Why U.S. Working Moms Are So Strained (Quick Study)

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0:50Caitlyn Collins:Work-family conflict is an issue that plagues mothers across Western industrialized countries, but it's easier in some places than others to be a working mom. The United States is one of two countries on the planet that doesn't offer paid maternity leave. The United States and Papua New Guinea are the only two countries in the world that don't offer this benefit on a federal level.

1:15Caitlyn Collins:I was interested in understanding what life was like day to day for women who live in other countries that have very different work family policy supports and also really different cultural attitudes when it comes to gender and work and caregiving. Sweden is a country that has 480 days of paid parental leave for parents, and it's paid out at 80 % wage replacement. And I remember one mom telling me, I really think this should be a 100 % wage replacement. That is a very big dip in income. And from an American perspective, that's comical because we have nothing. We have no paid parental leave in our country.

1:52Caitlyn Collins:Here in the US, women were really stressed and exhausted, and it was obvious on their faces. Oftentimes, they cried during our interviews, and they cried most often in response to one particular question. I know that everybody has a different idea of what it means to be a good parent, but to you, what does it mean to be a good mother to your children? And when women broke down in tears and explained to me sometimes in the conference room in their office building, sometimes in their kitchens or their living rooms that they felt they were failing their children. Their ideal for what it means to be a good mother felt very far away from their current state.

2:33We live in a country that deeply values individualism.

2:37Caitlyn Collins:And again, this idea of personal responsibility is central to the way our country is set up. The U.S. is one of only a few countries on the planet that has no federal standard for vacation and sick days, no paid parental leave, no universal social insurance entitlement, no universal health care, no universal child care. We think of families and of caregiving as private and personal responsibilities. Women tended to blame themselves when they struggled. When we live in a country that says it's your job to do this on your own, it's not at all surprising to me that mothers, when they experience difficulties, would say things to me like, well, yeah, if I just got a little more organized, or if I came up with a better schedule, or Or if I just prepared meals more on the weekends for my family, or maybe this spring break one mother said, we're not going to take a trip, we're going to stay at home and we're going to reorganize the house to make things a little less insane.

3:25Caitlyn Collins:They put it on themselves to resolve this. And again, you cannot fix a social problem with individual solutions. Being more organized or efficient does not bring about the sort of social change that all women both need and deserve here in the US. In Germany and Sweden and Italy, and of course across many other Western wealthy countries, countries, these are countries that have come to the collective consensus that caregiving is again a public responsibility and the cost and burden of it should be shared across society. Children themselves, our future workers and taxpayers and citizens, are a public good.

4:05Caitlyn Collins:Having knowledgeable managers who don't act like this is the first time in the history of humankind that anyone has ever had to navigate having a kid and working at the same time can go a long way toward making working parents feel supported. If I were a manager, I would think carefully about implementing policies like paid parental leave that are gender neutral. And having a policy on the books is one thing, but encouraging employees to take them is very different. And often that happens by managers leading the way. And so managers can role model what it means to, for example, talk about your family day to day in the workplace and not in ways that are stigmatized.

4:44Caitlyn Collins:Managers can role model taking vacation days and sick days. And importantly, managers can also educate themselves about perhaps what policies are already on the books, but that folks don't often know about until they actually get pregnant and start trying to navigate how they're going to make this work for themselves. We associate success with being fully committed 24 hours a day, seven days a week to work. And it shifts the dialogue, the discourse, when someone in a leading position shows that it can be done a different way that does not diminish their ability in the workplace. If there are women listening here who are working moms themselves, the one message that I would want them to leave this with is the idea that their work family conflict and their stress and their guilt is not their fault.

5:30Caitlyn Collins:It is not their fault.

5:37Thank you.