The difficulties of combining paid employment and childcare are not new, but they may be entering a new phase. While many families - particularly those on low incomes - have always had two parents in work, the male-breadwinner, female-carer model appears to be in transition. Assumptions that the mother must be the carer have been challenged over recent years as young women’s educational achievement and earning potential matches young men’s. More men are becoming involved in hands-on childcare. The Government is consulting on a very flexible approach to parents taking leave - in theory enabling real choice between families as to who works and who cares. But is the rhetoric of new-model parenting matched by a real change in the workplace?

On the positive side, there are many opportunities to work flexibly, and statutory rights make part time working easier to achieve. Many employers have allowed flexible working to spread across their organisations, with the most enlightened allowing alternative models of work right up to the top levels. A recent report estimates that 91 per cent of organisations offer some kind of flexible working.[ii]

On the negative side, the most common arrangement for a working family remains one full time worker (most commonly the father) with the second parent working part-time, combining paid work and childcare. Instead of flexible working rights freeing up time for both parents to work and care, flexible working - to date - has been seen as a means of keeping women in the labour market. There remains an underlying assumption that it is the mother who needs to find a balance.

There are clear barriers to change. Fathers of young children work some of the longest hours in the EU; parents spend more on childcare in the UK than in any other OECD country[iii]; many women have to take jobs lower than their skill set allows simply to find a job that will allow them to combine caring and paid work; and the recession has made employers and employees wary of working differently.

The opening quote, therefore, in the light of the barriers and attempts to overcome them, implies that there is a deeper underlying issue with the place that work has in our lives, and the way that it is arranged. These deep-seated routines and assumptions are significant obstacles through which parents must find a way if they are to successfully combine paid work and family life. For fathers, in particular, this balance is elusive.

A particular challenge is the way that work is organised. Although flexible working is available, and is relatively well-supported by many employers, the basis of flexible working is still one of exception, where an employee works in a way that is ‘non-standard’, an anomaly. The ideal of the always-available employee, unencumbered by caring responsibilities, has deep roots.

The view of parenting, that it is a normal part of the lifecourse or even a social good, is not something that sits easily with the way work is organised. In fact, any type of caring which necessitates a different way of working is seen as disruptive. Therefore, as welcome as policy developments are within organisations, and however well they are driven and supported by legislation, the problem of parents fully engaging with their work and fulfilling their caring responsibilities at the same time will persist.

At the same time, parenting skills are increasingly under the spotlight. As politicians move from lone mothers to absent fathers as contributors to - or even the causes of - societal ills, it is time to pause and recognise that families need both time and money to thrive. With 33 per cent of parents saying that the demands of work mean that they do not have time to sit down and eat a meal as a family more than once or twice a week, we should take a good look at our expectations of parents.[iv]

For a start we need to challenge the unrealistic expectations about how people can work. For many families in low paid work, both parents need to hold down several jobs equating to many hours at work simply to meet the bills. The resulting exhaustion and shift-parenting leaves little time for families to spend together: financial poverty is replaced with time poverty. But at all levels of paid work, problems persist.

Often inefficient and time-wasting ways of working are overvalued and rewarded, obscuring the effectiveness of alternative working practices. Long hours and presenteeism don’t occur by chance; these are ways of working which obtain the best rewards (if not results), win the approval of managers and ensure career progression. As Lewis and Rapoport have observed:

“The notion of the ideal worker who can “give” more and more time to work implies that working time tends to be valued more than time for families and communities, by employers and perhaps more widely. There is also visible and invisible time in the workplace. For example, time at work in the early morning is often valued less than time spent at work late into the evening. Those who use flexitime or informal flexibility to come in to work very early and leave early, often to collect children from school, report that they are often undervalued or regarded as part-timers, while those who come in later but work late and call late meetings, are considered to be highly committed.” [v]

This phenomenon of reward and penalty for full time versus flexible workers appears to be deeply ingrained within organisational DNA. New research[vi] shows that even when monitoring for bias, many employers still give a larger proportion of the top performance grades to full time rather than flexible workers, despite line manager assertions that they fully value their team members who work flexibly.

The question of who does the parenting is one which is largely shaped by the demands and requirements of work. Men do less childcare, less hands-on parenting, than women. Men look across at the compromises that women make with part time jobs and careers, and don’t want, or can’t afford, to make similar changes.

In many discussions about work-life balance, men’s full time work is accepted as part of an immutable background for the difficult work-life compromises that women must make as they shoulder the bulk of the responsibility of caring for children. The working patterns of men are largely ignored. Instead we try to regulate business and create new entitlements for women, to make their lives easier with the effect that every time we do this, without looking at men at the same time, women become more expensive in the workplace relative to men, and things worsen for them.

For parenting to become easier in relation to work, a more equitable sharing of the childcare needs to become a realistic option. Children still need parental time, but families struggle with both financial and time pressures of work. While childcare costs remain high and women weigh their part-time incomes against those costs, joint parenting remains uneconomic. Engaging fathers in delivering parenting may need more than exhortation from politicians: it needs a new look at the way work is organised. The value of children now for a properly functioning future society also needs to be re-stated: our future workforce is educated and shaped by today's
parents. Trying to fit families into economy-friendly shaped jobs carries with it a danger that children continue to be seen as an impediment to labour force participation. There needs to be a rebalancing of goals to recognise the benefits to families - and to the wider community - of providing time for good parenting.