New balance: will work be more parent-friendly than ever after the pandemic?
Last month, a video by Maggie Mundwiller, a mother in St Louis, Missouri, went viral on TikTok. It showed her one-year-old son accompanying her to a second face-to-face job interview. (She had asked for an alternative date because she had no childcare. The employer said: “Bring him with you.”) The video featured on Good Morning America, has had more than 9m views and has inspired endless admiring comments, including: “It makes me sooo happy to know there are companies like this”; “Glad it’s a toddler-friendly business!” and: “Take note, corporate America.”
The story is cute, as is the kid, who wore a bow tie and took along his own CV (“Skills: destroying a clean space in three seconds”). And, yes, the pandemic has given many of us permission to adopt work habits that previously weren’t encouraged. But will this kind of thing happen again in post-Covid life? What have we learned about incorporating family life into working life? And is anybody going to implement those lessons?
Behind last year’s conflicting headlines about and “kids spending in history”, the picture is extremely unclear. Working parents seem to be vacillating between extreme optimism (“I can take my child to a job interview!”) and dire pessimism (“We will have to work even longer office hours to catch up!”). According to a , published in the UK
