Of layoffs and littles.
Searching for work may be a full-time job, but it doesn’t hold a candle to parenting small kids without childcare.
Liz Sarb
Last Friday, I volunteered in my child’s classroom, gently pointing out backward letters and receiving hugs from her friends.
A year ago, I’d have felt itchy so far from my computer at 11 a.m. on a weekday — checking my phone for Slack messages, sweating over whether I could get back to my desk in time for a last-minute meeting.
Now, on the anniversary of my virtual pink slip, that anxiety lingers like a ghost: a hollow, hard-to-shake habit from years of balancing full-time work and parenthood.
Layoffs are brutal for anyone. The job market, cruel and demoralizing, keeps its unfortunate members second-guessing our skills and ambitions, peddling certifications and influencers. It suggests we need a “brand.” It offers so much contradictory advice. Meanwhile, we shred our budgets into tatters and try to remember what level of firmness is the appropriate level for shaking hands.
But a year removed from my own experience with a layoff, I’m clear-eyed about their unique impacts to parents of young children, most of which are all rooted in the same damn problem:
Childcare.
Childcare: The shadow layoff
In order to work, parents of young children pay through our teeth for childcare. When we lose that income, guess what we cut from the budget.
If you guessed childcare, you get a star sticker. (Hang on while I peel it from my kid’s spelling worksheet.)
A whole shadow layoff occurs when parents are let go. Babysitters, nannies, and nursery placements also get the pink slip. It makes little sense for unemployed parents to shell out thousands of dollars each month for services that have been rendered—at least temporarily—unnecessary.
But here’s the tricky part: finding good childcare is like scouring a beach for diamonds. In my small town, group childcare providers actually LOL’d when I first called to inquire about openings. Letting go of childcare means there’s no guarantee it will be there if and when parents find new employment.
Childcare: The job search dilemma
It’s not Imposter Syndrome if you’re an actual imposter, and I have been impostering all over Big Tech for the past ten years. (“You want me to integrate via API? Oh, sure! Um, I can… API it. Let me just bop over and chat with our engineering team for a minute.” [Frantically ends meeting and runs away real fast.] )
But, imposter or not, this is the industry I know and so I’m a big fan of LinkedIn.
Here’s an example of the highly unhelpful job-search advice I encountered there, early in my job-searching era:
“Remember job-seekers! Searching for work is a full-time job. Create a schedule for yourself that includes time for learning, networking, resume review, and rest! Here’s how I went about it, and now I’m a VP at the best company in the world!
8-9a Sip lemon water and journal
9-10a Work on a new skill - like learning a new language or how to code
10a-11a Take a long walk and feel gratitude
11a-2p Work on applications and update resume
2-4p Reach out to your network, and take calls with connections!
4-5 Spend quality time with friends or family! Job searching requires balance, dedication, and self-care!”
Totally well-intentioned; totally blind to the plight of parents whose job search schedule may look something closer to:
8-12a Slug coffee while feeding babies, cleaning up resultant mess, changing diapers and tiny socks, injuring foot on legos, cleaning up legos, hauling kids to things, and using TV as their new babysitter so as to eat something without children hovering below saying “BITE?!” through their little gaping bird-beaks. Use nap time to speed-edit resume.
12p-5p Haul kids home from things, make more snacks (“BITE?!”), help someone with a project, pull apart fighting siblings, fold fifth load of laundry and try to find a moment to throw hastily updated resume at a job posting or two.
Searching for work may be a full-time job, but it doesn’t hold a candle to parenting small kids without childcare.
Childcare: The “Is it even worth it?” phenomenon
Every morning that I worked a full-time job, my husband and I worried that:
We’d receive a text from our sitter that she was ill
One of our kids would wake up and barf
COVID would close the school
A child’s appointment would crop up on the calendar
…or any other number of childcare challenges that would require us to reconfigure our workdays. Lucky with a remote job (me) and decent time off (my husband), we could absorb these challenges but it sent our stress levels through the roof.
I didn’t fully process the extent of that pressure until a few months after my layoff when I was offered a really good, full-time position with a company I believed in.
Instead of relief, I felt panic. Looking down the barrel of the impending summer break and the bleak childcare landscape, I realized fully how impossible it had all felt, how drained we had been. With my husband’s support, I turned down the opportunity.
Since then, I’ve chased contract work. Between piecemeal childcare and part-time work, it has mostly made sense. We were able to manage the kids’ summer break without losing our minds. We were able to handle our foster kids’ case worker and specialist and court appointments without using up my husband’s PTO. It hasn’t been pleasant, but we’ve even managed to make it through the past two months of illnesses, holidays, and weather-induced school closures; it’s not lost on me that if I were currently working full-time I’d have done so with somewhere between one and four children at home almost every day for the past 60 days.
🤯 🤯 🤯
Our current setup isn’t perfect. It still requires me to rearrange my schedule, take calls studded with children, and magically align naps to host very-formal-calls with very-formal-clients. It still requires my husband to take time off for kids’ appointments and time his lunch to cover for me during meetings.
But it also allows us to move the pieces around more easily.
We understand why so many American parents — mothers especially — have unwillingly abandoned full-time employment in droves over the past few years.
We’re starting to think, like so many families, that saving for retirement may be less important than taking a significant hit to our income and waiting things out until the babies are older and we no longer have to deal with our country's ramshackle approach to parental support.
