Reading the news, I didn’t know whether to applaud or roll my eyes.
Parents and grandparents who work in Amazon warehouses will be able to choose to work in term-time only, read the headline.
While of course it is wonderful that Amazon – despite its other reportedly less favourable working conditions – is offering people the chance to work flexibly, I find myself asking, is this tiny step really something us parents should be grateful for?
Surely we should have adapted work practices to fit around family life long before now?
Instead, working parents – particularly women – face numerous problems after having children, starting right from maternity leave.
As a country, we lag so far behind the rest of Europe when it comes to parental leave.
While in the UK, mums can take up to 52 weeks off and dads get a pitiful two weeks, in Germany, on top of the statutory 14 weeks of maternity leave, parents can take up to three years off unpaid to look after their new child without risking their employment.
And if they don’t take the full three years at the start, they can take the remaining time between their third and eighth birthday, if their employer allows it.
In Sweden, parents share 480 leave days after a child is born – with 384 days to be taken by the child’s fourth birthday but, with 96 days available to take right up until their son or daughter turns 12.
And in Norway, in addition to the combined initial time off of between 46 and 56 weeks, each parent can take an additional year for each birth. I mean, how amazing is that?
It is little wonder that a Unicef study in 2019 found the UK was ranked 34th among developed countries for maternity leave.
Not only do other countries prioritise children and the importance of spending their formative years with their parents, these parental policies also show how much they value parents as workers. Their jobs are kept open for them, even though they wish to take time away to spend with their children.
They realise that their jobs, although important, are not the only part of people’s lives – and parents are not made to feel guilty about that.
We are facing our first summer holidays and wonderinghow we are going to manage for six weeks as working parents
In the UK, if we wanted to spend that much time with our children, we’d have to risk stepping off the career ladder, taking time away from paying into our pension and then, when we wanted to go back to work, explaining that big gap on our CV.
Instead, we’re told to ‘work like you’re not a parent, and parent like you don’t work.’ Even before I’d finished maternity leave, that particular phrase didn’t make sense to me.
Because I would remain a parent when I was at work, and I still wanted to work when I was a parent. The responsibilities of either didn’t go away, just because I wasn’t physically with my child or in my office.
When I went back to work, it made even less sense.
I was getting calls from the nursery while I was at work that Theo wasn’t well – that I had to pick him up. Or I was getting pulled into meetings at the end of the day when I really needed to leave, so I wouldn’t risk the £1-a-minute late fee that my nursery had drawn my attention to on numerous occasions when I’d signed up.
I can hear people now, saying ‘but it was your choice to have children, no-one else should have to pay for your life choices.’ But I shouldn’t have to pay, just because I chose to create a family, either. And nor should the other millions of other parents out there.
Yet, we do.
Ever since having children, our lives have been a constant juggle, helped only now by the fact that both Tom and I work from home. I cannot explain the difference that not having a two-hour daily commute has made to our lives.
Still, though, like all other parents, we have many balls in the air.
Theo is five years old and as he is starting his last half-term in reception, we are facing our first summer holidays and wondering just exactly how we are going to manage looking after him for six whole weeks as working parents.
Tom doesn’t have enough annual leave to even come close to covering it, even if he did look into unpaid parental leave. I am a freelance writer and so although I am more flexible, every day I don’t work, I don’t get paid.
And we’re not alone. It’s a conversation I’m having with every single one of my friends who have children. It’s a topic raised on every single mum’s forum. How are you going to make it work?
It feels like an impossible jigsaw, trying to fit together a pattern of annual leave, holiday clubs, grandparents and friends.
We’ll make it work, all of us, because we have to.
But surely by now, we should have come up with ways that people can parent and work without leaving feeling like they are failing miserably at both? Or that doesn’t cause sleepless nights and hours of worry?
We should have, collectively, come up with a system that values both children and parents in society. Just like other parts of the world do.
And not just be glad that one company has offered a tiny step in the right direction.
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