The Shriver Report – Why Are American Moms Maxed Out and on the Brink?
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Why Are American Moms Maxed Out and on the Brink?
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From the outside, it appeared that Katrina Alcorn was “doing it all.” She had three healthy kids, a loving husband and a growing career. Then one day in 2009 while driving to Target to buy diapers, it all came to a crashing halt when she had a breakdown.

As she battled her way through crippling depression and tried to heal, she wondered how other women – many others with less supportive bosses, less engaged spouses and lower paychecks – were managing it. As she began talking to other women and listened to their stories of migraines, depression and anxiety, she realized they weren’t. Like her, many were just hanging on by a loose thread.

She penned her book, Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink, to not only share her story and show other women that they aren’t alone, but also to break open the conversation about the dysfunction breeding in the lives of working women as they struggle to juggle care and career.

I caught up with Katrina to find out about her own struggle to try to do it all, what changes she thinks would help women find balance, and what she hopes will come from sharing her own personal story.

TSR: The way I came upon this book was actually through another working mom friend who passed along the article of the blog that was in The New York Times, and she said the constant refrain of working moms is, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Honestly, when I read it I started to get choked up because I was like, “This is exactly how I feel all the time.” Can you just take me through what really prompted you to write this book?

Alcorn: Sure. Originally it came out of crisis. I had this perfect life on the surface. Three healthy kids, loving husband, fabulous job that I loved in a lot of ways, but when I went back to work after maternity leave after my son was born, I just started falling apart on the inside. It was scary. It’s kind of amazing how you can hold it together on the surface sometimes when you’re just such a wreck on the inside.

After about seven months of having panic attacks and insomnia and all kinds of anxiety, I had to stop working. Writing was my way of coping in the beginning. It was just a way of making sense of what happened to me. Then after I started the blog, I started talking to other women and realized there was this much bigger story in this whole social context around what was happening in my life and what was happening in other women’s lives, and that became what is now the book.

TSR: What do you hope to accomplish by sort of putting your story out there and closely examining, as you put it, the fact that mothers everywhere are maxed out and sick with stress?

Alcorn: There [are] many things I hope to accomplish. One is simply to let women who are in similar situations that I was – and it sounds like maybe you are – to know that if you’re feeling maxed out, it’s not your fault and you’re not alone. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I think often – I’ve seen through a lot of the blog comments and the stories about the book – women will say, “She’s right, this is broken, but there’s no fixing it.” They get stuck on personal choices. They’ll talk about how we should stop at one kid or you shouldn’t have kids at all if you want a career. I think what we’re all missing is that it really doesn’t have to be so hard to work and raise a family. There are other countries and plenty of progressive thinking companies that are figuring out how to make the most out of jobs where women (and increasingly, men) have to take care of kids, but they still want to give their best at work. There are ways to do this. There are so many things companies can do with job shares, alternative schedules, better part-time options. Also giving women and men ways to get back into the work force after they take a few years off to take care of their families… All these things are things work places can do.

“There are other countries and plenty of progressive thinking companies that are figuring out how to make the most out of jobs where women (and increasingly, men) have to take care of kids, but they still want to give their best at work. There are ways to do this.” Katrina Alcorn
A Woman's Nation Pushes Back From The Brink

TSR: On ShriverReport.org, we talk about how the modern lives of American women and families – and therefore American men – have changed a lot in the past 50 years but institutions have not adapted with those changes, and you sort of spoke to that about progressive thinking companies. If you had to pick three changes in our corporate structure or our work life balance, what do you think are the top three changes that would really help moms that are maxed out?

Alcorn: Here’s my top two. The first one would be having more men involved with their kids, and really taking responsibility for their kids. That would be a game changer. We see this in other countries like Sweden and Germany. When men have incentive to take parental leave, they bond with their babies in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t. They take more responsibility at home. Moms go back to work sooner. Employers see that this is not just a “women’s issue,” and they start offering more flexible work options.

Another change I want to see is companies giving workers more autonomy. This means different things for different jobs, but there are lots of examples of how companies are doing this. What it means is rather than evaluating an employee based on the number of hours they work or how long their butt is in the chair in the office, instead they’re evaluated on results. That’s a better way to work for everyone, but especially for really busy but very capable women who can’t be in the office all the time. There’s a management strategy called ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) that I talk about in this book.

… I’m so impressed with what ROWE is doing. By teaching companies to focus on results, they make life more manageable for mothers and fathers, but they’re really doing a service to all employees. Everyone is struggling with job stress, whether you have kids or not. It just happens to be that folks with kids may be feeling it more.

TSR: We also talk about in the first Shriver Report, and we get into it more in the latest report, A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From the Brink, but we are referring specifically to the financial brink – this conflict between care and career. We need to recognize nationally that people, both men and women, are responsible for both their career and for caregiving of aging family members, of their young family members, etc. Do you see the tides changing? Are you hopeful?

Alcorn: I’m hopeful that change is possible. The thing that we really need to overcome is our lack of imagination. We need to overcome this idea that we can’t change, that this is just the way things are, that everyone needs to just buck up. I think that’s what is holding us back. I think when people actually realize that countries that help working families with things like paid parental leave and subsidized child care are doing well economically, when they see that that works, then we’ll have the will to figure this out in the U.S.

TSR: You also reference really honestly in your press release that this is taking a serious toll on women’s health. In your experience and sort of in your research, how have you seen that manifest itself?

Alcorn: Yes, being “maxed out” is affecting our health in all kinds of ways. What that meant to me was I was very seriously depressed and anxious, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I was unable to work. I ended up taking a year off. Now that I’ve been blogging about this issue for several years I’ve heard from at this point probably thousands of women around the country and also around the world, and in every industry you can think of, and many of them have similar experiences of just hitting a physical and emotional wall. The stress can manifest in very different ways—it’s not always depression or anxiety. But for some women it’s things like back pain, insomnia, or issues with gaining or losing too much weight… I got an e-mail from someone the other day who said she’d been sobbing under her desk and waiting until her co-workers left so they wouldn’t see her. Another women told she was having seizures from stress before she quit her job. I hear about lots of migraines.

The point is stress manifests in us differently, but what the research shows is that women are at higher risk for job stress than men. The problem is we’re still doing more work at home—we’re doing more with the kids—and research shows that we’re also being scrutinized at work in a different way when we have kids, so there’s this whole unspoken thing that’s happening. Of course we’re feeling more stress. Of course that stress takes a toll. Some stress is fine and inevitable, but chronic stress makes us sick.

TSR: In your book, do you focus at all on women who are lower wage earners? Because I think there are a lot of women who don’t feel a part of this conversation where their stress is amplified even more.

Alcorn: I think you’re totally right. I’m actually really glad you asked that question. One of the things that I’m trying to show with my book is I had a lot of advantages, including I made a good income, I was paid like a professional. I didn’t have the same financial stress that a lot of people have. I’m not a single parent, and that makes a big difference. I still couldn’t make it work. If I couldn’t do it, how can we possibly expect people to do this with even less support?

What I’ve seen in the research is that we are all experiencing this conflict between work and family at every income level. We are just experiencing it in different ways. Women who are lower wage jobs tend to be in situations where they have really rigid schedules, which are incompatible with mothering, and they can’t afford child care. On the flip side, you have women in professional positions who are expected to work crazy hours, travel for business, never unplug, never take time off. They’re both impossible for a lot of us, but it looks a little different in how they manifest, right?

The core issue is as a society, we need to look at how we make room for people to be caregivers.

TSR: I asked you before about sort of what you think would help in the corporate environment, but personally speaking, what did you cross off your list in your own life to sort of manage that? Because I think part of this is absolutely the lack of flexibility, but it’s also this unreasonable expectation that … it’s crazy the amount of things we expect ourselves to be able to do, and I feel like nobody prepares you for it before you become a mother. There’s no one that says you better just chill out and get off your own case.

Alcorn: When I first stopped working, my husband and I started talking about what had happened and what the last few years had been like, and I had this horrible feeling like I was waking up from a cult. Like I had been brainwashed to think that what I was doing was normal when it was killing me. I really relate to the feeling you’re talking about. It was like waking up from this bad dream.

The fact is, I gave up a lot of things to try to make it all work, but that wasn’t enough. This is not the answer people want to hear. What they want to hear is you’re in control of your life, you just choose and you just prioritize better and things are fine. I’m sorry, but that wasn’t true for me. I think I was actually really good at prioritizing and my house did get really messy, and I had given up the things I thought were “non-essential” (like seeing friends), which now I would argue are essential. It was giving up too much.

I think there’s a stage we go through where we figure out how to prioritize, but sometimes that’s not enough. What I’ve learned, what’s really helped me, and I’m still learning this, is to set better boundaries with work. The kind of work I do can take up every inch of your day. I now know I can’t do that anymore. I can’t let it creep in like that. Setting boundaries is a constant process. It’s not like you just say no and the conflicts all go away. You sort of have to find opportunities every day to reset those boundaries.

The other thing I’ve learned to do is not worry too much what other people think. Like today, I really needed some exercise and we had this call scheduled, so I’m huffing and puffing on my walk while I talk with you.

TSR: What is it that you want people to take away from your book?

Alcorn: What I want women to know is that they’re not alone and it’s not their fault if they’re feeling overwhelmed. I think that often when we perceive ourselves as failing, we then add this whole other layer of guilt and shame on top of it. I want people to be able to let that go. I want them to be able to see that it’s not just them. It’s a crazy situation. This doesn’t make it all better, but at least they know that it’s not them.

Then the last thing is I want it to bring awareness to this topic. I want people to start talking about it differently. I want people to stop fixating so much on here’s what women should do differently and start looking at here’s what policy makers need to do differently. Here’s what employers could do differently. It won’t just be a benefit to moms and dads. It’s a benefit to our nation. It’s a benefit to our economy to make these kinds of changes.