An after-school struggle to juggle kids and work
WALTHAM - It’s 3 p.m. Do you know where your children are? Every weekday afternoon, Claire Celsi faces that question as she thinks about her two teenagers, ages 13 and 14. With no after-school program available for them, she must keep tabs on their whereabouts and activities from her office. „It’s a huge balancing act.”
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A new study by Catalyst and the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham (Massachusetts) shows that the workplace productivity of US parents suffers when they are worried about what their kids are doing after school. Millions of working parents share similar concerns as they watch the clock and hope that their after-school arrangements are in place. For their employers, these distractions can take a huge toll on productivity.
„The good news is that many parents have good support and good programs in place to help them”, says Laura Sabattini, a researcher at Catalyst. „But many have concerns about what’s going on after school. Calling children or even just being worried can lead to distraction at work.”
More than a third of the US labor force consists of parents of minor children. Almost three-fourths of those children are between 5 and 18 years old. Two- thirds of these parents are employed full-time. The gap between the time school lets out at 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. and the time most full-time employed parents get home at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. adds up to 15 to 25 hours a week.
Parental concern is greater when children are older -from grades 6 through 12- because this age group is more likely to be unsupervised. „Researchers find that teenagers don’t like to go to after-school programs”, says Ms. Sabattini. Supervised programs for teens often do not even exist, says Celsi, a single parent. Those that do exist, she finds, often serve at-risk children. „At some point my kids became aware of that and wouldn’t go. They were perceived as at-risk kids, poor kids.” The challenge, she says, is to find something acceptable to the child and affordable for parents.
In the business world, says Sabattini, the Catalyst researcher, companies can lessen the high toll of decreased productivity after school by developing an ”agile” workplace that thrives on flexibility and emphasizes results rather than rigid schedules. Celsi offers a suggestion of her own. Asked what would make her after-school situation better, she says: „I wish I could have a global positioning system on each of my kids and look at that on my laptop. I’m totally serious.” (The Christian Science Monitor)
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