Parents are failing

Parents in tech are struggling, but if you ask some of our coworkers, we’re getting too much help from our employers.

Have you heard the news? Parents are failing. And also coasting. Wait, which is it? 

Parents in tech are struggling, but if you ask some of our coworkers, we’re getting too much help from our employers. As tech parents of a one-year-old, my partner and I know we have it better than most. His company offers paid time off for childcare (12 weeks), and his team has designated times for meetings (10-3), outside of which it’s understood that other priorities (eg, kiddos) will be tended to. My most recent employer wasn’t quite as generous in offering paid leave (12 weeks of unpaid leave or working halftime for 50% pay hardly felt supportive), but my team was very parent-friendly: they knew that unless it was an emergency, the childcare blocks on my calendar were unmovable. You could (and some did) look at how we’ve been managing and think, “Wow, she gets to design her own day and work whenever she wants.” Or, “It seems like he’s allowed to work fewer hours than me — that’s not fair!” And you wouldn’t be alone in your thinking; in fact, there is a growing backlash against these policies—  and their recipients. 

But the idea that parents are somehow getting more out of this pandemic than their non-parent peers is deeply misguided. It imagines that the support in place provides an advantage, when all it does is provide relief — and not even enough to make us whole again. The reality is that parents are failing left and right. 

We are failing our kids: We are only half present, still thinking about that email we didn’t get to send out last night, or the meeting we’re going to have to miss this week because our children always come first. We struggle to fill the shoes of great teachers we are in no way trained to replace. We do our best not to snap at our kids for needing so much attention from us (they didn’t ask for this pandemic, either). We feel guilty and scared and relieved and ashamed if we’ve opted to send them to daycare, because who can know whether the damage of social isolation is greater than the potential risk of contracting the virus? Does this too, make us bad parents? 

We are failing our jobs: We are half tuned into a meeting, distracted by the little ones who lovingly (or clingingly) climb into our laps in the middle of an important announcement. We are worried about how much longer things take for us to accomplish now that we are working from home and trying to tend to the kids at the same time. We feel guilty that our spouse is taking on more of the childcare, or resentful that we are the ones taking on more of the childcare. We are jealous of coworkers who can share childcare responsibilities with a partner, parent, sibling or friend. We feel pressured to hire a nanny, send our kids back to daycare, or call in for backup from grandparents even if we are deeply uncomfortable with the risks that introduces — for our family and for others — because some of our coworkers have set a precedent by doing this already. We can’t afford to hire a nanny or send our kids to daycare, or get support from grandparents who live too far away to help out. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We feel guilty that our single colleagues are picking up the slack. We see no chance of a promotion or even an exciting and high visibility project at work, because we see no way to do work well enough or visibly enough to qualify. We are afraid to tell our boss how difficult balancing childcare and work has become, or afraid that if we don’t tell them, we won’t be evaluated fairly come performance reviews. We are grateful we still have a job, but we worry we are slowly working ourselves out of it. We are too tired to do anything well.

I empathize with my colleagues who do not have children and feel the support structures available to them are insufficient — they are probably right. We could do with more mental health days, and more ways to support our colleagues who live alone and are achingly lonely after months of little to no social interaction. We could look beyond the challenges of childcare to include elder care, too. We could talk as much about taking care of ourselves as we do about taking care of others.

But the solution here isn’t to take away benefits for parents, or to ask companies to stop talking about the struggles of being a working parent during the pandemic. It’s to recognize that everyone right now is struggling, for a myriad of reasons. Parenting is no doubt more visible than other struggles — it is getting a lot of media coverage, and is predictable in its peaks and valleys (everyone knows when back to school season is and can reliably anticipate their parent-colleagues will be struggling). On the other hand, anxiety and depression don’t often raise their hands, but they are in every room or meeting we go to. There’s probably at least one person on your team who lives alone and is suffering from loneliness and lack of social contact, and another who has either gotten COVID-19 or has a friend or family member who has. We’re all struggling, some more quietly than others.

Companies should do their best to make sure everyone feels supported, and we should all do our best to recognize that everyone’s situation and needs are different right now. Rather than criticize how others are managing and what support they deserve from employers, we can assume that there’s more than meets the eye on what others are experiencing, and on just how helpful those company benefits are. We can fight for our cause without tearing others down in the process. I don’t pretend to know what would be most supportive to non-parents right now; it may indeed be time to shift the conversation to how employers can support this group. I only hope we can do so without creating dividing lines among us.