Something Has to Give So That Women at Work Don’t Put Children at Risk : Families: Longer school hours? Flex time at work? A ‘neighborhood watch’ for kids?

When women went to work, we wanted good jobs and wanted our personhood respected and we deserved both. But the simple, infuriating fact is that we left a great big hole in our children’s lives. We expected help in our transition and got little. We gave up too much for what we gained, and without some major economic and social changes, the situation will only get worse.

Of course we shouldn’t go back to scrubbing grout. Most of us couldn’t if we wanted to. The majority of working women today aren’t greedy; they need their paychecks. And even if they can stay home, they have the duty to try to reach their full potential. This may sound like heresy, but we homemakers in the 1950s and ‘60s padded our jobs. Even if we had four children, joined the PTA and volunteered at the Red Cross, we still had time to watch the daytime soaps or read bodice-rippers, or just sit around exchanging recipes.

We weren’t stupid. We provided moral guidance and a safe environment and freshly cooked nutritious meals. We also budgeted, balanced the checkbook, refereed family feuds. We were a marvelous greatly untapped national resource. But now that it’s been tapped, who in God’s name is watching the children?

A few women, even some professionals, out of frustration and guilt, are hanging up their shoes and going back home, but women are not going to turn around and march out of the work force en masse. And even if they did, the majority of them would end up on welfare.

This is a gigantic mess, and it’s everyone’s problem. Saving our children should be placed right up there with foreign trade, health care and peace treaties.

How about flexible school hours to adapt to the parents’ work schedules? Sure, it would break up friendships, but it might also break up the gangbangers. Or how about a mandate to corporations to offer flex hours? Not cost effective? Well, what’s cost effective about prisons? Maybe college students could pay back their loans by volunteering for after-school care. What greater community service could there be? Or maybe there could be a “neighborhood watch” where the children must check in with and be monitored by an assigned person each day of the week, someone who has agreed with others in the neighborhood to stay home one or two days a month so that all weekdays are covered?

We’ve already waited too long. We’ve lost too many of our children. Somehow, we must develop a support system for them, one that doesn’t involve sending women back to inspecting one another’s dust bunnies.

Or maybe we should just give all the children computers programmed with two Virtually Real parents.