which has tried to not have weekend emails. So to encourage all of the employees to turn off their electronic devices over the weekend. And I think they did that for like two weekends or so. And, you know, there's a variety of things about the responses to that because they're not the first company that have tried it. There's some great experiments. Maryland did one and one other campus did one where they, you took like college students and you forced them to stay off of electronic devices, email, social media and for 96 hours. And the first 48 hours you go into this with 24 hours in particular, like a serious withdrawal syndrome where people can really fidgety and uncomfortable. And it takes like 72 hours to get to a place where you can digitally detox to a place of being sort of okay with it, you know. You know, technology is neutral folks would say how we use it is the key. It can both improve your work life balance significantly because many of us are able to work after the kids go to bed. This is sort of a classic piece. Your earlier statement by the way, really brings home to me because I have a lot of evening meat. This is the classic pastor thing. You've got all these evening meetings. So like I come home for dinner and then I go back for like a seven o'clock meeting. But I can't, the big issue is when I get home at nine 15, it like totally disrupts everything if my oldest son tries to stay up, you know, in order to hang out and say good night or whatever. So I've got to like come in the back door is so I don't wake anybody up. It's the same thing you talked about. But then I can get on the computer and work some more, right? And that's hopefully good because it means I could leave earlier and finish the work at home. On the other hand, it means that I've had bosses who will email me at four in the morning on a regular basis and expect an answer by six. So this is in government. But so one of my spiritual practices and we'll, we could turn to this if you like is I don't, I don't have a smartphone. I don't have a iPhone or any, I had a BlackBerry and I developed such carpal tunnel syndrome. I got rid of it. So I don't have a, I do have a cell phone that's five years old and I don't have any and I'm on email a bunch, but I do not have a smartphone. And part of that is just my own discipline to not be always available. And I consider that a spiritual practice, but it's trying to manage the technology. Technology super, there's this great book called Hamlet's BlackBerry, which looks at how this is not a new phenomenon, how culture has run up against technology that when they developed the scroll, the Greeks were like totally upset because they thought it would, if you had to, if you started writing stuff down, you would decrease human contact. And so, you know, the idea of emailing someone in the next cubicle decreases human contact. This is not a new phenomenon, by the way. My big conclusion in life basically is that some form of flexibility and increased spirituality is critical to my own sort of work-life balance and I sort of recommend that to folks, which is to say, of all the policy, and we haven't even touched on the public policy stuff, but we should, maybe we can in Q and A, some sort of workplace flexibility becomes, the situations where I see things working best in my own context and others are where families find some sort of flexibility to make the needs of the family or the needs of life work with the work that someone has to get done. And on the other hand, some sort of spiritual, the only way I can be sort of healthy with what has been a decade of ridiculousness in my own sort of build, trying to put it all together is some daily spiritual practices which have been big and trying to connect some healthy parts of my own tradition. I talked about some unhealthy stuff coming out of Calvin, but some healthy parts of the tradition to my own practice, my own practice of it. Let's stop right there. We've gone for an hour. Let's stop right there and just pick up questions and see what the conversation might lead us. All right, Jerome? Yeah, if you would. I'm wondering if backwards here that actually rest is what you do when you get to the office and work is what you do when you get home. And it just seems like if we really could do the work we do in a six hour day, which I think a lot of our jobs really could be done that way, are we just prolonging our time at the office in order to avoid family life? Yeah, we got some thoughts on that, but either one of you wanna jump in? I totally, I remember a conversation when my children were pretty little with some cubicle mates and we were speculating, rather than having a nanny cam, if they had a cam on us, when we were at work, if our children would be sort of appalled, it's like, why are you there? You're getting so, we were joking or something. The question was whether we were really productive enough to justify the fact that we were at work. And I've certainly had conversations where, I would say to my husband, it's Sunday evening and I'm more tired, much more tired now than I would be, say, at work. I mean, yeah, home can be quite exhausting. So I think that's a very valid point. Okay, are we trying to get away from our lives? You know, that's a really interesting thought. There has been some research that women in particular feel more comfortable, less stressed at work than at home. And I think a lot of that has to do with what they call roll overload. When you think about it, women are still the primary caregivers. They're still considered primarily responsible for the house. And you've got work on top of that. That's just a really heavy load. And I think that that's really something to look at when you look at what are the leverage points for change? Changing gender norms, changing how we work are really critical. So let me talk about the gender and then answer Jones directly before another question. So in 2010, Boston College at Center on Work and Family had a, there's a study called The New Dad Exploring Fatherhood within a Career Context which talks about the subtle bias that fathers face in the workplace, trying to have their stepped up family care responsibilities. And many employers will presume that men are unaffected by children. This is sort of the cultural need that is, a lot of guys will want to spend significant times with their families and that I certainly do. And that's the numbers that Bridget listed about the tripling or quadrupling of the number of hours, tripling the number of hours men are spending on childcare over the past generation is significant, but it's still less than where women are. But it's one where the Boston College study talked about when men go to take offspring to the doctor or pick them up from childcare, they tend to do so in a stealth fashion rather than making formal requests for a flexible work arrangement because they don't want others to know they need support or because there's gonna be a bias that is in the workplace, which is also there for women as well, but is newer to men and workplaces are trying to figure out what to do with that as well. There's a definitional interest that I have in exactly what Jerome was saying, which is to say that we need to change the conversation from thinking of work-life balance. Balance is a bad term in my mind, even though I use it all the time, because it implies this equilibrium where they actually, things are in balance. You can do 50% of your time on work and 50% of your time on family. And I would argue that the family time, as you all have said, is certainly in my case, frankly, way harder than the work stuff. I mean, for me, having the four kids under five, the last couple of years, this was just insane, still is insane, because the oldest is only six, and the family time is really hard, but this is not just anecdotal. Like the evidence will say that there's so much squeeze on families, 20% of Americans have some elder care responsibility, and it takes a lot of work to try to be a parent, okay? And do any kind of care responsibility, that it is the case that I would say, whatever gives you energy is the life, and whatever takes your energy is the work and the family, and that there ought to be a term called family-life balance, where there's work-life balance, family-life balance, because you need something to balance the family care responsibilities, and that the work and the family are on the same side of the scale, and that the people are the bottom of the scale, and that you need something that balances the work and the family that gives you energy so that you don't go crazy, and so that becomes a more helpful paradigm, I think, to find what gives you energy that is your life that can help sustain you in your work and caregiving responsibilities. And that space used to be called leisure. You know, that's where the Greek said that's where you refresh your soul, that's where you become most fully human, and it was interesting as you were going through the grand history there. It's really important, I think, that we look at women in that history, and really they've been absent in all of that history. You know, you go back to the Bible, back into the Old Testament and Proverbs. I'm gonna get this wrong, but sort of like a woman does not eat of the bread of idleness, you know, that she's always busy, and always taking care of her family, always puttering around. You know, in Greek society, it was the men who were to work through work to get up to the point of having leisure. And the work was done by the slaves and women. And when you look at the theory of the leisure class, which is a wonderful book written at the turn of the last century by Tharsten Veblen, he very quickly, on page two, dismisses women. He talks about how leisure through time has always been about status and power. And very quickly he said, you know, you wanted to show your power by getting as far away from drudge work as possible because that was done by slaves and also women. So women have largely been a footnote to all of this. And so when we're talking about having this third space, if you will, to give yourself energy, to fuel you, to get through your work, to get through your home life and all your responsibilities, it's a much more difficult proposition for women to feel that they even deserve that. There's some really interesting, if you can believe it, feminist leisure research out there. And they did studies across the globe looking at women in every number of different cultures and number of different socioeconomic levels. And they found that women felt they needed to earn leisure, that they didn't deserve that kind of time, and that if there was ever a moment of space, they immediately went to their to-do list. So it's very hard to build up that sense of resilience and that time for self when you don't come from a history and a tradition and a culture of it, and that's worldwide. So one of Franklin's dads, Josiah Franklin's favorite quotes is the Proverbs 22 that see a man diligent in business, he shall stand before kings, a heavy patriarchal statement. The involvement for the centuries of motherhood, the success of the children, particularly the male children in business would have some derivative benefit for the mother. So when I think about this sense of election and calling, the role of motherhood became so significant and because the work of the child being successful would have some glory to the mother in an almost a Mary and Jesus kind of way. Lisa? Hi, I'm Lisa Grinsey, I'm the director of the Early Education Initiative here at New America and this is just such a stimulating conversation on a lot of levels. And as we've been sitting, I've been thinking, what are the policy solutions? But I'm also thinking as a mom and as someone who looks at the child development research about what does it mean to our kids? You know, how are our children learning from these kind of over-crazed models that we're putting in front of them every day as parents? And so I just wanted to ask, I guess it's kind of a two-pronged question really for any of you. The first is I've been looking at some of the books out of Europe on parenting styles and how children there, there's a self-sufficiency in kids that we don't seem to have here in our American culture. There's a sense that, well, they're just gonna have to kind of deal and children are just gonna have to figure it out and we don't need to be kind of hovering over them in the same way American parents do. And I've wondered, as I've watched my own children take some of the load off me by learning how to fold their clothes. I'm like, oh my God, things are getting easier because they're gonna do this themselves. It's leading me to wonder if we should be putting more attention on helping families in those very, very early years build self-sufficiency in their kids so that they can get to a point where the kids are absolutely part of the chores that they're doing at home, but also so that they're not having to feel like they have to be there for their kids every single minute of the day, which is putting that stress on parents. And if that's where we are, if that's maybe a solution of some kind, then the imperative then is to help families with the really young kids so that they can kind of get to that space by the time they're five and six years old to really be kind of helping themselves. And yet, we as a society, that's where we spend almost the least amount in terms of public investment whether it's in childcare, in preschool, in supporting families when they first had children. So, and family leave, absolutely. So I don't know if that seems like an opening for a solution or not, but I'm just curious about your reactions to some of that. Anything strike you what Lisa said? Well, yes, Lisa just read my draft policy chapter, so thank you very much. So this is very much on my mind. I think that that very question goes to the heart of everything that we've been talking about. I think that when you look at the United States and compare it to what happened to the rest of the world, in the 1970s, when mothers really entered the workforce, there was a moment when societies kind of looked at, is this a good thing or not? How are we gonna respond to this? And at the time, when you look at the surveys, at the time, there was a feeling in the United States that it was a social good and it was about time, women were getting educated. And it was sort of a non-controversial thing when you look at some of the Harris and Gallup polls, which is a really interesting thing that in the late 60s, it was sort of not considered a terrible thing. Well, what happened? You also had places like Sweden and Scandinavia who you had the prime minister of Sweden go to the United Nations in 1968 and say, we believe that gender equality is so important that we are making it part of our national policy. And they instituted sweeping policies which we will never have in this country. So this is not what I'm advocating for. It's a very different kind of government, very different kind of society, much smaller, you know, it's easier when you're more homogenous and smaller. We're big and sprawling and diverse. We have a very different political tradition, but they made a real, a very public effort to have the kind of gender equality where you would enable both men and women to work. Now it isn't perfect and there are certainly problems with that that I could talk about if you're interested. But what happened here in the United States? So we were at that same moment. And both houses of Congress said, you know what, if we're gonna have working mothers, we really need to help them take care of their kids. So they're both houses of Congress passed Universal Child Care Development Bill where you would have great child care, high quality standards, easily affordable and accessible for everybody to be available on a sliding scale. So it wasn't just a poverty program. So it passes both houses of Congress. Well what happened? The rise of the neo-right at that point, people like Pat Buchanan, he was working in the White House at the time and he had been to the Soviet Union and had seen daycare centers over there and seen little children march in lockstep and spout Linnanus doctrine and he was terrified that this was the end of America as he knew it, that we would be warehousing our children. And so he convinced Nixon that this was the wrong thing to do, not just on economic grounds but on moral and philosophical grounds. And so he wrote a veto message that so condemned the idea of communal child care that we in America, we raise our children at home. This is a private affair. So what happened then that pretty much turned the whole conversation to the right and the conversation sort of has been stuck there ever since where having a child is seen as a private responsibility, not something that society is responsible for or takes an interest in, where we're very ambivalent about whether a mother should work at all. And so if you're ambivalent about whether a mother should work, maybe she should be home with pie and cake, as Pat Buchanan told me at three o'clock greeting her children. And if you think that's really where she should be, why would you have policies that would help make it easier for her to do anything else? So we've been sort of stuck with not really doing a whole lot. We haven't had a strong union movement that they've been more focused on higher wages, thinking that sort of indirectly that will help women. We've had a women's movement that's been very preoccupied with really biological issues, reproductive issues. It really hasn't directly addressed this either. So you get into a sense, so we've been stuck really since the early 70s and we haven't really ever, ever had a chance to address some of those very questions that you're asking. It's really interesting that since the early 70s, the rise of education and health care and housing costs have outstripped inflation to the point where in this part of the country you need two incomes and just housing is so expensive. And it causes many people who otherwise might not have stayed in the workforce to stay in the workforce. And even then women's workplace participation peaked in 2000 and started to go down a little bit. Lisa and I worked a lot on the child care, the 1990 child, they passed the child care bill finally in 90 in a different way than a generation before and are looking quite seriously at reauthorizing it again, but it's such a limited pool of folks who benefit compared to the original vision or certainly what countries with falling birth rates like Sweden had done in a significant way to really move the needle in terms of fertility or in terms of changing the mismatch between work and family. Why is there anything that? Well, I just, I mean, I think the other thing that Lisa's talking about is the concept of building competencies in children and giving them a sense of mastery of household chores and other things at earlier ages. And I think child care is part of that, but also sort of parenting culture is part of it also. Obviously, I mean, I'm not a historian, but there was time when children were seen as another hand to help around the house and it is striking as apparent how much work children can be as opposed to how much work they can contribute. And I do think that on an individual level in households, you really can get children too to participate and to work and to cook and to do their own laundry and to sort their clothes. And so part of it, I think, has to do with the culture of households. And I'm not quite sure why it's happened. I'm trying to remember there was an article or a study or both fairly recently in which children, I think sociologists or psychologists came into a house and watched as parents tried to get their kids to do some stuff. And it was just unbelievable how much resistance they met. I was really shocked by that. You see a late study. It's probably my house. Right, yeah, right, right. Because the other part that you were talking about the parenting standards, and that's part of why you get the kind of the time craziness and no time for leisure for women, that parenting standards have gotten really intense. But I'm not sure why this has happened because I mean, again, to be anecdotal, when I was growing up, I mean, we would roam the neighborhood, we would, we developed competencies, we could make our own lunch, we could make our own grilled cheese sandwich, at a really pretty early age. And so part of it, I'm not quite sure why the standards and culture have changed, but they have. And even at a time when our moms had lots of leisure, we were developing competencies. It's such a great question. I'm just gonna go to questions here, but I'd love to follow up on that as well, just thinking about the generational difference of helicopter parents and everything from obsession of allergies of peanuts to wearing helmets everywhere kids move. And crime and safety has to do with that. Crime and safety, although we become way more safe than we were in 1985 when the child well-being index will show. So let's go to a question here. Let's start taking two questions at a time here because we have a couple here and then. I'm Sarah Sloyer and I'm with the National Partnership for Women and Families. So until last night's presidential debate, work and family balance issues have really been largely absent from general discussion. What are your ideas for amplifying the public discussion on these very important issues? It's great, it's great. Let's see you take another question along with it. All right, my question's a little bit different. I'm Estelle, I'm an undergrad at American. I was really fascinated by the discussion of Calvin and kind of trying to combine his ideas of calling and predestination, how that kind of morphed into, I guess almost prosperity gospel. My question is what should the response of the Christian community be now as people who do value work? And as we were saying before stewardship and that idea of Adam and Eve working the Garden of Eden and even before the fall. But then also as people who really value family and wanna spend time with kids and being caught in this work family dilemma, what do you think Christians now in the 21st century can do to either on a policy level or on a more personal family level to respond to that situation? It's great. Either one of you wanna talk about amplifying? It was interesting to see childcare mentioned. I emailed one of the campaigns during the debate right after Romney started going on Workplace Flex a bit, which they've yet been responsive and here he comes out with it, which has been in a way that McCain did in 2008. It was great to see him do last night. Either one of you wanna talk about amplifying this in the policy area? I mean, Obama has addressed it some and it was gonna be an issue and to a certain extent has been an issue from Michelle Obama and some of the people who work in our office. It's just hard to bring that to the fore, as we've talked about before in the current economic climate. I mean, it's hard to advocate for leave and things like that when you're trying to get people jobs. I mean, I was really interested when Romney started talking last night about reaching out to have more women in his cabinet and then letting them go home and everything that he said about it was awkward, the binding for, I mean, Twitter just jumped on the binder for a woman. There was so much hostility directed at that comment and then hostility directed the ability, he wants them to go home and make dinner and the phrase make dinner. And yeah, I thought he was kind of tentatively, I mean, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was trying to talk about flexibility and about encouraging, being inclusive and maybe I'm just naive, but the speed at which he was jumped on for the way that he said it did not seem to me bode well, to bode well for the discussion. Well, and I think how to raise the profile, I think we start talking more about men. Yeah, it was still in the context. It would have been helpful to raise it. The challenge is it's the gender gap and they see it in the lens of closing the gender gap. So you use all your examples as women who are challenging because that's the target audience for votes around that issue. Yeah, that's true. But it was great to see it raised last night. I think, Eliza hit the nail on the head, which is in this economy, anything that's seen as an accommodation is opposed to a standard retention or recruitment policy. I mean, you got to change the conversation include men, include business strategy. In other words, flexibility is a way to recruit and retain workers as the way in which the 21st economy needs to evolve to. And that's a hard conversation when everything's focused on jobs and the deficit. You know, in terms of the church, focusing on the stewardship of time as well as the stewardship of money, stewardship of everything God's given us, thinking about religious concepts like stewardship. Stewardship means making choices. It means saying no to some things. It means valuing the model day that we were created in God's image. So we need to take care of ourselves. Self-care is a spiritual value. Rewearning the value of Sabbath. There was a great op-ed in the post this Sunday, past Sunday in the Alex section on Sabbath, which is essentially a day of resting from all one's works. If we go back to the God resting after creation, would say that you really need to turn off all your electronic devices for an entire day, and it becomes as important as ever because it's harder than ever to really have a day of rest. Rediscovering some ancient spiritual traditions I think is a real opportunity for the church because people are yearning, yearning for help. And policy is critical, but policy will only help to a certain degree. Some level personal responsibility. I mean, you can create the Sweden model here and give as much flexibility and free time as someone could want. And if they use all their flexibility and free time to have a third job, or to do something that is less spiritually uplifting, let's say, at some level, it's got to the individual to take responsibility for their own life. And that's gotta go, something's gotta provide resources on a personal level to help people manage their own, the creation that they've been given, which is themselves, from a spiritual context. Two more questions here. Let's take a question over here and then we'll see if there's a final one here. Hi, my name's Diane. My name's Diane and I'm also with American University. My question is more, we've been talking a lot about the stress both for males, females, parenting, leisure, and just overall, you all are working on books and how and research and everything like that. But what about the everyday parent who doesn't have time to sit in rooms like this to actually hear about what's going on and how by the time policy does get addressed and by the time everything does start to get a change, how can we address those parents? How can we get them to understand that it is a dominant issue that men aren't able to go home to their children but then we wanna raise the issue that there aren't enough fathers in communities and that there aren't enough present fathers doing their jobs and roles, but how can we address this to the community as a whole? Very good. David, there's a final question for the gentleman next. You raised this earlier when you were talking about children, especially students being stressed and I wanna know your opinions and thoughts on our current educational system, especially higher ed because there's a huge pressure to get into the right school and then once you're in that right school, you need to get great grades no matter how many hours you spend achieving them, usually why you're also working or volunteering and then once you graduate, you're funneled into a good job or a good company where you have to work and how do you think policies could affect higher education? Let's say, there was a third question that the lady, you had right here, just ask it. We'll just, then the three of us will conclude. I was gonna ask, with achieving pay equity, especially in a time where we're seeing a lot more households led by women as breadwinners have a significant impact on making it possible to find the work-life balance or do you see this more as only a loosely related issue? So we have three good questions here to finalize. Let's just give our final comments on taking any one or any comments on those. Bridget, do you have anything you wanna say? Sure, I think the pay gap, while it's important, it's only a piece. I think that the culture and the norms are far more powerful and when you can start small through pilot programs, through working the way that you can show that you're most productive and efficient changing that workplace culture. And I've seen some really cool things out there as part of my reporting. So I know that it's possible where you cut down on distractions and you focus on your work and when you go home, you turn off the email and you turn off the phones. So yes, I think that pay equity is absolutely important but it's not the only piece. And as far as parents today, this kind of goes back to what Lisa was saying, I think part of what is going on because we have ambivalence about working mothers, because we don't have policies that are supportive, because we've kind of got this all the time on kind of bleeding of work and life. Learning how to create boundaries is, you gotta look at what can you do right now, the personal responsibility, what can you create right now? An American parenting is kind of crazy. It's sort of guilt fueled. There's a lot of consumption. You're not there. So you spend all of your leisure time with your kids that tends to be hovering. You're worried about college because now that we don't have sort of a manufacturing sector anymore, you're not really gonna have a great future with a high school education. So oh my God, I've on this list. So there are people who are asking for Mandarin lessons for their two year olds and how can they get great art lessons and private lessons for their toddler and I'm thinking poor paint out and let him finger paint. But I remember feeling that stress too. I still feel that stress. I had a friend come by the other day and talking about how her son is going to some national tournament for fencing. And while I was happy for her son, I had this like, my son's not going to the Olympics. Oh my God, this sort of this fear that somehow he was gonna miss out and he's a great kid. So there is a lot of pressure all the way down into kindergarten to kind of get on this path where you'll be successful and you will achieve. And so that's part of what drives the craziness because you're so afraid for your child. And then when, so then you're stressed out and you're in college and I don't know how many kids are on either ADHD meds or anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds. They kind of don't know who they are. They've been so over-scheduled. They get out of college, they've got all this debt and they're like, who am I now, what? So there is a real cycle of kind of craziness that until we can change the bigger picture, which is gonna take time, you really have to figure out how you can change in your own lives. Oh, very well said. Was any reflections? Well, I mean, to the answer, the question about ordinary moms, I mean, it is a continuum. I think, when Emery Slaughter's piece came out, there were those who said, well, she needs to spend more time talking about poor women or, and I think her very valid argument is, I know I'm talking about a select group of women, but our fate is important because if we can get in policy positions, then we're in a position to think about and care about and come up with policies that will help women in at all sort of levels of dealing with this. I mean, but pay equity, yes, is very important. I mean, it is important to acknowledge that women are supporting houses. And you look at the Walmart, the Walmart class action case that was denied by Supreme Court, but it's where a woman who was a manager at Walmart found out that a younger man who had been hired after she was working, was making more, 10,000 more a year as a manager at Walmart because he was a father. And even though she was pregnant, her supervisor was just not thinking of her as a breadwinner, as somebody whose household depended on her and yet we know that this is true and we know that increasingly moms are single moms and part of the reason in sort of the middle and working class that we have more and more women going it alone is because they are looking at the men in their cohort and they're saying, well, what will you bring to the table in this relationship, what will you bring? Are you gonna be doing the housework? Are you gonna be helping me in the same conversations, the same evaluations going on? How much help am I gonna get from you in my crazy, difficult life? So, I don't, I mean, I do think it's a continuum, but that at a certain level, the issues and questions are really the same. What are men gonna contribute? And if they're not gonna contribute something, then I'm just gonna stay single and it's gonna be my paycheck supporting my household. Yeah, and there's, boy, I mean, we did an event this past summer here on the Boomerang and Accordion Families and some of the family formation challenges that folks who were in their 20s and early 30s are struggling with as they, many folks living at home are just thinking about what looks like, how do we form a family and how do we make, how do we pay for rent that allows us to have our own place, all those questions. As we conclude here, I just lift up, at some level, the culture that we're in puts a lot of pressure on us, regardless of whether we're in school getting ready to go out for our first job or whether we're trying to figure out what a family looks like or whether we're trying to stay attached to the workplace in a way after a long career, but doing it in a more flexible way. And I really think some of the values that are in many faith traditions around how we care for ourselves and how we push back against culture are as important now as they've ever been. And as I sit with people both pastorally and read the research reports and deal with my own challenges, I lift up reconnecting with your own spiritual core or your own meditative core or just caring for yourself in whatever way helps you navigate your particular challenge. Thanks for being here with us today and providing some good questions and I appreciate Liza and Bridget, you again here with us today. Thanks to Voice of America and to all who've been here. I hope we have a good afternoon and we are adjourned. Thank you.