Annemarie Quill: It's called 'the struggle of the juggle'

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg confessed she saved time in her morning routine by sleeping her children in their day-time clothes. PHOTO/AP

Does it have to be this hard? With just five weeks from a general election, I was hoping to hear more policies about families, in particular ... not handouts that do not benefit everyone.

In the early hours I am often up, folding washing or catching up on emails. I'm not alone. I have text conversations at 5am. Usually about mundane things - like where to find a dentist who cleans children's teeth, if it's Mufti Day, how to remove loom bands stuck in the Hoover.

I realised that this is a mum thing when once I sent an early text to a childless colleague and she replied: "What the heck are you texting me for in the middle of the night?"

It is a worldwide working mum thing. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, wrote in her book Lean In that before she had children she met a working mum who confessed that she put her children to sleep in their clothes to shave 15 minutes off the morning rush. This seemed appalling to the pre-child Sandberg. But after she had her own kids, she thought - what a great idea.

This week when a colleague accidentally booked a meeting with me at 2am instead of 2pm, when the electronic text beeped it didn't faze me. When he apologised the next day I told him, no worries, that I just got up, did some chores and spent some extra time "worrying".

He looked at me as though I was crazy.

Perhaps I should have told him I spent the time engaging in "mental labour". It is a term used to describe the time that mothers spend thinking about the details and planning around family and work life, coined by researchers who presented their findings to the American Sociological Association last year. Their studies found mothers spent more time thinking about details about family and work than fathers and that it was because they were the ones that mostly had to juggle plans to fit everything in.

A similar study caught my eye this week reported in the Daily Mail (surfing news sites is another of my nocturnal habits).

This survey of 2000 British women found women were at their happiest in their 20s, but less happy as they got older due to the pressures of juggling work and family life. Among the things that women worried about were earnings, health, family, children, being overweight and not spending enough time with friends.

It is a wonder that women get any sleep at all.

We do not need studies to tell us about the struggle of the juggle, but reading them reminded me of a time when, with three children under 6, I was a freelance writer.

I'd set up a time to interview a business guy. When the call came, my 3-year-old started to throw a hissy fit. I ran into the bathroom to hide from her. Sitting on the bathroom floor without my research notes, pen or even paper, I winged it, and almost deafened my interviewee as I talked louder and louder to drown the sound of wails and furious door-banging.

Interview over, I scooped my angry red-faced daughter in my arms, and joined her in the howling. We both lay on the bed sobbing until we eventually fell asleep. When I woke in the middle of the night, I got up and wrote the interview from the top of my head.

Experiences like these are probably not dissimilar to many mums, whatever their occupation. I'm not looking for sympathy. No mum I know would trade her family life for the world. It is what we do. We laugh about it afterwards. It's why we drink wine.

But does it have to be this hard?

With just five weeks from a general election, I was hoping to hear more policies about families, in particular.

Not handouts that do not benefit everyone. As this paper has noted before in editorials, the Working for Families system, a legacy of the last Labour government means that some families who do not qualify for childcare assistance or tax credits ironically can end up poorer than those who do qualify, even though those who do qualify earn less.

Last year we reported the cost of childcare and this loss of tax credits because of higher income meant that some Tauranga parents said they were better off working part-time or not at all.

For some families, the expense of working (childcare) eclipsed income.

This scenario is not good for the country whether you have kids or not, because it incentivises people who might be well skilled not to work or not to earn much. It is another factor that keeps New Zealand wages low. We hear so much about affordable housing but perhaps the emphasis is wrong.

Some Kiwi families cannot afford the houses because they don't earn enough, because a mother may have to give up work to look after children, or cannot find a job that pays enough to cover childcare, or does work but struggles to pay both a mortgage and childcare costs.

And for the latter woman, not only is she paying the mortgage, but she is paying for it in guilt, plagued with higher stress levels.

What to do?

It doesn't have to be an either/or. Other countries do better than New Zealand at the work/life balance. In Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Denmark, childcare is high quality and subsidised for all. As a result, writes working mother Antonia Hoyle in Britain's Daily Telegraph, "As the costs are so low, over 78 per cent of mothers with children under seven are at work. (It's perhaps no coincidence that three of the top five countries in the United Nations' World Happiness Report - Sweden, Denmark and Norway - also have heavily subsidised childcare.)"

In Britain since June, all workers have the right to request flexible working from employers. Announcing the move, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: "Modern businesses know that flexible working boosts productivity and staff morale, and helps them keep their top talent so that they can grow. It's about time we brought working practices bang up to date with the needs and choices of our modern families"

Clegg talks a lot of sense.

I asked Labour Minister and our Tauranga MP Simon Bridges what the position is in this country. He said that the Government agrees that "flexibility, choice and fairness in the labour market helps create jobs, increase wages and encourages innovation, and is critical for supporting a stronger and more productive economy".

In New Zealand, employees already have the ability to negotiate hours of work and, in some cases, request flexible working arrangements.

Current law allows someone who has the care of a person to request flexible work from their employer and, under the National Government's Employment Relations Amendment Bill (currently before Parliament), the right to request flexibility will be extended to all employees, not just caregivers. Proposed changes to the parental leave system also would enable employees to take unpaid parental leave part-time and flexibly.

Allison Pearson, author of the book I Don't Know How She Does It, wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in June that she was "jubilant" about the flexible working legislation.

Pearson's novel about a lawyer mum, who struggles to balance her "domestic to-do list" with her "brutally demanding" job, became the working mum's bible. Pearson writes that she was motivated into activism upon hearing from hundreds of mums just like the book's character.

Writes Pearson: "One senior advertising boss and mother-of-three said she would only be able to read the novel if it was printed on the inside of her eyelids so she could read while asleep."

Pearson became involved in Working Families, a British charity lobbying for better work/life balance "shifting entrenched attitudes and campaigning for changes in the law that would ease the crippling national burden of stress".

The Working for Families system in New Zealand does little to ease our country's similar burden of stress.

I hope New Zealand adopts the new flexible working legislation.

Happy working mums make sense for employers, for the economy, and most of all, for those people we do it all for - the kids.

Annemarie Quill is a journalist at the Bay of Plenty Times.