A reader (gender unknown) says something I've heard a lot of guys say: that I have the good fortune to have a career where I can work from home.
Well, sure. As long as there are no children in it.
Having small children and writing is no more compatible than having small children and being a lawyer. For the first five years, childcare is constant. I might be able to freelance an article here and there provided my husband cared for the children while I wrote. But when a child is in the house, and you are responsible for it, you don't do a damn thing that requires more concentration than running a load of laundry. I always laugh at the men I know who entertain fantasies that their wives will bring in the major salary while they stay home with the kids and write. If you are of this class, take a daytime babysitting job for a day and bring some work along with you. Report back on how far you got. My bet is that you didn't even get a paragraph finished.
The SAHMs in my comments thread seem to think that I am under the delusion that their jobs are easy. Far from it. It is precisely because your job is so hard that I think you will have to pay a fortune to get someone else to do it with even half your dedication.
A reader (gender unknown) says something I've heard a lot of guys say: that I have the good fortune to have a career where I can work from home.
Well, sure. As long as there are no children in it.
Yes and no -- I tried to do academic work with two preschool children at home, and that did not work very well. But I have worked full-time at home ever since my youngest was in kindergarten, and my kids have been home after school and during the summers with me ever since. During most of those years, they'd have been in child-care otherwise. At the end of summers, I do look forward to the start of school, but I understand this is not a feeling limited to Dads who work at home.
.....you disregarded my last point. You've come to the realization that there are inherent conflicts between a career and parenthood.....in short, it is not possible to "have it all".
If being a writer, and being your child's caregiver is not compatible, then someone else needs to provide that service. If the cost of someone else providing that service is economically unacceptable to you (based on what you're being paid, or what you perceive such services should cost you), you will have to make a choice.....continue your career or take a break and raise your child (or your husband will......but that's a subject for another post, I'm sure).
You're not facing a decision that millions of women (and men) haven't faced before. You'll figure it out, I'm sure......
"Having small children and writing is no more compatible than having small children and being a lawyer."
I'm not sure I agree with this 100%, since I was the stay at home parent and wrote five of my books before my daughter was five, along with numerous other writing projects (and blogging of course). In fact, we found that my wacky, stay-up-late writer schedule was useful in the very early days, since I would handle the late-night feedings etc., while my wife would get sleep for the next day.
That said, it does help to be a fast writer and to be able to focus while one's offspring is napping or doing something that does not require direct interaction. The way I solved this when my daughter was a toddler, her play are was in my office, so she would play with toys or look at her picture books or play on her computer (she received by cast-off) while I typed away. I got a surprising amount done that way.
It also helps to have a spouse who will serve as an attention magnet once they get home, allowing you to take care of stuff you didn't get done earlier. Never underestimate the importance of two parents in a household.
I also think, quite honestly, that I got credit for being a stay-at-home dad that women might not have necessarily gotten if they tried to work from home as well. I would frequently have phone meetings with corporate clients and I would tell them that from time to time they might hear my daughter in the background. No one ever gave me grief for it, and a lot of people seemed to think it was admirable. I was never quite sure what to make of that.
"For the first five years, childcare is constant."
Uhhh...ok...I can tell you don't have kids.
Let me clue you in:
Newborns sleep...a lot. It can be quite easy to squeeze in many hours of work each day as long as you are flexible as to when in the 24 hour cycle you will work (which hinges pretty closely to when they decide to sleep).
My experience was that the newborn-toddler stage is actually fairly "easy". They don't really move around a lot. You plop them somewhere they tend to stay there.
Toddlers to three year olds. They are the ones you have to watch. They're sneaky, mobile and adventurous. They do still nap during the day but not as much. So this is the trickier stage in which to schedule a few hours of work.
Four to five year olds - you'll probably want to have them in pre-K or K for a few hours each day anyway so it is fairly easy to squeeze in a few hours of work during that time. If not in pre-K or K then yeah they will take up more of your time. On the bright side you can actually converse with them by now and you get to play with playdoh and fingerpaints while explaining the advantages of a laissez-faire economy.
Of course if you are also having to do all the other household work - cooking, cleaning, etc. then yeah that definitely compunds the problem of finding the time to do "real work". But this is when/where your partner needs to step up to the plate and carry more of the load than they might otherwise be inclined to. If they are not willing to then perhaps one should have picked a better mate.
All work can be hard. I don't think that childcare (even at the skilled labor level :)) is any harder than the daily grind most of us experience at our office or factory or job site.
Early years of child care can be a fun wondrous time (and fatiguing, nerve-wracking, boring, etc.). It is unfortunate so many of us miss out on that. Assuming of course one has any actual interest in that.
While you're not exactly wrong, having one parent working at home does make childcare a lot easier (I'm a lawyer, married to a journalist who works from home, and we have two kids). While you still need childcare while you're actually working, you don't need it while you're commuting. You don't need it after the kids go to bed, if you're going to work late. You generally have the flexibility to manage emergencies, like a sick kid who can't go to daycare that day, or a sick or flaky childcare provider, or getting a kid to the doctor, or or or (and calling these things emergencies doesn't make it clear that something along those lines happens at least every couple of weeks, and can totally destroy a workday if 'work' means commute 40 minutes each way to an office you can't take a kid to.)
We needed fulltime, as in 9-5, childcare until both kids were in school, and we have them in an afterschool program now. But having my husband working from home reduced stress levels for both of us immensely (and gave him much more time with the kids.)
And like John Scalzi said above, at least for men working at home, minor interruptions or rescheduling necessitated by childcare get a very admiringly sympathetic reaction from people you work with (or at least my husband said it worked that way for him). I'm not sure how this plays out for women -- I've never been the parent trying to work from home.
I'm a computer programmer, and I went back to doing freelance work from home when my twins were about three months old (basically, as soon as I was getting a reasonable amount of sleep at night, and the babies weren't nursing ALL DAY LONG). I was able to get a reasonable amount of part-time work done during naptimes until they were about 9 months old, maybe 20 hours a week. After that, though, naptimes just weren't long enough or consistent enough to count on doing more than an hour of solid work a day. Since you can't really get any meaningful programming work done without long blocks of time, I wound up hiring a teenager to come in the afternoon and play with them, and then shifted to a full-time nanny.
FWIW, I pay my nanny $9 an hour, plus my half of the payroll taxes. Her son is the same age as my girls, so she brings him along and takes care of all three children. Many of the "day cares" I know of are similar situations, SAHMs who do in-home child care for two or three other kids. These women are happy to work for relatively low wages, because it lets them earn some extra money while still being full-time mothers to their own children. I imagine such in-home child cares put some downward pressure on the prices charged by the larger day-care centers.
The commenters above are correct. More generally, there's just no good reason (aside from personal taste, of course) to do as much housework and childcare as modern upper middle-class folks seem to think is necessary. Kids above a very young age are resilient and do just fine with minimal supervision and structured activity.
James Lileks
Wow. Great examples of people extrapolating from their experience to universal descriptions of child care. Just to clue you kids in - children can vary widely in their temperament and the demands they make on you. Parents can vary widely in their reactions to those demands. Women in particular have to be aware that they have very little idea how their bodies and minds will respond to the physical changes that accompany pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. Sitting around debating how hard it is for a generic person to care for a generic child is a pretty silly exercise. As someone who raised a multiply handicapped, disabled (but very happy, outgoing, and placid) son and a very bright daughter who happened to have colic for the first two years of her life, let me tell you - kids don't come in generic. (See, I can extrapolate as well as you guys...maybe better.)
Hmmm, I'm surprised to be in the minority by agreeing with the original post. My wife is a stay at home and works as a freelance proofreader. She brings in about $12k/year, and could bring in up to 30% more if she had more ability to schedule her work so it wasn't so lumpy (she does academic journals which have a tendency to all hit in the same part of the quarter). So that gets us to $16k/year, and then if you assume that we really needed the money I could see pushing it to ~$22k/year. Beyond that, no way, at least without paying for help which doesn't make sense given her ~$16/hr wage. Or i suppose we could fairly dramatically change our work/spouse/kids balance, but we'd probably start by me stepping back from 60 hour work weeks to 50 and lowering my career ambitions, rather than increase her workload. It just doesn't pay.
Contra-Scalzi et al above, we have 3 kids, currently 6, 4 and 2. Her work time is basically limited to naps (younger 2 only now), evenings post-bed and weekends. Our kids are no worse than average, but the average time between a request for food, drink, boo-boo kiss, arbitration, finding lost toy, problem with the Wii, new funny joke, random crying, happy screaming, upset screaming, screaming competitions...well its measured in seconds more than minutes.
Now that we can see the end of the rainbow (in 2 years she'll be at home, alone, for ~8 hours a week) she's starting to consider what she should do with that time, and we're not sure whether to plan on her bringing in more money, or keeping her workload the same and just being able to manage it more easily.
I stay home with my daughter two days a week, and I've learned to take "I'm not getting any work done today" as the default. If I do get something done, great, but I don't count on it. I can still get work done in the evening, of course, but during the day it's usually a wash. I became much happier when I accepted this.
Of course, there is Lileks, but Lileks is a machine.
As a lawyer with a SAH, teach-and-write-part-time- and-try-to-finish-the-thesis husband, I'd have to say that (i) I agree that being a writer (or academic or in any similar "flexible" employment) and a stay-at-home parent is not at all the slam-dunk most people who don't yet have kids seem to think, but (ii) it is far, far more workable than being a stay-at-home lawyer. Client demands, pure and simple (though, I suppose there are some types of part-time writing jobs that could call you up and require you to be in Houston by 6pm). Unless you're doing T&E (dead people rarely have crises), a few other specialty areas, or doing relatively low-skilled piece work on a contract basis, it's not even close. That's not to say that I think writing is really workable, either.
Bob_R's quite right about differing temperaments, though. Our first kid was rather high maintenance and a complete wrecking machine around the house, and even with nearly full time help nothing work-like got done during the days. The combined home-office/nursery actually seems to work with our daughter, however, now that the boy's in preschool.
And, for John Scalzi, you'll find this illustrative: I was on a call with a client listening to my boss explain how another (male) lawyer needed to take care of his kids and couldn't make a call at dinner time. So I'd do it. Male lawyer's kids were re in high school, mine were both under 4.
As a translator, I can't imagine having to concentrate on "time-definite" jobs to a fixed deadline and paying attention to needy small children and infants. The work is totally unscheduled, feast-or-famine type stuff. Jobs that at first look innocuous turn out to be time-hogging monsters once you get into them.
I'd say anything of a work-at-home variety with a fixed deadline beyond your control and a high requirement for mental concentration would relegate child rearing to a "leisure" task, when and if you find the time. That wouldn't make me too confident that I could juggle work and kids effectively for either.
100% true! I leave the house to write. I wrote a book in the college computer lab.
Small children take more attention than anything else I've ever down.
We have twin 3 1/2-year olds. I work a night job, and at present my wife stays home and tries to write. She actually makes a pretty good go of it, given that my schedule allows me to get our guys out of her face for a few hours each day.
My wife and I have a five month old son. My wife is the choir director and organist at our church, plus she teaches piano out of our home.
She manages to get in several hours of piano and/or organ practice every day while still managing the household and providing excellent care for our son. (I am of the opinion that my wife is superwoman, but I think that's only tangentially related.)
Yeah, I take the boy in the evening sometimes so she can have a couple hours of uninterrupted time, but she still gets a lot done. And I do take him while my wife is teaching her piano students.
Clearly, it's possible to still get things done when you have a small child in the house. I don't know how typical our experience is.
Let me clue you in: Newborns sleep...a lot.
Speak for yourself. Neither of my children sleeps anything like the amounts prescribed in the books. I recall once getting one of those automatic emails about "Your child at X weeks" or whatever, and reading that "your child is probably only sleeping about 15 hours a day now." Well, my child had never slept 15 hours total in any 24-hour period from the day he was born. Three years later, the only time he sleeps that much are when he's seriously ill. Our second will sleep 9 hours at night (and that's 9 hours interrupted with a couple of feedings) and then, if we're lucky, a couple of times during the day if he's allowed to do it either nursing or literally on my chest.
Great series of posts, thanks. You really have stirred the pot.
P.S. as always there is James Lileks.
My wife and I decided at the start that she was going to stay home with the kids. We would simply live at whatever standard of living my income would provide. (One of my kids once said, "You two are so fifties.") She worked one or two nights a week (she's a registered nurse), as much for R&R as for the income. When it turned out that I was going to spend most of my life working at home, she simply coped. I never had a bit of trouble. And, I don't believe any client ever heard any child over the phone.