The Job Search

The job search continues.

As I address selection criteria, polish my CV and my best black shoes, and trying to remember to take my best handbag to interviews, I came across this new study from the ANU by Dr Liana Leach and her team, Bad jobs will make you miserable. Please do not dismiss this as Yet Another Case of the Bleedin’ Obvious. What Dr Leach found is that it’s not enough that you have a job. She found that “people who moved from unemployment into poor quality jobs were much more likely to be depressed than those who were still unemployed”. The quality of the job you have makes a profound difference to your wellbeing.

I can’t direct you to a copy of the paper yet but if you follow the link above, the media office should be able to give you a copy.

To all who are job hunting, I wish you all the best.

 

Smart mum – and one who tells it as it is

Ari O’Connell has written this piece Mothering is an extreme sport and I have to pass it on. Her humour and honesty can be seen with her “I’ll finish my PhD while the baby sleeps for the first three months”. I love it, especially the vision of dirty washing sprouting like mushrooms.

Another reason why I like this piece is Ari’s honesty about the Commentators, who are a danger in this extreme sport we call mothering.

When I’m not changing, or bathing, or hurtling – eyes closed to maintain the illusion of sleep – down to bub’s room at 3.00am, I’m batting off another sporting mainstay, the Commentator. Make that plural. Available anywhere and at any time, the Commentators inform me of how I’m stacking up against the competition, and they double as Coach if I’m going off course.

The mommy wars are so damn useless. I’d do my usual whinge of why can’t we all get along and respect differences, but I’m probably preaching to the choir. All I can say is, Ari, I hope you have a lovely time with your baby, enjoy each moment of happiness when it comes, and keep your sense of perspective.

 

“7 Mummy Sins”, but not apparently the ones done by Daddy or Aunty or Uncle …

Seriously, the title of this article stinks. On the surface, it looks like one of those tee-hee, look at me, I do some daft things as a mummy and maybe some of them are ill-advised, so hey, let’s get some so-called experts give their take on it, and voila, here is an article with a snappy headline. And blow me down if I didn’t get caught in the trap of reading the darn thing.

Let me save you time. Basically you aren’t a bad mum if you feed your kid the occasional dinner of baked beans instead of a gourmet meal of pureed organic vegies and a teeny bit of steak from a named cow, or if your kid goes through a phase of only eating one or two things. Things are getting questionable if you use tv all the time to babysit your kids, or if they’re drinking from a baby bottle when they’re old enough to go to preschool. It’s inadvisable to give kids sweets every day – keep them as a “sometime” treat.

WHY is it necessary to make the mother the sinner, the evil one who has to cut corners to get things done, who does things sloppily or holds onto old habits because she doesn’t have time to work on new habits or behaviours? How about coming up with “7 Daddy Sins”? Let me start the list, thinking of some men I have known in the past.

“I leave my kid watching TV all afternoon while I sneak off to my study to play wargames.”

“I take my kid to fastfood restaurants because I couldn’t be stuffed cooking a proper meal for myself and my kid, and besides, I don’t really like vegies and I love hamburgers.”

“I do everything to get out of looking after my kid and I call it babysitting when I do look after him.”

Go on, make your own list!

 

And the mummy wars rev up again

Splat!Blog entry by Evan Maloney here. He commented on the article on Gen X women drop out of workforce.

From the article:

Only 38 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified women worked full-time, compared to 90 per cent of Generation X, tertiary qualified men, in a University of Melbourne study.

Life Patterns claims to be Australia’s longest running study of the lives of young people, tracking a group who left school in Victoria in 1991.

Its leader, Professor Johanna Wyn, said most of the group’s women, now aged around 37, had ranked career as their highest priority when they left school. [...]

Professor Wyn said Australia’s workplace policies had also taken their toll on the health of Generation X when compared to counterparts in a similar Canadian study.

I feel I have been a wee bit brainwashed by some of the comments that regularly accompany *any* blog entry that may be interpreted as pro or anti SAHM or working mom. Even one entry here where the plea was why can’t we all get along, there were problems further down the comments. There are *always* screams that nobody understands the plight of the working mom who is torn between her career and her children, or how expensive childcare is, or how her partner isn’t picking up the slack, etc. And similarly there will be screams that nobody understands the work that an SAHM puts in, the rewards and annoyances that she gets each day, and (OMG my favourite ever) IF YOU REALLY CARED, YOU WOULD GIVE UP YOUR JOB AND YOU COULD LIVE ON ONE SALARY. Please excuse the screaming capslock. As a widow, I think that one is hysterical and I have only avoided smacking some inconsiderate women because I can’t reach my arms through teh interwebs to administer some justly-deserved punishment.

So, the comments on this Australian blog are normal. Go figure. People who are Gen X, some who are Gen Y, men, women, people of different ages, some who don’t have kids, a few who whinge their pants off, others who show an unexpected kindness and understanding, and those whose candour would, in comment on a Momformation blog post, would see them scorched to the seventh level of Hell for admitting that motherhood is complex and sometimes unhappy and unrewarding.

Please don’t get me wrong. I value the many blog posts at Momformation, the bloggers’ humour, sense of perspective, sense of justice, their curiosity about the world, their honesty and more. I’m thinking of Beth Hering, Betsy Shaw, Joyce Slaton, Jamie Lee, Kristina Sauerwein and more. I think some of the regular commenters are fabulous, also. I may not agree with them all, but I look forward to their comments, as familiar members of the community!

 

Our dads are better than yours

Yup, it’s official.

Go on, read the article. Thoroughly readable and you may or may not agree with the findings.

Here is the researcher talking about Australian fathers:

‘They do less than Australian women but they compare favourably to men in some other countries,” says Lyn Craig, a senior research fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW.

Australian fathers, her study shows, are run off their feet. Their long hours in paid work combined with their domestic labours means they work harder than Danish, French or Italian fathers and the same as Americans.

Mind you, Australian mums don’t necessarily have it easier just because many dads are more involved. Aussie mums spend more time on housework and children than mothers in all other countries, which sure makes for a looooong, tiring day. (See the blisters on my feet and my fallen arches, not to mention the delicate eau d’oignon behind my ears from frantic cooking.)

‘Intensive parenting seems to be a phenomenon of Anglo countries,” she says. ”Australian men and women -but especially women – spend more time with their children than do parents in the other countries, with only the US coming close.”

I am grateful that Dr Craig points out the reason for the inequality: it is

not because fathers do less childcare than fathers overseas, but because their wives do less paid work, and much more housework and childcare than elsewhere.

 

The Rug Rat Race

Fabulous title, eh? For your delectation and intellectual stimulation, may I direct you to the working paper of that name by Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey from the National Bureau of Economic Research, published in August 2009. (So it’s September and I’m behind in my reading. I’ve been travelling. That’s my excuse.)

This working paper looks closely at childcare usage and trends, linking twelve time use surveys from 1965 to 2007.

We argue that the increase in time spent in childcare,
particularly among the college educated, may be a response to an increase in the perceived return
to attending a good college, coupled with an increase in competition in college admissions.
Importantly, the size of college-bound cohorts rose dramatically beginning in the early 1990s,
coincident with the increase in time spent on childcare.

Increased scarcity of college slots appears to have induced heightened rivalry among
parents, taking the form of more hours spent on college preparatory activities. In other words,
the rise in childcare time resulted from a “rug rat race” for admission to good colleges.

Crikey! Then there’s page 14 which looks at Trends in Overall Time Use of Mothers.

Anyway, read through it all, including the later pages where the authors rebut the usual explanations given, including income effects and selection effects.

 

Polar Fleece Mum bites back

Yes, things have been quiet recently. Thanks to whichever delightful sharing, caring folks brought swine flu to Australia, various quarantine measures have been put in place. As one who travelled to Melbourne (treated as if it were the plague capital), I ended up spending a week in quarantine with DD who wasn’t allowed to see any of her friends at childcare. No signs of flu, in fact, pretty rude health indeed.

Of course, I still had a computer but … I had a three year old who also likes computers and who desperately wanted to use mine. Every time I logged on. I was doing well to catch up with work emails and so on, and blogging was a poor second. ::smishes blog::

Anyway, while looking like a bedraggled mummy in my horrid polar fleece and poorly-fitting jeans (cold weather and no money or opportunity to buy new clothes), I found this summary of a gem of an article by Naomi Wolf. Now I know what I am a poor reflection of a woman. I am being contrasted with Angelina Jolie, she of the pouty lips, pneumatic bosom and tattooed skin. Wonder woman, saviour of the nations.

The reason people are obsessed with Angelina is:

• She’s a lover
• She’s a mum
• She’s an activist
• She’s a pilot

To which I could add “And she can bite my flabby, pasty ass”.

Here’s my list why I am awesome, despite my apparent failings.

• I’m a mother
• I’m a fine wife, thank you
• I have created a stable, happy home
• I am careful with expenditure
• I dress well for work and when I go out
• I am well-educated
• I am an amazing organiser

But I can still guarantee that Naomi Wolf will never write a profile about me (I should be relieved). After all:

Whatever Jolie does next, Wolf believes that she’ll continue to capture the public interest. “I for one will keep watching,” she writes, “since Jolie’s image is not just a mirror of one woman but also a looking glass for female fantasy life.”

Yeah, Naomi, because we all need more mirrors that make us inspired, annoyed, dissatisfied, bemused, irritated, and more.

 

Pumpin’ Mamas

Article by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker here.

When did breast pumps become a substitute for proper paid maternity leave? Economically it’s cheaper for an employer to find a broom closet (remember, not a bathroom) with a power supply and a chair for a new mother, rather than the hassle of paying out maternity leave and employing a new person in the workforce.

 

What price do you put on your children?

No, not on the open market.

For a while now the figure of over $500, 000 (Australian dollars) has been bandied about as the cost to raise two children to the age of 21. Not so, says Michael Dockery, an associate professor in the school of economics and finance at the Curtin University of Technology (see Sydney Morning Herald article here.) He says the actual figure is more likely to be around $1300 a year, when you factor in things like the net wealth of the parents and compare that to those of people without children.

Dr Dockery disputes the logic of seeing children as a cost. The price people were prepared to pay for fertility treatments showed children were regarded as a “very large net benefit”.
He also takes issue with studies that used the amount of money parents spend on children to determine their cost. “There seems little justification for considering expenditure on children to be a measure of their cost, any more than going to a restaurant can be considered a cost to the patrons.” Restaurant-goers saw their night out as a benefit, not a burden.

As well, when couples chose to have children they understood they would have to switch their expenditure from dining out to nappies and child care.

It seems that a net wealth approach gives a better idea of “cost”. Yes, I know that there are those who will claim loudly that “cost” is negligible or indicates a mercenary attitude. I say that it’s better to walk into parenthood with your eyes opened as much as possible. Accept that there will be a financial cost, but that there may be many wonderful and intangible benefits. Opportunity cost was never so hard to work out!

The whole original article is here at the The Centre for Labour Market Research.