End-of-year school obligations drive parents batty

[June 05, 2008]  NEW YORK (AP) -- My son's baseball teacher scheduled an end-of-year, mother-son game the other day, and it was a blast. The 5-year-old boys "won" (wink wink), but not before us moms got to hit a few grounders and run the bases in Central Park in the middle of a work day.

Yup, that was the only problem -- the middle-of-the-work-day part. Just like my daughter's ballet recital the day before that, and her upcoming xylophone concert, tap performance, field day and poetry publishing party.

Don't get me wrong, all these events are great. Life is short, and who wants to miss a chance to celebrate with our kids?

But as thousands of working parents across the country know, this can be the cruelest season of the year, logistically speaking, when dozens of these end-of-school-year events collide with work obligations, over and over again.

It's not just a matter of having an understanding employer, although that certainly helps. Even for those in the most flexible workplaces, a series of three-hour absences can sabotage a week. Yet with vacation time so tight in this country -- as opposed to say, Europe (hello, August on the beach!) -- what employee has enough to squander an entire day of it on a baseball game?

And even if you're lucky enough to have your own company, it doesn't mean kid crunch time is a piece of cake. Ask Liz Lange, founder and creative director of Liz Lange Maternity, what she's been doing lately, and you'll get an earful.

"I was at school this morning for my daughter's book fair," she tapped out on her Blackberry the other day, "on a class trip with her all day tomorrow, and over the next 2 weeks will have my son's book fair, my son's end-of-year party, my daughter's end-of-year party, my son's poetry reading, lower school graduation and I am sure there are a few other school events that I am forgetting," she says.

"Mostly it's about constantly having to reschedule important meetings and feeling mortified about the amount of times I have to say that the reason is kid-related," says Lange. "I fear that to non-parents it must sound not true!"

And even Lange, with her professional savvy, can't keep the events straight in her head, often finding herself e-mailing other parents frantically in the middle of the night. On Tuesday, she told her father he could take the kids to a Yankee game. She forgot that was the night of the third-grade year-end party, which the family ended up missing. Oops!

While Lange seems good-naturedly stressed, some parents experience a much more serious form of it, says Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist in Boston who works with schools and parents.

"People have been in my office this week in tears," says Steiner-Adair. "There's just way too much stuff. They're saying, 'I can't handle it all. And I can't handle being seen as a bad parent if I don't show up.'"

Working mothers bear the brunt, Steiner-Adair says, because in most cases they're the ones suffering the consequences of taking time from their jobs, not their husbands. But stay-at-home mothers have also been in tears, she says: "They too are having a tough time juggling all the command performances."

Has the situation gotten worse over the years? Steiner-Adair thinks so. "It's this crazy culture we have now of anxious parenting," she says. "This nervous generation of parents is signing kids up for way too much stuff. And so we have too many rehearsals. Too many games, too many practices, too many cookies. Too much celebrating!"

And all this can impact kids negatively, she says, by tiring them out and depriving them of the "chilling-out time" they need to cope with these transitions in their lives.

Still, she feels that our workplace culture needs to do a much better job of acknowledging the needs of parents. "If we want our employees to feel fully focused at work, we have to recognize that the job of parenting is especially demanding at this time of year," she says, noting that a few female-owned businesses treat mid-May to mid-June just as they would the end of August.

Turns out there's a professional term for, say, the need to run out to catch the violin recital -- it's called informal flex time, explains Carol Evans, CEO of Working Mother Media Inc., which publishes Working Mother magazine and promotes issues of concern to working mothers.

"It used to be, six or seven years ago, that women couldn't get enough formal flex time," says Evans, referring to part-time work, job shares and the like. Now, formal flexibility has really caught on, Evans says, "but we've realized that informal flexibility is just as important." Companies, she says, are slowly realizing that they get a return on their investment for every hour of flexibility that they provide a valued employee.

But flexibility has its limits. There's also an onus on the employee "to be realistic about what they ask," Evans says. "You have to pick and choose."

And Lange, the maternity designer, gives a frank answer when asked how she deals with the kid crunch from an employer's perspective. She tries to be understanding, she says, while hoping that employees "don't have as many external demands on their time as I do!"

In San Francisco, Cathy Benko, an executive at Deloitte LLP, the professional services firm, is dealing with her own version of kid crunch time. The mother of two has a slew of eighth-grade graduation events these days -- lunches, dinners, and more. And because she has a girl and a boy, "It's not like you can double-dip that much," she notes. "There are two different sets of schedules."

But Benko, the chief talent officer at Deloitte, has done a lot of thinking about the work-life balance as the innovator behind Mass Career Customization, a system under which employees at her firm are allowed to dial up or dial down their career plans -- in terms of hours, compensation, the promotion track -- based on the stage of life that they're at. Under this view, Benko says, the corporate ladder becomes more of a "corporate lattice."

When it comes to parental obligations falling within work time, we should at least be honest, Benko feels. For her, one way to do that is to tell her staff exactly where she is going -- so others will feel comfortable doing so.

"I'm struggling with it," she says of her own logistical conflicts. "The people who work for me are struggling with it. Should we struggle in silence? Or should we acknowledge what's going on, and learn from each other how to manage it."

[Associated Press; By JOCELYN NOVECK]

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