Less Work, More Playtime Makes Jack a Good Parent
The recent economic news is encouraging: Jobless claims are down, corporate spending is up and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 19% for the year. These key indicators suggest a return to better economic times and offered a well-timed boost for consumer confidence during the holiday shopping season.
As recently as 10 years ago, this news would have been clear cause for celebration. But for working parents in 2003, the benefits promised by the nation’s return to economic health are clouded by the reality that productivity increases too often mean more work by the same number of employees. That translates into overworked parents being forced to give up something. For more and more parents, that means sacrificing family time.
Families with two-parent incomes make up 64% of today’s households, up from 35% in 1974. Between 1969 and 1999, working couples had work cut an average of 22 hours per week from time spent with family members. Kids under 5 are spending an inordinate amount of time in non-parental care each week so their parents can make enough money to pay for, among other things, child care.
The concept of a good life often centers on the acquisition of things. Who has not seen the matching Jet Skis sitting in garages weekend after weekend? They’re not being hauled to the ocean or a lake because the owners are busy working to make the payments. As we acquire more things in a misguided effort to improve our lives, we become unwitting slaves to the auto loan, the home mortgage and the payments to all the people in our lives who perform the work that one stay-at-home parent could be doing.
We want to slow down but don’t. Even weekends offer few opportunities to rest. On Saturday and Sunday, the family car becomes a shuttle bus, with parents and children bouncing from one location to the next in a frantic effort to compress 25 hours of action into a 24-hour day. This “pinball parenting” is stressful.
Our family’s recent Thanksgiving was all too typical. We left Orange County on Wednesday night for Thanksgiving dinner in San Diego. After Thursday’s dinner we drove home. Friday was spent running errands and working around our home to complete the many chores we couldn’t get to during the workweek. Saturday was a repeat of Friday. On Sunday, my body rebelled; the mild case of the flu that I had dodged for days finally got the best of me. I spent Sunday flat on my back, leaving my wife to scramble to finish the errands and chores.
Today, simple rest is a luxury. At night, long past the time when we should be resting, we sit in front of a computer or television -- or on work that we’ve brought home.
The National Sleep Foundation notes that two-thirds of Americans don’t get the recommended eight hours of sleep needed for good health, safety and optimum performance. So our health suffers. We compound the problem by eating the wrong food and cutting back on exercise. That leads to increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses.
American parents need to pay more attention to the quality of their lives. We are confusing being busy with happiness and fulfillment. Consumer spending clearly has been the major contributor to the rebounding economy. But the chances are good that we’re buying things we don’t really need. That forces us to work more to pay for these goodies.
Give up these goodies. Work less, enjoy life more. That’s a difficult concept to grasp when we’re packing the aisles of stores, and that concept won’t play well on Wall Street. But our children will be thrilled to get mom and dad back. Radical notions, to be sure. But paying more attention to the quality of our lives will be the best long-term solution to the worst of times now facing many families.
One major poll indicated that the average household spending for the holidays would be down slightly from last year. Part of that may be due to uncertainty about the future. But I hope that part of the reason, albeit a small part, is the recognition that the best gift family members can give each other won’t be found online or in a mall. It’s called time.
