The Child's View of Working Parents (It's Not So Bad) SEEN BUT NOT (UNTIL NOW) HEARD
By Cora Daniels; Ellen Galinsky

(FORTUNE Magazine) – The image of working parents as jugglers long ago entered the gallery of cultural cliches. We know that balancing work and family life produces stress and guilt, not to mention the uncomfortable conviction that one day your child will cry to a therapist about how the babysitter nursed her through the chicken pox. But what do children really feel about all this? That was the question that Ellen Galinsky, co-founder and president of the Families and Work Institute, set out to answer in her new book, Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents (William Morrow, $25). Galinsky surveyed 1,023 children in the third through 12th grades, as well as 605 employed parents. She had help designing the questions from her own daughter, Lara, who did one-on-one interviews with children of various backgrounds to find out what issues were important to them. Galinsky made some surprising discoveries. For one thing, children don't seem to mind that their parents work. But they do wish that when their parents were around, they were less tired and stressed. (Surprisingly, the thing the kids wish the most is that their working parents made more money. Is this family values?) Galinsky found that the amount of time parents (both mothers and fathers) spend with their children does matter, but so does the kind of time. Children who reported that their parents can focus on them when they're together were more likely to feel that their parents were good jugglers. And as Galinsky told FORTUNE's Cora Daniels in a recent interview, when children have the chicken pox--or any illness--they really do want their parents around.

What did you find when you looked at spillover from family life to work life?

[In the past] we've seen children as the problem, as the drain on productivity. There's the child care "problem." The sick child "problem." It's not to say that these aren't problems, but we haven't seen the other side. Parents who have good work environments, who come home in a better mood and with more energy to invest in their children, have kids who fare better. And then they have more energy to reinvest back in work. So in a sense there's a circle: A good situation at work can lead to better relationships with our kids, and then we can come back to work in positive ways.

We asked [parents], "How often have you been in a good mood at work because of your children?" Seventy-one percent said that they'd been in a good mood either often or very often at work because of their children. If you look at the people who say that they've been in a good mood at home because of their work, it's 37%. In fact, kids really energize us for work.

Do companies need to adopt new policies to help out?

People who work more tend to feel more stressed. But the real thing that's powerful is job pressure. You have deadlines that are difficult to meet; you have such a large amount of work, you can never get everything done. So the message to employers is to think about creating a work environment that maximizes people's productivity. We've tended to think of [the main thing] to do with children as helping to provide child care. That's important, but I think that for real return on investment, you need to think about creating an environment that helps people work in a more constructive way.

Merck has really tackled this. Work group by work group, they looked at what was getting in the way of success. Then they made a list of things that people could change in the work environment. These are not things that are out of the scope of what business can address.

You also recommend that working parents be home when their child is sick.

In the early days when I was doing research on this subject, [the conventional wisdom was] that if you provide flexibility, [employees] will take a mile. We followed Johnson & Johnson through a process where it provided more flexibility, and it found that absenteeism went down. If you give people an inch, they give you an inch. If people have the flexibility to take care of family issues, they tend to be there for you when you need them as an employer. Give and take.

What can you tell about the next generation of workers?

A lot of business leaders I talk to think people aren't going to be willing to just get involved in the kind of frantic overwork that so many people do today. Children who have seen their parents struggle aren't going to be willing to do that. Not many people want to work harder than their parents. They might want to work as hard, but they don't want to work harder. People who are managing Generation X already feel there are some differences. [Generation Xers] want more autonomy; they're less willing to settle for less say in their jobs.

What is the bottom line of what kids are trying to tell us?

They're telling us that there is a problem, but it's not that we work, it's how we work. They worry about us. Two-thirds of the kids worried about their parents at least some of the time, and mostly if we were tired and stressed. They often worried about our safety. Will we get to work safely? Will there be an accident? Will something go wrong? They are telling us to be there for them. And they're telling us--and I think this is perhaps one of the most poignant findings of the study--"If we act as if we don't want to talk, we may not know just how to tell you that we want to talk, but we really do. Don't set up the moment for the perfect quality time. Hang out with us, and then we'll warm up to it. And hang in there."