After keynotes by Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett and the First Lady Michelle Obama and a panel moderated by Claire Shipman, the Senior National Correspondent from Good Morning America, each of us was assigned to one of five breakout groups to discuss workplace flexibility.

Given the stated goal of my group—the “Benefits of Workplace Flexibility” led by the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer—it was breathtaking how quickly my group moved beyond the discussion of how flexibility affects the bottom line.

Yes, several of the business representatives made the point that there are business benefits to providing flexibility. For example, James Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young, said that his company measures the cost of turnover and employee engagement.  Engagement, he said, is a particularly important metric because they have been able to see direct links between more engaged employees and better client service. Both metrics have improved since E&Y began its “People First” initiative that includes policies to provide flexible work arrangements and more importantly, a culture of flexibility, where there is, in Turley’s words, “trust” among people so that they are able to bring up their work, personal or family issues, real “respect” for each other’s needs, and “teaming” so that business groups can solve the work and family problems they face. When pushed about whether he knew for sure that flexibility was directly linked to better profitability, he stated he knew that creating greater flexibility had affected E &Y’s bottom line.

But does the business case matter, he asked. There are legions of studies linking more diverse leadership at the top of organizations to better business results, but as Turley said, there has been little progress in increasing the diversity of leadership in corporations.

Shelley MacDermid Wasdworth of Purdue University aptly summarized this conversational thread by stating that it’s a fallacy to think that “doing nothing costs nothing.”

At that point, many of the participants in my group began to look over a special new report from the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), entitled Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility. With a group as prestigious as the CEA reviewing the research on the return on investment in providing workplace flexibility, perhaps all of the business case arguments had been presented, contested, and defended in this impressive report with a green cover.

The real passion in my group was in suggesting solutions. Does moving beyond the return on investment so quickly mean that the need to prove the business benefits of workplace flexibility is fading into history? That’s not clear—perhaps the group invited to this Forum was more likely to include members of the choir, the true believers in flexibility rather than the doubting Thomases and Thomasinas.

Early on in the group discussion, several members suggested specific solutions. One was to stop assuming that “presence at work (or face time) equals productivity” and to stop creating flexible work arrangements, but rather focus on achieving work results only.  Another solution was allowing all new mothers to bring their babies to work for the first six months of their lives.

The group jumped into a pro and con discussion of these specific solutions with a great deal of fervor. Because individuals around the table represented the diversity of those involved in issues of workplace flexibility—from CEOs and more senior business executive to representatives of small business and of the lower-wage workforce—the discussion was quite heated at times: this would or this would never work in my workplace.

That’s when I spoke up, saying that if I have learned anything in my three decades of research on these issues, it’s that “one size does not fit all when it comes to innovative policies.”  Workplaces have different kind of work (a baby in a plant producing dangerous chemical might not work), jobs are different, and employees’ needs are different.

Although the group was expressly convened to talk about business practices (not public policy), there was the expected tension about whether there should be mandates, legislating workplace flexibility. Some of the business leaders took the “let the market prevail” stance. Flexibility for them is a value added, something that differentiates them from other companies in attracting and retaining employees.  They don’t care if others don’t adopt it.  Let those companies fail, one leader said. That’s better for my company.

At that point in the conversation, some of the representatives of lower-wage workers began to talk about the obstacles their employees faced in getting what more advantaged employees might consider rights—the right to stay home with a newborn, or a sick child, or a dying parent. Even if companies that denied employees time off policies actually failed, they wouldn’t go out of business, these members of our group argued. The simply would do as well as more enlightened companies. There will always be better and worse employers (and bosses).

At that point in the conversation, there was a slight shift. Some of the business leaders began to consider whether, as I would put it, there is a one size fits all need to define a floor of flexibility by providing sick days or leaves, and better yet, providing some pay for these leaves.  One business leader even said that a floor of flexibility might be necessary as long as it didn’t inhibit his company’s ability to be innovative.

At the end of the breakout group, we were asked for concluding thoughts. One had occurred to me as I listened to the shifts in the conversation that had occurred in our group by hearing each other’s points of view and real life experiences. So my concluding remark was that in addition to realizing that one size does and does not fit all, we need “perspective leadership” training. I know from my studies in child and adult development that the ability to understand someone else’s point of view helps both children and adults thrive. Perhaps companies and schools should provide this kind of training. And that comment earned me a hand bump from Jim Turley who said, I agree!

Yesterday, as I listened to the opening of the Forum on Workplace Flexibility at the White House, I wrote a note to myself: “They are singing our song.” All around me were the words that those of us who have worked on issues of work and family life have used for years.

Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to the President, opened the Forum by saying that we need to build a 21^st Century Workplace that meets the needs of the 21^st workforce.

At that point, I turned to find Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in the room and smile at her. She has been the visionary funder of much of the research on America’s working families for the past fifteen years, funding what now exceeds 400 projects. Close to a decade ago, she began reporting on a trend in the research—that many of the studies were revealing a mismatch between the workplace and the workforce. In other words, the workplace has not been meeting the needs of the workforce.

In the traditional family, as she has pointed out, there were two adults and two jobs. One of the jobs was being the economic provider for the family (typically the man) and the other was being the nurturer of the family (typically the woman). However, as we have moved to an economy where both men and women work, there are still the same family responsibilities—just less time to meet them. Kathleen Christensen has talked about the toll this mismatch has taken on families, noting that we now have a vocabulary to portray these feelings—“the time bind” and the “time squeeze.”

Yesterday at the Forum, President Obama described families as “juggler families,” where life is a series of “high wire acts.”

So if a mismatch is the problem, what are the solutions? And that was exactly the question Kathleen Christensen began to ask in 2001. She turned her funding to focus on solutions. Given the findings from decades of studies, a key solution is giving more employees access to “workplace flexibility.” In 2003, she declared that her goal was to make flexibility the standard way of working in America.

Yesterday, the director of the Office of Personnel was, in essence, singing the same song. His words are equally memorable. He said that workplace flexibility is the new email: some employers have it. But, he added, that those employers who don’t have flexibility now, will have it soon!

The organization I head, Families and Work Institute, was among the organizations that the Sloan Foundation funded, beginning in 2003 in their new focus on solutions. Our focus is on employers while another grant to Georgetown Law Center, Workforce 2010, focuses on public policy.

We first turned to the results of our nationally representative studies of the U.S. workforce and workplace. Because our studies are ongoing, we can track the ways that work and workers have changed over time. One of our first papers in 2004 looked at the fact that this is not your grandmothers’ or grandfathers’ or even your mothers’ or fathers’ workforce and workplace. Drawing on the terms IBM was using at the time, we argued for creating a new normal.

Yesterday, the breakout sessions at the Forum were focused on defining the “new normal” by looking at what works and what doesn’t work.

Our studies have been asking the same question—what works and what doesn’t work? We began by looking at our data.  As we have pursued these questions, we have found that there are kinds of jobs that benefit employers because they are linked to higher job satisfaction, high job engagement and better retention. These same kinds of jobs also benefit employees because they are linked with better health and less conflict in managing work and personal or family life. These kind of jobs are jobs that provide economic security, learning opportunities, job autonomy, respect, the support of supervisors, and workplace flexibility.

We named our Sloan funded project When Work Works, because work has to work for employees and employers, and for communities.  As a joint project of Families and Work Institute, the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, and the Twiga Foundation, we are now in 26 communities and five states. Spearheaded by local coalitions of leaders, When Work Works provides education, outreach, and awards for flexible and effective workplaces, based on national norms and on employer and employee surveys.  Last year, almost 1000 companies applied for these awards.

Yesterday, numerous speakers talked about making work “work.” At the end of the day, I received an email from a business colleague who had watched the Forum online. She wrote:

I am so psyched that the President of the United States just reiterated the words of the message that we have been promoting for the past 30 years! I am glad to be alive to see this day!  And I do believe we will live to see flexibility truly become the norm in all workplaces.

Yes, they are our words, but there’s more. In his closing remarks at the Forum, President Obama said that workplace flexibility helps families, helps businesses, and helps the economy. But he went on to talk about how workplace flexibility reflects our priorities as a society and our number one priority is caring for our families.

Among the other emails I received last night, a colleague wrote:

I can’t express how perfect it all seemed. A dream come true… “workplace flexibility ultimately reflects our priorities as a society” from the President of the United States!!

They are singing our songs, but they have added to the tunes and to the words. So they and we are singing new songs—songs where the words have greater reach and more resonance.

But these are words. And as we all know, words aren’t action. Now the real the real hard works begins—translating these songs into action!

Related Links: Dan Froomkin’s post on HuffingtonPost.com
Morra Aarons-Mele’s post on BlogHer

The idea of having a White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility would have been beyond anything I could have imagined when a literally handful of us came to the independent conclusion in the 1970s that work was “not working” for employees.

We came from very different places in arriving at the same conclusion. My own research had been on children and families as had others’; a few had conducted research on the workplace; and a few worked for large corporations or for business schools. And even before the Internet would have made finding each other easy, we did manage to connect, to meet, conduct studies, and implement more family-friendly programs and policies (as they were called in those days).

At a meeting of the Conference Board’s Work Life Leadership Council (where many of us convened on a regular basis beginning in 1983), we once went around the room, round-robin style, to share why we cared so much about this issue. The reasons were all profoundly personal—one of us had had a boss who was not flexible during a difficult pregnancy, another had huge support during the death of a parent, and another had a daughter who was treated differently than her male colleagues. The reasons were all about our own families and personal lives.

Although those of us who joined forces to help create the field of work and family life were men and women, we began by focusing on women and child care. We used to say, “demographics are destiny,” meaning that the rapid influx of women into the workforce made workplace change inevitable. Our words, however, hit many brick walls—the prevailing attitudes were “if women can’t hack it in the workplace, they should go home.” So while the business champions argued that these shifts in workforce demographics were here to stay, they still had the need to make a strong business case for addressing child care (turnover and absenteeism were costly) so that they could “fix” the problem. And frankly, some truly believed that they could fix this problem and then move back to serious business issues.

But, of course, child care problems were not so easily “fixed,” and the business champions among us got more deeply enmeshed in doing more with child care, then in adding elder care and workplace flexibility to their portfolios.

Still there was strong resistance. Work and family life were seen private issues, not business concerns. I can’t tell you how times we heard, “if you give employees an inch (flexibility), they will take a mile.” In a worldview where “presence equals productivity,” the business champions found the road to workplace change full of pitfalls.

What’s more, we all understood the resistance. The view that “presence equals productivity” is appropriate in an industrial economy. Furthermore, managing in new ways to work can be difficult.

But then in the 1990s and 2000s, the workplace and the economy began to change as fast as employee demographics. At that time, employers began to see that “work wasn’t working for employers either.”  Those companies most able to survive and thrive in after 9.11 after Katrina, after H1N1, or after the economic downturn were those that were flexible. Companies were becoming flexible for community reasons too—to be green, reduce traffic congestion and air pollution as well as to attract new employers into their communities. And everyone wanted fully engaged employees.

In addition, the younger generation was used to technology and to working anytime, anyplace. And the older generation needed to continue to work to afford their eventual retirements, but wanted to ease into retiring, rather than making abrupt changes.

And that is the landscape as we look forward to the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility this coming Wednesday, March 31^st.

We had a preview of the Forum last week in DC at the Work Life Conference, co-convened by the Families and Work Institute and The Conference Board. Speaking at the conference, Martha Coven of the White House Domestic Policy Council said that some might argue that employees are lucky just to have jobs, that companies have to focus on meeting their payrolls, and that the government needs to get the economy back on track and stabilizing it. They ask, “why workplace flexibility; why now?”

That is a false choice, she countered. Workplace flexibility is something that we have to do not only when times are good, but when times are bad. Workplace flexibility will help our businesses AND our families thrive.

Terrell McSweeney, Domestic Policy Advisor to Vice President Biden and Deputy Assistant to President Obama, echoed this point of view. She said that we can’t help the economy recover unless we help employees care for their families or go to school to improve their skills. She described workplace flexibility as part of the infrastructure that makes jobs work.

It is been a long road, since those days in the 1970s when a few people took on the very radical issue of work and family and workplace flexibility. It has been a road filled with many unexpected twists and turns, setbacks, and openings. But never in those early days could I have expected a President and a First Lady to talk openly about their own struggles in managing work and family. And certainly never could I have expected workplace flexibility to be recognized as part of the infrastructure that makes work “work” for employees, employers, communities, and the country.

Let’s see what Wednesday brings! And let’s hope that it is the beginning of a new conversation, not just a one-time moment.

The novelist William Gibson has famously said, “The future is already here–it’s just unevenly distributed.” This past week, Families and Work Institute and The Conference Board co-convened our annual business Work Life Conference around the theme of the “new normal’–what the future is expected to bring and how we might respond.

As I participated in the conference, I found myself realizing–surprisingly–that my forthcoming book, Mind in the Making is, in some ways, a case study on providing parenting information in the 21st century. Here are some key trends we discussed as the “new normal” and a few thoughts on how they relate to Mind in the Making:

1. Change is propelled by curiosity

Although he wasn’t a speaker at this conference, I begin with the words of Seth Godin from this book, Tribes. Godin discusses the role of curiosity in propelling change. He writes that curiosity “has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting.”

It was curiosity that propelled my journey that led to Mind in the Making. I needed to reconcile two images that conflicted with each other.

The first image comes from interviews I conducted with children from the third through the twelfth grades, asking them about their experiences in learning for a study I was planning to conduct. Despite the fact that these children were from very different backgrounds and communities–I found many of them turned off by learning. When they talked about learning, their eyes were flat, their faces dull and devoid of expression.

My experience echo the findings of the High School Survey of Youth Engagement conducted by the University of Indiana. This survey of more than 81,000 student found that only 39% go to school to learn (compared with 73% who go to school to get a degree, 69% because of their friends, and 58% because it’s the law).

The second image is a very different kind of image. It is an image of babies and young children. They are voracious learners, absolutely unrelenting, in their attempts to see, to touch, to understand, and to master everything. The fire in their eyes is burning brightly.

And so this multi-year journey has been a quest fueled by curiosity to reconcile these two images–of too many older children turned off by learning and of babies and young children who can’t stop learning.

2. In the world of information overload, “curators” of information are key

Lisa Witter, Chief Strategy Officer of Fenton Communications made this point at the conference. In 2010 alone, she said, there will be more information generated than at any other time in history. We will navigate this flood of information by having curators–like curators in a museum–who help us filter it.

I now realize that is what I have done. By interviewing and, in partnership with New Screen Concepts, filming 75 of the leading researchers on the science of children’s development and learning, I have immersed myself in this developmental research and neuroscience so that, like a curator, I can bring it to parents and teachers.

The ten-year forecast by the Institute for the Future describes one of the trends they foresee as “neuro-futures.” Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow from the institute said at the conference that advances in neuroscience will make it more practical. And that has been a goal of Mind in the Making, where there are hundreds of suggestions for translating research knowledge into what we can do everyday.

3. Learning is a conversation

Garrett Graff, Editor of the Washingtonian Magazine said at the conference, “everything is a conversation.” For far too long, learning as been seen and practiced as pouring information into empty vessels. In the new world of on-demand, multi-media information, that image has to shift. Yes, of course, there are times when we need to learn something from someone but we need to be very engaged in the learning process as well.

The old ways of providing parenting information didn’t work for me–though at the time, I may not have seen what I was doing as creating a conversation. But now it’s clear that’s what I have done. In the Vook (coming soon!) and on the Mind in the Making website, we share the actual experiments of researchers conducting their studies so that parents and teachers can experience these for themselves. My daughter calls it unlocking the doors of academia and making the actual research accessible to everyone. And these experiments are fun, fascinating, and insightful. They fit the new image of learning as a give and take, learning from each other.

More importantly, many parenting and teaching materials to date have been a guilt-trip that–consciously or not–make us feel that what we have done is wrong. When learning becomes a conversation, a give and take, we learn things but we also feel inspired.

4. Storytelling is front and center to new (and old) ways of communicating.

My mission in creating Mind in the Making has been to spur a movement to keep the fire in children’s eyes burning brightly as they grow up. In doing so, I share the stories of many parents and teachers.

I hope that you will now join us on this mission and share your stories.

The way that conventional media thinks it can reach parents is through “what’s new.” The way bloggers say they want to be reached is through ‘what’s real’–’what’s authentic.’

The New York Times published an article about mommyblogging today that captures many of the acknowledged good points about parenting blogging- the community, the support- and furthered many of the stereotypes behind mommyblogging- that many just do it for the pageviews, or potential sponsorship. I’m in the middle of launching a new parenting book in today’s media landscape, and I see clearly an often unstated reason why parents love to blog: to create their own narrative of the struggles and joys of parenting.

We are clearly the midst of an upheaval in communicating with parents. The underlying assumptions of conventional media and the influential parent bloggers who represent the views of millions of other parents seem to be worlds apart–day is night and night is day.

Now granted there are legions of bloggers who write about parenting and legions of media outlets and within each there is huge diversity. But a three-hour conversation with a group of leading Mommy Bloggers in Washington last Thursday, March 11th, provided a stark contrast between the two worlds.

My book, Mind in the Making, will be released in five weeks. This book is a tour of the latest research in how children learn best and how we can keep the fire in their eyes burning brightly by developing life skills. As my daughter says, it unlocks the doors of academia by taking us into the labs of scientists conducting actual experiments (in addition to the book, the experiments were video taped and there will be a video book–a Vook).

This book was written with the online community commenting throughout and I sat together with social media leaders in Washington DC to talk about what parents want online.

We said to them–you are hugely influential and get lots of people approaching you these days. What drives you crazy? That was enough to spark a wide-ranging and insightful long conversation:

I dislike parenting just being seen as Moms. There are Dads too.
I hate the crisis or problem approach. Don’t tell me how I have it all wrong. Inspire me. Be positive.
I hate being approached as if I am just a Mom and all I am interested in whether or not my kids “poop is purple” or how to get kids to sleep through the night. Moms are smart and we want to be approached as smart people.
There is a big hole. Most of us have moved beyond the feeding, diapering stage but then most parenting information drops us. We want conversation and guidance about growing a person.
I hate the assumption that parenting is black and white and whatever happens is your fault. The blame-game. OVER!
I hate being approached as if parenting is a competition–it is you against others.

One of the bloggers asked where each of them gets parenting information.
Mainstream media? No because its approach is what they just said they don’t like.

Word-of-mouth and blogs? Yes.

Facebook? Yes.

I countered: Lisa Belkin of the New York Times’ “Motherlode” told me that if she uses the word “guilt,” her readership goes way up.

We all know that true confession and being snarky goes on in blogs, big time. But still another bloggers speculated:

I think a guilt backlash is coming in parenting. We do feel insecure at times, but we are sick of the Super Nanny approach. We are looking to be connected to others, to give and take, and not just be told.

Are these bloggers right? I came home and saw the mere shadows of what used to be huge magazines and newspapers on my kitchen table and was again convinced that these bloggers are on to something important. I’ve been in the parenting world for more than three decades, and I’ve answered countless parenting advice columns in magazines and newspapers. Things are different now. We are in a transition and perhaps conventional media should listen to what these parents say they want and experiment with providing it.

Okay: Parenting Bloggers weigh in, please!

Since December 2007, seven million jobs have been lost in our country, and the majority of those who’ve lost their jobs have been men. At the same time, females have been returning to the workforce in higher numbers than their male counterparts, and more and more women have taken on the role of primary breadwinner for their families.

Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, shares her research on how this gender disparity in employment numbers affects workers and household economics.

Listen here.

Former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright wore a pin symbolizing breaking the glass ceiling but the question that hung in the air at the White House celebration of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month on March 8th was: what does it take to bring about change for women and girls. President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary Albright all said what we know to be true—that we don’t want our daughters to have fewer opportunities than our sons. But what does it take for that knowledge to become reality?

If there was one answer in the celebration, it was: it takes our grandmothers; it takes our mothers; it takes our daughters; and it takes us. In other words, it takes real experience in confronting challenges and then it takes real experience in facing down these sometimes quite harsh challenges to take on challenges and ignite change.

The President retold the story of what ignited his own feelings for this issue—of his mother who fought for injustice overseas and of his grandmother who worked her way up from a secretary to the vice president of a bank, “only to watch as men, no more qualified than she was, rise up the corporate ladder.”

Madeline Albright concluded her comments with the well-known poem, Low Road by Marge Piercy. It message is that with one person, “you can fight…but they roll over you.” Two people can “keep each other sane, can give support, conviction.” Three people form a “delegation;” four “can start an organization; a dozen make a demonstration; a hundred fill a hall.”

As the program closed with a searing song about violence against women by Afghan singer Mozdah Jamalzadah, the message of the event was clear—change takes experience, change take conversation.

And speaking of conversation, almost everyone in the rows around me was bent down looking at their BlackBerries or their iPhones. Were they tweeting about the event or were they keeping up with their own conversations on email, even at the White House?

Work-life professionals, I’m curious to hear from you. What would you say to the Dad or his supervisor?

Back in the mythic 50s and 60s, housewives like Betty Friedan and Betty Draper were very bored. The Feminine Mystique opens with this description of an average housewife’s day: “Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”

Contrast this to the average day of 2009’s Janice Ramos, featured in Joan Williams and Heather Boushey’s new study, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict.”

Janice Ramos is a married, 30-year-old registered nurse who lives in a home she owns with her husband, a technician, and two children, an eight-year-old son and a 14-month- old baby. She works the night shift so she can be home with her kids during the day. Her husband, whose shift starts at 9:00 a.m., gets the children up and fed and takes

the baby to a neighbor’s and the older child to school. Janice arrives home at 8:30 a.m. after they have already left. She sleeps for five hours, then picks up the baby and meets her son at the bus stop around 3:00 p.m. She spends a few hours helping with homework and playing with the baby, and then goes to sleep when her husband returns from work around 5:00 p.m. She sleeps until 9:00 p.m., when she leaves to arrive at the hospital at 10:00 p.m.

Ramos is part of what Williams and Boushey call the “missing middle.” These parents, writes Lisa Belkin, are working “highly supervised jobs that often leave them one sick child away from being fired”; these are “Americans who are neither rich nor poor,” and “have a median annual income of $64,000, earning between $35,000 and about $110,000 a year. Their median income has fallen 13 percent since 1979 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).”

The middle is 53 percent of Americans, but the authors say because they are not as vocal and visible as professionals, the infamous “opt-out” group, or as desperate as the poor, they receive the least attention and even less help.

Time is a finite resource. Think of our lives are pies: pieces are divided between work time, home and family time and personal time. Cali Yost explains that conflict arises when our work and home time demands become so great that we simply run out of time. This is the state of many Americans.

Reading the “Three Faces” report is eye-opening and extremely sad because work-life conflict among all income levels is so pronounced. I was most struck by the phenomenon of “tag-team” parents like Janice Ramos in our new two-worker norm. In the study, exhaustion is a common theme of life in the middle. One parent says, “My daughter always wants to do things with me, but I’m too exhausted.”

Lisa Belkin wrote, “Is work-life balance a luxury? In many ways, yes. Only those with both financial security and some control over their work lives have the freedom to recalibrate it.” Williams and Boushey’s report makes it clear that for married couples, time together as a family is a luxury, much less time for oneself. They also note that tag-team couples are between three to six times more likely to divorce.

Which leads me to the political hypocrisy of our legislators (almost everything I read these days leads me there). The U.S. is hostile to creating federal legislation that supports family-friendly workplaces — and it is this legislation that would help the tag-team parents, those caught in the middle.

Legislation that does exist helps poor women with childcare subsidies. Wealthier women can make more choices about their work and family lives. In either instance, as Williams and Boushey note, “The problem is viewed as not the lack of adequate public policies but rather the personal choices of a small set of mothers who are in families that do not look like most U.S. families. Politicians have actively used these narratives to reject moving forward on a work-family agenda.” Meanwhile, the majority of U.S. families soldier on, with little money, time or breathing room to spare.

Even more ironic?

“Nearly 60 percent of mothers in the middle work full-time or more, but only 42 percent of low-income mothers do. Both parents work full-time or more in more than half — or 51 percent — of all middle-income families as compared with only 15 percent of poor ones. The percentage of full-time work is slightly higher in professional-managerial families —- 57 percent -— but they can do all kinds of things to make life more workable.”

I’m a lucky professional example: The more money I make, the more money I willingly spend to outsource as much as I possibly can.

Families in the middle also pay more, percentage-wise, for childcare than do poor families or those at the top:

In March 2009 dollars, low-income families pay around $2,300 a year per child for childcare for children under age six —- about 14 percent of their income. Families in the middle average $3,500 a year —- six percent to nine percent of their income. Professional families pay about $4,800 a year —- three percent to seven percent of their income.

Read the rest at BlogHer.com.

Today, an email from MomsRising really hammered the point home:

“My husband and I have to work opposite shifts because child care is unaffordable. He works from 6am to 2:30pm, and I have to meet my husband at his job to drop off our son so that I can be to work by 3:00pm. I miss out on putting my son to bed.” – Kristina, MomsRising Member

Are you part of a tag-team couple? How does it affect your life?

Last week, I wrote about preventing aggression in young children, but what about reducing violence when it has already flared up.

Several years ago, Families and Work Institute (FWI) conducted a nationally representative study of young people in the fifth through the twelfth grades on this issue. Our findings—as always when we study young people’s views—were surprising and enormously helpful.

We found that although much public discussion about aggression has focused on extreme violence, such as school shootings, the largest proportion of young people talk about teasing that goes beyond being playful; about cruel put-downs and gossip; and about rejections as very real aggression to them.

This emotional aggression is very much a part of young people’s lives. In fact, two-thirds of young people (66%) have been teased or gossiped about in a mean way at least once in the past month and 25% have had this experience five times or more.

This is not to say that other kinds of aggression are unimportant—almost one third (32%) has been bullied at least once and 12% have been bullied five times or more in the past month; 46% of young people have been hit, shoved, kicked or tripped at least once and 18% have experienced this five times or more in the past month. Finally, one in 12 has experienced extreme violence.

Young people focus on emotional aggression as the trigger for other kinds of aggression—and this insight is echoed in the seminal studies of Larry Aber of New York University.

Aber has been especially interested in aggression in younger children because it can escalate into to greater aggression during the teen and adult years—and interfere with children’s learning. He wanted to know: What are the roots of aggression in children? When in a child’s life is aggression likely to flare up? Does it continue to escalate or can it be prevented? If so, how?

Aber says that there were twenty years of attempts to improve children’s “repertoire” of problem-solving skills. Did these efforts yield results? Yes, but “only a little bit,” Aber says. So the question became why.
Building on the work of Kenneth Dodge of Stanford University, Aber and his colleagues began to probe what goes on in children’s minds when they are provoked. They asked children how they would respond to an ambiguous hypothetical situation—such as one child bumping into another in a school cafeteria and spilling a drink on the second child. Which children would decide to “push back harder?” And which children would decide to use other problem-solving skills and why?

They discovered a missing link, a link they call “an appraisal process.” In the spilled-drink scenario above, for example, the child who has been bumped makes an immediate assessment of the situation: Was this an accident? Maybe this kid doesn’t like me? Maybe this kid is trying to hurt me?

For the children who assume that others are out to get them, having skills to handle conflict are relatively worthless because they have a bias to attribute the action as hostile—even when there isn’t enough information to be certain. They jump to conclusions. Given this insight, efforts to curb aggression in children of all ages have moved to include what Larry Aber calls “attributional retraining;” that is, helping children step back when something happens to them and make sense of the situation.

Aber and his colleague have evaluated several school-based approaches to curbing violence, most recently a curriculum in the New York City public schools, called Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution. This program doesn’t separate teaching children to handle conflict from other kinds of academic teaching. Each unit is based on a children’s book selected for its literary quality and its relevance to the theme. Through discussions, writing exercises, and role-play, children explore the meaning of the book, learn how to appraise complex situations, and then are taught how to resolve conflicts in these situations.

The early results of this research are very promising. Children are less aggressive and the reading scores of those most prone to behavior problems have improved.

What are the implications for parents? For me, it is promoting the life skill of perspective taking in everyday situations with our kids. Whether we are talking, watching television or a movie, or reading books with our kids, ask them to think about the perspectives of the characters in the story: What are they thinking and feeling? Why are they acting as they do?

In FWI’s study of young people, young people told us again and again they wanted help, especially to stop the “mean behavior” that goes on everyday. In the words of one young person, “if we are part of the problem, then we need to be part of the solution.”

This research gives us the tools to help young people be part of the solution!