gil (01/30/83)
There's been a lot of talk about this recently. I would like to respond to a couple of suggestions that I've seen recently. One person mentioned the idea of having three couples living together, and with the six parents having different days off. Another spoke of two parents, living along, but each having parttime jobs. Both spoke of the difficulties that might ensue in trying to make such arrangements with employers. I believe that rather than structuring our lives around the desires of large (or small) companies which are our employers, and therefore sacrificing our careers or our children, we should be working towards restructuring our workplaces. Employers (or some of them) have learned to accept maternity leaves. They must learn to deal with giving working parents a more human way to raise their children. I know it seems a long way off, and maybe it is, but I believe we can't expect employers to supply us with specially structured jobs for parents until we ourselves learn to expect as a right.