Parents of Horizontal Children

Be Careful What You Wish For

A few days ago, a friend emailed me an article that just ran in El País, Spain’s largest daily newspaper. The headline reads: “Conciliar, sí, pero ojo con el niño.” Yep, it’s in Spanish; which is why it took me a while to muster up the brain energy to read it. Conciliación refers to reconciling work and personal life – the Spanish one-word equivalent for our “work-life balance.” The article argues that conciliación – reconciling one’s personal life with one’s working life - is certainly necessary, but that the children of working parents need to be a bigger priority. One person quoted in the article suggests that “conciliación is good if it allows for more time spent with children; if not, we’re doing nothing.”

Agreed. Laws that allow both men and women to climb to the top of the corporate ladder are great, but simply mandating that a certain percentage of positions be reserved for women does little to address the needs of the entire family. If those women and men with rocket-careers both choose to have families as well, who is going to spend time with the kiddies?

Whereas in the 90s “latch-key kids” (kids who come home after-school to an empty house and take care of themselves ) were the talk of the town, in Spain attention has shifted to another phenomenon: “los padres de hijos horizontals.” Parents of horizontal children – clever, huh? The term refers to working parents who have the means to pay for childcare, leave the house before their children get up in the morning, and come back only after they’ve gone to bed at night. The imagery is simple and dead on.

Despite the fact that Spain offers public child care, paid parental leaves, the option to work part-time during the first years of a child’s life, and 2,500 euros in federal support per child, the article points out that this is still less than what many other European parents get. Of course, if Spaniards wanted to feel down-right awesome about their progress, they should have compared themselves to the U.S. In any case, there is room for only 17% of Spanish children under 3 years old in public childcare centers, while Belgium manages to enroll 81%, Denmark 56%, and France 43%. The U.S., in case you’re wondering, offers a stellar 0% of American children between the ages of 0 - 3 public childcare.

When we ask the young professionals and students we interview who will take care of their kids if they plan to continuing working, many respond “why they’ll be at school of course!” Since the Spanish workday is typically from 9 A.M to 7 or 8 P.M (with a 2-hour lunch break in the middle), we wondered how in the world this could be possible. Turns out, Spanish children spend more and more time away from home due to after-school activities, longer school days, and activities during vacations. The Spanish Society of Psychiatry estimated that about 40 percent of children are stressed due to the accelerated pace of life. The article suggests that all of the extracurricular activities that Spanish children do are not necessarily for their own benefit, but rather because their parents need a safe place to put their children for the duration of their long work day.

Affordable childcare and after-school activities would be a welcome addition to the sparse options available to help Americans reconcile their work and family lives. As this article points out, however, these options aren’t enough because children's well-being isn't the principal guideline - work is. Childcare, no matter how good, is probably not a sufficient replacement for parental care.

So what should be done? How do we reconcile work and family life? How do we restructure the system so that parents with very young children can spend more time raising their little bundles of joy and constant wailing? Back to the drawing board, I guess.