[...] Working Parents Exhausted [...]

[...] fact, most of us spend too few hours in bed every night. At that point, what we do with those hours becomes a trade-off: sex vs. sleep. For one [...]

[...] bedtime battle is as old as parenting. You want to sleep. Your kid wants to stay up all night watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from the box, which [...]

Oh, man…this is gonna be good…<running to get popcorn>

Should the government step in and give middle-income parents a hand? No. They should develop policies that would enable a household to be run on one adult salary, like it used to.

What does your family need to make a work-life balance work? I work part-time from home and will work more, probably outside the home, once my child is in school all day. I know I will probably never had a high-powered career because I am choosing to be present for my kid and the job is secondary.

Do you and your partner both work outside the home, or do you have a full-time stay-at-home parent in your household? See above.

What I *do* think needs to happen is people need to be DECENT HUMAN BEINGS. Really, it is pretty much up to the discretion of HR departments and bosses whether someone is going to be fired for missing work because of a sick kid or whatever. Must we legislate compassion? If an employee is good and hard-working most of the time and these needs for time off are occasional, then the bosses need to be human. I guess if we can no longer rely on that kind of decency, there do need to be rules in place to protect working parents. But, child-care subsidies, etc. for the middle class? Nope. That’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul and in the end, the kids lose.

I stay home while my husband works. So, we are living in luxury comparatively. When the kids are sick, I am already home. My husband only has to take time off when *I* need something… which is rare.

I also used to be a Union Organizer/Rep and had to help save MANY jobs where parents were about to be fired for missing too much work to take care of their sick kids. It’s insane because most companies do not allow you to use your own sick time to take care of sick children. The only time you have any protection at all for taking care of sick kids is when the illness qualifies for FMLA. That’s only for chronic illness, not your sometimes several weeks out of the year you are home nursing your kids’ stomach bugs, etc. Even with FMLA protecting, employers will fire their employees and if the worker doesn’t know any better or know how to fight it, they are just out of luck. I have dealt with HR managers whose attitude toward their workers was to just say that they needed to come up with alternatives when their kids were sick. So, we should all just have family members who sit around all day waiting to take care of our kids when we are at work and they fall ill. That was literally the HR manager’s solution to the problem. WHO has that? Not many people. And we were talking about people who fall into the “working poor” category too, not people who had money to throw around for nannies or other childcare. It makes me sick to even think about.

I think we need to have the government step in to demand real policies that allow people to take enough PAID time off to take care of their personal needs. WE already know that we don’t get enough time off work in this country… for parental leave, vacation, sick time…. all of it. That’s where we need help!

There’s no point in whining that working parents are exhausted, they weren’t forced into being parents….Becoming a parent must be thought through..it’s too easy to irrepsonsabily breed and then whing that your life is hard…I’m sorry, but what would you say to a friend whining that having 5 rottewiller at home is expensive and time consuming…?