Anyway, this time of year always turns the mind to graduation, and graduation clichés. Commencement speakers everywhere will tell people to “follow your passion.” It’s not bad advice. I’m glad I followed my passion to become a writer, even if it was not an obviously viable career option.

But of course “writing” encompasses a lot of different ways you can spend your day-to-day life. What does one write about? What form does the writing take? How does a writer spend his or her hours?

Many careers have similar variances. A school nurse and an ER nurse will spend their days differently. I recently met someone whose job involves going to landowners and communities to get formal permission for utility right-of-ways.* It’s document production and signing, but it is a very different day to day job than, say, an in-house corporate legal person.

It turns out that professional happiness is often a function of how you spend your hours as much as anything else. One source of dissatisfaction for a great many people is that they have jobs that sound cool in theory, but they spend hours daily in boring meetings, or responding to angry emails.

It would be hard to ditch meetings and emails entirely. But I do think the “follow your passion” advice should lean a bit more on this question of what you want your days to look like in addition to the “stuff” of the job that tends to dominate.

All sorts of questions come to mind. Do you like quiet? Do you like talking with lots of different people? Do you mind having the same conversation over and over again with lots of different people or would that make you go insane? Do you want to be able to control when you do things or do you like to go with the flow? Do you want set hours? If so, do you care when those hours are? Some industries feature much, much earlier hours than others. If you do clerical work for a construction company, you will likely be starting your day by 7 a.m., but if you do clerical work for some tech and media companies you might be starting more like 9:30 a.m. or later (and going later too). Do you like to focus on one thing and develop deep expertise, or would you like to learn about lots of different things? Do you want to go to the same place most days (which could be a home office) or do you like going to different sites?

These things might be a bit harder to suss out as people consider jobs and careers because they are not as immediately obvious as what the “stuff” of the job is. Some hour by hour happiness is also dependent on the specific people you wind up working with. But these questions are definitely worth thinking about. My passion is writing, but my passion is also sitting in a quiet office, all by myself, with large blocks of unstructured time. It suggests a different life than, say, corporate communications, or a daily newspaper job, or being part of a TV show writing team.

What do you think of the “follow your passion” advice? Did you follow your passion or figure out your passion along the way? (I realize sometimes this phrase is “find your passion” — but that is something else entirely!)

Photo: Where the magic happens most days, though it looks different now that I have my junk all over the desk.

*I am pretty sure they can get the right of way whether people approve or not, but I think the idea is that everyone feels happier if they feel like they were consulted.

By Jennifer D. Sciubba

One of my prized possessions is a 1967 Teen Guide to Homemaking textbook, found years ago in a successful dig through the thrift store shelves. On the cover is the side profile of a sweet strawberry blonde with a pink bow in her bobbed hair. Inside, girls and boys learn the basics of ironing and good nutrition—including plenty of then-in-vogue canned food. In the section on career advice, the authors explain that boys and girls might have different goals when it comes to a career. They say that a girl “can be pretty sure that she will have to know how to be a homemaker and mother,” and so her career outside the home likely won’t be as important as it would be to a boy.

The world teens live in today is radically different from the world in 1967 when the Susans and Tommys of America were reading the Teen Guide to Homemaking, but has the gender revolution completely freed women from those societal constraints? Is the struggle over?

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild tried to answer those very questions. She studied married women working full-time, with husbands who were also working full-time and who had kids ages 6 and under; in other words, me when I was writing the first draft of this book. She watched them come home from work, fold laundry while on the phone, give the kids baths, and so on. She chronicled her observations in her book The Second Shift, in which she argued that although there had been a lot of changes in gender roles across the decades, there were still larger societal issues making some women question whether getting married and having kids was worth it. Working both a first shift outside the home and a second shift inside it was exhausting.

Multiple pressures on women is a global issue. Researchers Mary Brinton and Dong-Ju Lee find that post-industrial societies that encourage women to work outside the home while also painting them as natural caregivers have lower fertility because they impose conflicting narratives on women. We can see this difficult dynamic in East Asia. In much of East Asia, it’s the norm that men are breadwinners and women are responsible for household and child-rearing duties, but women are also welcome to work. With this gender-role ideology, women struggle to reconcile work outside the home and family responsibilities. As a result, they often have only one or two children or forgo childbearing altogether. In low-fertility Japan, a 2009 survey by the East-West Center showed that Japanese wives of reproductive age did 27 hours a week of household duties while their husbands only did 3—and most of those wives worked a paid job, too. Having a family continues to be incompatible with work for Japanese women. An OECD study of 18 member countries ranked Japan second from last “in terms of coverage and strength of policies for work-family reconciliation and family-friendly work arrangements,” and pointing out that “Japan’s childcare coverage and parental leave offered by employers are both especially weak.”

In contrast, when women are discouraged from working, their role as homemakers and mothers is clearer, and fertility is higher, but it’s the interaction between gender norms and labor-market conditions that affects fertility, not just one or the other. Fertility is actually lower in countries where men and women have equal roles, because these norms lock women into a particular lifestyle rather than give them a range of socially acceptable choices about how to combine work and family. Countries that have more flexible arrangements, rather than strict equality, have higher relative fertility, as we see in Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Finding ways to reduce the pressures on women and share household tasks can be an effective way to support women who do want children.

How does that play out in the United States? At first glance, it seems like mothers in the US have perfect freedom to choose whether or not to work outside the home, and the US does have a higher fertility rate than many countries, but if we look deeper we must acknowledge those choices are highly constrained. “Flexibility” without supportive social structures (like affordable and available childcare before school ages) means that some women who might want children will choose not to have them, and those who might want several might settle for smaller families.

The answer isn’t to prevent women from working, it’s to put policies in place to meaningfully support their choices, policies that are likely to result in higher fertility overall, with benefits to the size of the working-age population in the long run.

Pumping takes a lot of time. Nursing mothers who choose to pump at work generally need to stop what they’re doing multiple times during the work day for some amount of time (often 30 minutes or so, plus pump assembly and milk storage takes time…). Some folks are able to continue working while pumping, but this doesn’t always work. Pumping also isn’t a particularly pleasant experience, especially if you are aiming for a certain number of ounces and seem to feed a child more easily than you fill a bottle. (Cue watching the drops…)

Sarah and my advice was to let a lot of other things go, and recognize that these rough months wouldn’t last forever, but some people noted that we could have mentioned that pumping is optional.

So, in case anyone is wondering, pumping is 100 percent optional! Breastfeeding itself is optional, but pumping is especially so. This listener was a few weeks back at work after a 5 month maternity leave, so the baby was pretty much old enough to be starting solid foods anyway (at around 6 months). It might be possible to scale down the pumping (to maybe once a day), have the baby scale up the solids during the work day and nurse in the morning, and after work and more on demand on weekends. Or the listener could skip pumping entirely, and use formula during the work day and nurse when she wasn’t at work. All of these would be ways to continue breastfeeding without some of the time pressure.

However, I do know from long experience talking with new parents that the belief is out there that feeding breastmilk exclusively (whether nursing or pumping or some combination thereof) until age 12 months is what a good mother “must” do. I can disagree with this story — plenty of amazing moms do not do this — but I know it can be a deeply held belief.

Less fraught: There are also a number of moms who do enjoy breastfeeding and would like to keep it up as long as possible, and who find it easier to nurse at night/mornings/weekends when the supply is high, which pumping frequently does facilitate.

In any case, if you do want to breastfeed for a while, and intend to go back to work before a baby is 12 months old, there are a few options.

Obviously extending a maternity leave as much as possible helps. A three month old baby needs to be fed more frequently, and can only have milk/formula. A six month old baby is a different story. (Of course, our listener had already done this, so it’s not a fool proof answer for lowering breastfeeding stress.)

Working from home as much as possible for the few months after returning to work is also a good way to have the best of both worlds. If you have a nanny (or other parent/relative) caring for your baby, you can have that person bring you the baby at feeding times. I have found it possible to edit or type one-handed or be on some phone calls while nursing (you start dividing your contacts into People I Can Call While Nursing A Baby and People I Cannot Call While Nursing A Baby). Since you’re not commuting, this can also make for a shorter day away from the baby.

Post-Covid this is an option for a lot more jobs than it used to be. It doesn’t have to be either/or — working from home 2-3 days per week and from the office 2-3 days per week would still reduce the total number of feedings that must be pumped.

I know not all jobs can be done from home. For those that can’t be, negotiating for a temporary part-time schedule if you want to breastfeed exclusively might make the first few months back at work feel more doable (though it is going to involve a pay cut that might make life feel less doable…so your mileage may vary). If the organization knows this is not forever, but just for 6 months or so, that might make it easier to get to yes. Then this would reduce the number of feedings away from the baby too.

As for the pumps themselves, I know that some people have had luck with Elvie and Willow and other such “wearable” (and theoretically quiet) pumps. I bought one and was planning to try it out with my fifth kid during long airplane rides and such — and then Covid happened and I didn’t leave the house for months, to the point where the baby refused to even take a bottle. So! I welcome reports of other people’s experiences with whether that made it possible to work while pumping. Again, not all work is the same — it might be possible to do a phone call with a wearable pump but potentially not lead a class of first graders…

If you worked away from home and pumped, what tips would you add for the listener?

In other news: I thought that my trip to Paris might lead the toddler to lose interest in “mommy milk.” I did not bring my pump, though (perhaps TMI) I did express milk daily. I returned home Thursday night, took him upstairs with some “baba milk” and rocked him. He drank the bottle for a while, then looked at me and said “Me want mommy milk.” I guess he didn’t forget. It’s fine. He won’t still be breastfeeding while learning to drive.

In other other news: Friend of the blog Camille Pagán has a brand new novel out this week! It’s called Everything Must Go, and it’s got her trademark witty take on women’s relationships with family and friends. Plus, the main character is a professional organizer, so the “everything must go” concept takes on multiple meanings…If you have a Kindle Unlimited account, then the book is free. Please check it out!

I find this all fascinating. First, there is survey design. Was “get to the gym, call a friend or have sex with my spouse” all listed as one option? Otherwise, how do you get a neat figure like 62%? If separated out, presumably, you’d find that some number were too stressed to get to the gym, but were fine with sex, and vice versa.

But beyond that… oh, where do I start. Hey, where’s my favorite chart from the American Time Use Survey? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, married mothers who are employed full-time spend 0.66 hours per day socializing. That’s a solid 40 minutes. Dads spend just a minute or two less. Seems like there may be a few phone calls to friends going on in there. We don’t spend much time exercising, but I don’t think that’s because we lack time. Working moms do spend close to 90 minutes watching TV, daily, after all. Married fathers who work full time spend close to 2 hours per day watching TV! We don’t exercise because we don’t want to exercise. Stress is convenient to blame. So is the monster under the bed, or capitalism, if you want to throw that in there. (Actually, dads who work full time spend 0.30 hours per day on exercise and recreation, or a little over 2 hours per week. It’s below the guidelines — 2.5 hours per week — but not much below).

As for sex, people generally do not mention this on time use surveys (they don’t tell researchers when they went to the bathroom either). But… come on. The average mom with a full time job works 36 hours per week. The average dad works about 42.5. If we sleep 8 hours per night (and the ATUS shows we actually sleep a bit more) that leaves 76 hours and 69.5 hours, respectively. Presumably, we could find time for two short romps in there if we wanted.

We have plenty of time for anything that really matters to us. However, we have this cultural narrative that working parents are starved for time. We have no time for fun things in our lives. Our time diaries reveal otherwise, but that’s not the picture we like to create of ourselves.

On one level, so what? We all like to complain. But here’s the problem. All these stories inevitably create an impression for young people that combining work and family is just going to be incredibly difficult. You’ll never get to the gym, call a friend, or have sex again! (Though somehow many of us manage to have more children, so go figure). And so people feel they need to put off having children until the perfect time when they’ve done all the things they want to do, or that if they want a relaxed life they have to work part-time, or that having children is a valid excuse for letting your body and your health go. None of this needs to be true. A big part of my mission with 168 Hours is changing the narrative. As you can see by this Care.com number, it’s a big mission.

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