Thursday 21 July 2011

Who does the school run?

Apparently Nick Clegg is "killing himself" to take his children to school in the morning. But he does at least make the effort. I've just listened to a conversation on BBC Woman's Hour with an Express journalist idiotically suggesting that if people want a highflying career, they'll have to give certain things up, like, um, spending an hour at the start of the day with their kids.

What a depressingly uncreative mindset. There have got to be ways of managing your work to ensure that your children - surely the most important thing in your life - feel you're participating in the structure of theirs.

Negotiate your hours with your bosses. Don't ask, don't get. Nobody's pretending it's easy asking a reluctant boss to be flexible, but it's certainly becoming more acceptable, even if not to numpties like Express woman. I interviewed a chief exec of a major charity a few years ago who said she'd just appointed a senior manager - a man - who had made it a condition of his accepting the appointment that he could take his children to school on certain days and pick them up on others. She wanted him, so she said yes.

My partner goes into work early one day a week so he can pick our two up from the childminder. I do it two days a week, he does it once. It means I can work late or do a long day out on a story.

Before even having a baby we both decided to work four days a week so we would have them in childcare for fewer days than they're with us. We take a financial hit, but it means we spend proper time - exhilarating, frustrating, amusing, knackering time - with our kids.

Could we be more, er, highflying than we are? Weeeell, possibly... ! If we didn't have small children, there'd be more freedom to do exciting assignments abroad, travel for work, attend events that would help us network. But we don't do too badly - I write for national publications and have multiple deadlines weekly. My partner works for a wildife magazine and is in the same situation.

The point is that it wouldn't work if we didn't share the load pretty equally. And that means that we both do stuff like the childminder-run, bed-time, bath-time, doctors appointments and taking time off  when one of the children is poorly. Over three years we've rethought and renegotiated the way we do our work to make that possible.

It's not perfect - in fact at times it's very stressful. It takes a lot of goodwill from each of us, a small adjustment on the part of my partner's work, and some careful diarising. To help us and parents like us, it's absolutely vital that people like Nick Clegg continue to demonstrate that with considerable commitment, having time for your kids is doable at (almost!) the very top of the career ladder.

Monday 18 July 2011

Chocolate buttons

There is a special place in hell for mummies who eat their toddlers' chocolate buttons. Especially when they have been promised as potty training treats.

There are no more chocolate buttons in our house right now, and the potty trainee is due back any minute. Nothing but chocolate buttons will do, I know this already. So I might as well stop prevaricating and get my nasty chocolate button thieving self down to the post office sharpish.