August 14, 2021

Libby VanderPloeg

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

"Companies finally recognize that caregiving needs are real."

— Katherine Ryder, chief executive of Maven Clinic

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In June, In Her Words and DealBook invited readers to share their questions about returning to the office. Over the next few weeks, we'll be putting those questions to experts and publishing the responses.

A reader writes:

I am afraid of losing time with my kids. Even during the lowest moments of 2020, I was grateful to have every meal of the day with my kids. What will new flexibilities for child care look like? Will we ever see our kids again?

A lot of major stakeholders have woken up to the fact that what was once considered "normal" — rigid 9-to-5 working hours, face time in the office and parents so consumed with work that they were barely spending any time with their children (just over two hours a day in 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) — really wasn't normal at all.

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"'Work-life balance' has always been a high-stakes tightrope walk with no net," said Reshma Saujani, a former chief executive of the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code. She is also the founder of the grass-roots campaign Marshall Plan for Moms, which recently published a handbook for companies with ideas on how to reimagine the workplace.

But the good news is that you, as an employee and a parent, have more leverage now to ask for work arrangements that work best for you, because in the past year, child care has become too difficult to ignore. As schools went remote and large parts of the child care system crumbled, kids in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of calls and Zooms became just another part of the workday. The hard line between private life and work life was thoroughly dissolved.

Hundreds of thousands of women left the workplace altogether in the past year because of increased child care duties, and in an effort to try to stave off an exodus of more employees with children, companies felt increasingly compelled to expand existing child care accommodations or offer new ones that had once felt almost unthinkable in America: offering extra money for child care costs and paid time off for caregiving duties (Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Bank of America); creating learning pods where employees' children attended remote schools together, sometimes with a teacher hired by the company (UnitedHealth Group, KPMG); or offering flexible schedules for those who had to spend most of the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. helping children with remote school (Walmart, Visa).

But those were, in a way, quick fixes in a difficult time. Tax breaks for companies that offer paid family and medical leave, for example, are expected to expire in September.

In May, executives from nearly 200 companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Patagonia and Spotify, acknowledged that the caregiving crisis was affecting their operations — and ultimately their bottom lines — and that they needed to craft workplace policies that would better support caregivers in the long run. What might that look like? Potentially a lot more flexibility. Shorter workweeks and greater control over work hours, free or subsidized on-site or center-based child care facilities and expanded paid parental leave — policies for which advocates, grass-roots organizations and voters from both sides of the aisle have long been clamoring.

But smaller companies and start-ups are also looking at how to fill the void at the local level. A new start-up, Otter, which was founded in October, connects parents who need child care with stay-at-home parents who can look after those parents' children and pays the stay-at-home parents to take on the extra caregiving. In July, the barely-a-year-old company raised $23 million in funding — an indication of the unprecedented demand for creative solutions.

"Honestly, the main post-Covid trend that I think is a really positive one for parents is that companies finally recognize that caregiving needs are real," said Katherine Ryder, chief executive of the family health and benefits company Maven Clinic.

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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley.

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