Joyce Fegan: Why is the 'juggle struggle' an accepted way of life?

This week a study found that Ireland ranked second worst out of 38 OECD countries for parental leave and worst for public family policies

Researchers specifically studied the happiness of parents and non-parents and measured the gap between them. In the US, coming in last, parents were 12% less happy than non-parents. And in second place, parents in Ireland were 9.5% less happy than non-parents.

In American writer Angela Garbes’ new book, Essential Labour, she makes a startling point.

When America was pulling itself out of the Great Depression, via very deliberate government policy (the financial wellbeing of the majority was not being left to the will of the free market) it relied on the idea that every working person would have someone at home to do the cooking, cleaning and care work. The idea being that one job could sustain an entire household.

“The New Deal established an American family wage, a guaranteed minimum wage that would be enough to support a working husband, a housewife, and a couple of children,” writes Garbes.

The US lawmakers excluded two types of workers from the safety net: agricultural workers, mostly black people, and domestic workers, women in the main.

“Most people still agree that you toil at work, then come home to be cared for (mostly by women),” adds Garbes.

An outdated way of living

Time has moved on but policy the world over has not moved past this economically and socially-outdated idea.

This week a study found that Ireland ranked second worst out of 38 OECD for parental leave and worst for public family policies.

Your daily parenting “juggle struggle” is borne out in the data.

We place just after America when it comes to parental leave, and that’s bearing in mind that there is no paid parental leave in the US whatsoever. There is one law there, however, that your job will be safe for a maximum of 12 weeks after the arrival of your child. No pay, but a narrow-windowed promise. Most mothers go back far earlier.

This isn’t the first time Ireland has come in second last next to America, one of the richest countries in the world, when it comes to parenting

In 2016, researchers at the University of Texas looked at the happiness gap between parents and non-parents in 2022 OECD countries.

In some countries, non-parents were happier and in some, parents were happier. It wasn’t that parenting was so hard that it made you utterly miserable, it was that parenting in a culture without much support or flexibility made life unnecessarily stressful. The happiness “gap” was linked to support, or lack thereof, for working families.

Researchers specifically studied the happiness of parents and non-parents and measured the gap between them. In the US, coming in last, parents were 12% less happy than non-parents. And in second place, parents in Ireland were 9.5% less happy than non-parents.

Whereas in Portugal, parents were 8% happier than non-parents, thanks to better policies and workplace attitudes. In places like Sweden, Spain, Hungary, and Norway, parents were also happier than non-parents.

“Differences in happiness are smaller in countries providing more resources and support to families,” the researchers found.

We might call it the “juggle struggle”, but the scientists call it the “macro level causes of emotional processes”.

Policy and solutions

Said another way, the juggle struggle seems to be accepted as parental fate, when in fact, it’s policy. The source of the squeeze isn’t just teething, sleep deprivation, and sibling rivalry, but corporate culture and political policy.

This week’s survey also points to solutions.

The juggle struggle isn’t an inevitable reality of parenting, things can be better.

In the 2016 study that looked at the parenting happiness gap, Norwegian parents were happier than non-parents, and in this week’s survey, Norway ranked highest for public family policies, scoring 8.15 out of a possible 10.

This is exactly what the 2016 researchers found — “the parental deficit in happiness was completely eliminated” in countries where there was the strongest family-friendly policy packages

It’s not that parents in Ireland or America find parenting less fulfilling than their Norwegian counterparts, just that the task of balancing care work with paid work in our requisite countries is more stressful.

With schools and creches back a month or so now, and the fall in temperature, the normal bugs are doing the rounds. Parents are either calling in sick when they can’t send a sick child to school, or else, if they can, juggling remote work with care work.

Enabling men to ‘assume a fair share of the domestic workload and caring responsibilities’ would help lead to more balanced lives.

During the pandemic Melinda Gates, in an effort to get parental leave over the line in America, called out the reality of this life.

“At some point in our lives, almost everyone who works will need time away from their job to take care of themselves or someone they love. A new baby, an aging parent, a sick family member, a startling diagnosis: these are constants of life,” she said.

“Now that most mothers work outside the home — and only about one in four parents has a partner who doesn’t — it’s time to catch up to the fact that our economy is powered by people with caregiving responsibilities,” she added.

Even though that’s the reality — that most workers also carry the invisible cost of care, America did not legislate for this change.

Budget brings hope

However, in Ireland, there’s hope that things are changing. In the recent Budget, that will kick in after the New Year, parents of children under the age of 15 will see a reduction in the cost of childcare, under the National Childcare Scheme.

It’s a good start, but it’s the kind of investment that needs to continue, and it’s not the only thing we can do.

London School of Economics Professor Shani Orgad names five key actions, one of which is affordable childcare. The other four have less to do with governments and more to do with us.

She points to challenging work cultures where long work hours and inflexibility are the norm. Enabling men to “assume a fair share of the domestic workload and caring responsibilities” would also make an impact. As would encouraging more dads to work part-time or flexibly.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Those actions involve attitudinal shifts outside the corridors of power.

The reality is that the vast majority of parents now work both inside and outside of the home. And it’s here that the other tired phrase, “work-life balance” birthed here, where the need to protect our livelihood competes with us providing care.

Working is caring and caring is working, we need to design a society where they are complementary, not in competition with each other. That way we’ll have more effective parents, and more productive workers. It’s a win-win for parents, and non-parents alike.