80′S Hair Bands; Music Or Noise? Essay, Research Paper

Families today are being squeezed by an ever-tightening noose of time, money, work, and responsibility. Many of us feel the knot will never loosen. ?How do I find time for myself and my family?? we wonder. ?How are we going to make ends meet? Why does the future seem so insecure??

The nature of work has been called into question. What kinds of work are necessary to sustain a family? How much time do we devote to our paid jobs? How much time and energy is left over for all the unpaid work to invest in our homes and communities? How do we re-order our lives when everything in the world seems so disordered and out of place? From business pages to women’s magazines, to country radio and comic strips, to the kitchen table at home, people everywhere are asking these questions.

Such broad concern suggests that resolving the conflicts of work and family will require responses at all levels of our society.

A few years ago, many of us looked to greater workplace flexibility and workplace-based services such as child care or employee assistance programs to resolve the conflict. We now see that while such efforts are extremely helpful, they, of themselves, will not resolve the stresses that families experience. The problems are too complex to yield to one-shot solutions.

Are people talking about family-supportive workplace policies around the kitchen tables of Canada? Probably they are not. I suspect that their concerns are more fundamental.

For many families, the talk around the table is basically about time, money and logistics. How do we get a meal on the table in time to check in on aging parents, in time to get back to supervise the kids’ homework, in time to work on that correspondence course, in time to send someone off to night shift, in time . . . Clocks no longer make noise, but the relentless demands of time keep ticking.

Then there are the pressing economic concerns. When I was young, most parents assumed their children would do better economically than they had. They assumed that the children of my generation would use their superior education to obtain valued job skills. They assumed that we would live in the same neighbourhoods in stable communities and work our way up the job ladder, with the same employer for 30 years. Indeed, most assumed that their daughters would raise children at home while their sons would work at full-time jobs outside the home.

How times have changed! In our information and service-industry society, we hardly even share a common definition of work. Employment comes in so many forms. There are more variations of work, more employment from home, and more impermanent and poorly paying jobs. As a result of all these changes, pollsters such as Reg Bibby tell us that there is a growing detachment between the work force and the job market, with little lasting loyalty between workers and employers.

Yet the work of families goes on. The caring and nurturing, the educating and socializing, the community activities, the mutual aid and working together, the housework and yard work and shopping. These basics of family life and family work remain.

Many now feel that the demands of earning a living are swamping these other vital family functions. In response, families are desperately attempting to take back control of time.

Wresting family control over time will require responses that reach across a number of areas of responsibility. Our agenda would, of course, include:

flexible workplace options;

caregiving services that will supplement and support the ability of different kinds of families to care for their children, their elders, and others with long and short-term care needs.

But it would also have to include:

family-supportive policies and operating procedures at every level of every community organization, school, institution, government, or consumer-oriented business;

redistribution of paid work time–some now have too much while others have too little;

recognition of the value of unpaid work that families do–some of the trade-offs we make between work and family responsibilities may not add up;

a shift toward lower levels and expectations of consumption on the one hand and more secure family incomes on the other.

We might add several other items to this list. Yet if there is one overall response to the conflict of work, time, money and family, it is that there is no one response. It is not a matter of altruism or ideology. If only for reasons of pure self-interest, as community or family members, as employers, as workers, and as business people in need of consumers, we need to look seriously at a range of actions if we are to resolve anything.

What is the talk about around the nations’s dining room tables? It is about time, money, work, responsibility and love. Today’s Canadian families require some understanding and support to balance it all.