Blog 4 children first

There is millions of different family set ups around the world or even in one city. Not one structure is good or bad but should be defined as such by the happiness and health of each family member. A good family life, have the family members healthy, happy, and well connected as well as stable. Children should feel safe and secure with their family and adults should be able to connect well with each other while providing for their children and their spouse (both adults not just one or the other). The mother who describes career and children in the film says there is guilt and hectic schedules that are hard to balance, she also spoke about sacrificing different aspects of life sometime the children don’t have mom at a school meeting but they have their attention at home which is more important in the long run. Sure sacrifices for the children and also regarding the children will come up but when you balance a career (that may be putting food on the table) and your children you have to figure out what is more important and what can fall by the wayside. Growing up with two working parents I got to bond with my grandparents more than the average child does and I also had a sense of logic, self efficiency, and independence instilled in me as well as appreciating the time I did spend with my parents every night or early mornings.

We have all seen the movies where there are children racing around the kitchen shoveling food into their mouths while mom in business attire cooks and dad in a suit drinks his coffee the hectic life style of having children plus a career is often depicted but it also shows the mother doing domestic roles that are ‘expected’ of her. Movies like Mr. Mom show how ridiculous it is for a man to take on the female housekeepers kind of role within the family it is so out of the ordinary that we made a movie about it…how very telling. These different aspects of life can be hard to handle successfully if one of the family members or an employer refuses to be flexible when it comes to schedules. If the mother doesn’t help the children with homework the father can feel overwhelmed or if the father does no housework and leaves it to the mother, also if the children or other people who live in the house don’t help out nothing is going to get done in an orderly fashion. Households are a team, and a team doesn’t succeed if only one person is doing the work. Employers who have a right to expect certain things from their employees also need to assume that people have families that need their assistance from time to time and should be willing to bend when necessary to the influx of mothers and father in the work place.

In the United States we still very much adhere to the traditional gender roles, women cook they clean and usually they take care of the children more than their husbands do. It’s what most of us have grown up seeing and these gender roles are passed along to various generations because monkey see monkey do. Because of these roles that have been passed onto our generations men make up a large part of the supervisor branches in the work place and do not see why women need to either break that glass ceiling and at the same time run home once in a blue moon to pick her kid up from school because he has chicken pox. With the changing times it is hard for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to gender in the work place and gender roles at home. Some women may not want to give up household chores but others are simply afraid to demand help. It isn’t normal to see a stay at home dad as it is to see a mother staying at home to raise the kids and keep house. Employers that are family friendly aren’t hard to find, many have day care services within their buildings, some offer different lunch hours to pick up children, some work in teams so all team mates can have a flexible schedule but still meet deadlines businesses like parents have gotten creative over the years to accommodate working parents. Unfortunately I have seen bigger companies like chain stores offer less flexibility to their staff which in some cases have children and cannot afford daycare because of how their low income. These are the mothers and fathers that need the most flexibility.

Supportive family members and family friends are how I grew up and how many of the children on my block grew up, sure we lived in a kind of ‘slummy’ district of Virginia but the families where nice and made sure the kids didn’t burn the place to the ground. I was lucky enough and my parents were lucky enough to have outside support from their parents and I wish every kid had their grandma as a babysitter but the reality is not all of us can. Day care businesses like KinderCare need to become more affordable or more accessible, businesses need to make an effort to work with parents and start putting children first.