Kids/life balance

We've got a very schizophrenic attitude to parenthood and work. All parents are supposed to be at work, even if they're single parents. Work has many faces. It's the great emancipator, liberating the poor from poverty and women from male oppression. It's a status symbol (a friend of mine recently told me of how certain people faintly sneer when she tells them she's a housewife, and thus lacks this badge).

Work can also be a source of great satisfaction and an income, so let's not diss it completely. We do all have to eat, and our kids need to be kept in video games. But as a culture, we do have an attitude problem here. Work-life balance is a big issue these days, and the more I coach people around this area the more it seems to me that it's the parenting/work dilemma that's usually at the heart of it. There's a whole spectrum of ways in which that occurs - you don't even need to have kids for it to have an impact on you.

We've built a world that's constructed around work, and we've reached a point where we're not sure where kids and parenting fit into it. For some people it's a simple question of finding themselves in a straight choice between attending vital meeting and picking up a suddenly-vomiting child from school. For others it's despair at how to juggle conflicting expectations and pressures on themselves as a parent - these come from partners, TV, their kids, their family, other kids, horrible fast-food chains, wherever.

It's a mistake to moan about our world though - it's just there. Better to find productive ways of dealing with it. My suggestion is that a good start would be to get a clear idea of what work means to us, and what raising children means to us. All of us.