CHAPTER 1
The Waving Window
It is 6:45 A.M. on a fine June day in the midwestern town of Spotted Deer. At a childcare center in the basement of the Baptist church, Diane Caselli, a childcare worker in blue jeans and loose shirt, methodically turns over small upended chairs that rest on a Lilliputian breakfast table. She sets out small bowls, spoons, napkins, and a pitcher of milk around a commanding box of Cheerios. The room is cheerful, clean, half-asleep. Diane moves slowly past neatly shelved puzzles and toys, a hat rack hung with floppy, donated dress-up hats and droopy pocketbooks, a tub filled with bits of colored paper. Paintings of swerving trains and tipsy houses are taped to the wall.
At seven, a tall, awkward-looking man peers hesitantly into the room, then ventures a few steps forward looking for Diane. His son Timmy tromps in behind him. Diane walks over, takes Timmy's hand, and leads him to the breakfast table, where she seats him and helps him pour cereal and milk into his bowl. Timmy's dad, meanwhile, hurries toward the door.
One wall of the room has four large windows that overlook a sidewalk. In front of the second window is a set of small woodensteps children climb to wave good-bye to their departing parents. It's called "the waving window." Timmy dashes from the breakfast table, climbs up the wooden steps, and waits.
His dad, an engineer, briskly strides past the first window toward his red Volvo parked down the street. He stops for a moment in front of the waving window, tilts his head, eyebrows lifted clownishly, then walks on without a backward glance. Timmy returns to his cereal, sighs, and declares excitedly, "My Dad sawed me wave!" Diane and Marie Martin, the center's other childcare worker, exchange warm smiles over Timmy's head. As professionals they aren't supposed to have favorites, but sometimes it's hard not to.
A moment later, in a burst of excitement, Jarod and Tylor, four-year-old twins, bound in ahead of their mother, a quick-stepping, trim woman in a black and white business suit. A successful junior manager, she doesn't pause at the door, but with an air of pleasant authority, strides--clack, clack, clack--up to the breakfast table, as if in her kitchen at home. Car keys in hand, she pours out Cheerios and milk, consulting each twin about the amount. She watches them eat for a few minutes. Then, glancing at her watch, she bends down, offers long hugs, leaves the childcare room, and reappears outside. She feigns surprise at the first window, makes a funny face at the second, races to the third, and gives a big wave at the fourth. Finally, out of sight, she breaks into a run for her car.
At 7:40 A.M., four-year-old Cassie sidles in, her hair half-combed, a blanket in one hand, a fudge bar in the other. "I'm late," her mother explains to Diane. "Cassie wanted the fudge bar so bad, I gave it to her," she adds apologetically--though Diane has said nothing. Gwen Bell is a sturdy young woman, with short-cropped dark hair. Lightly made up and minimally adorned with gold stud earrings, she is neatly dressed in khaki slacks and jacket. Some Amerco mothers don business suits as soldiers don armor while a few wear floral dresses suggesting festivity and leisure. But Cassie's mother is dressed in a neutral way, as if she were just getting the job of self-presentation done.
"Pleeese, can't you take me with you?" Cassie pleads.
"You know I can't take you to work," Gwen replies in a tonethat suggests she's heard this request before. Cassie's shoulders droop in defeat. She's given it a try, but now she's resigned to her mother's imminent departure, and she's agreed, it seems, not to make too much fuss about it. Aware of her mother's unease about her long day at childcare, however, she's struck a hard bargain. Every so often she gets a morning fudge bar. This is their deal, and Cassie keeps her mother to it. As Gwen Bell later explained to me, she continually feels that she owes Cassie more time than she actually gives her. She has a time-debt to her daughter. If many busy parents settle such debts on evenings or weekends when their children eagerly "collect" promised time, Cassie insists on a morning down payment, a fudge bar that makes her mother uneasy but saves her the trouble and embarrassment of a tantrum. Like other parents at the center, Gwen sometimes finds herself indulging her child with treats or softened rules in exchange for missed time together. Diane speaks quietly to Cassie, trying to persuade her to stop sulking and join the others.
The center works on "child time." Its rhythms are child-paced, flexible, mainly slow. Teachers patiently oversee the laborious task of tying a shoelace, a prolonged sit on the potty, the scrambled telling of a tall tale. In this and other ways it is an excellent childcare center, one of a dozen islands of child time I was to discover in my three summers of field research at Amerco, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Spotted Deer.a Scattered throughout the town, such islands--a playground, a pediatrician's waiting room, the back of a family van--stand out against the faster paced, more bureaucratically segmented blocks of adult work time.
Indeed, on that June morning, seated atop a tiny stool inside the center, I find myself musing impatiently, things are slow here. I watch Timmy pretend he is in an airplane for what seems like a very long time. Jarod and Tylor slowly sort out pieces of a puzzle anadult could arrange in a flash. I begin to feel slightly bored. I have, after all, left behind my own hectic university schedule--teaching classes, advising students, keeping up with a blizzard of faxes, phone calls, and e-mail messages--and I feel in a hurry to get busy with the task at hand.
I had come to Spotted Deer to explore a question I'd been left with after finishing my last book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.1 In that work I had examined the tensions that arise at home in two-job marriages when working women also do the lion's share of the childcare and housework. Such marriages were far less strained, I found, when men committed themselves to sharing what I came to call "the second shift," the care of children and home. But even with the work shared out, there seemed to be less and less time for the second shift, not to mention relaxed family life. Something was amiss, and whatever it was, I sensed that I would not find out simply by looking at home life by itself.
Everything I already knew or would soon learn pointed to the workplace as the arena that needed to be explored. As a start, I was well aware that, while in 1950 12.6 percent of married mothers with children under age seventeen worked for pay, by 1994, 69 percent did so; and 58.8 percent of wives with children age one or younger were in the workforce.2 Many of these wives also had a hand in caring for elderly relatives. In addition, the hours both men and women put in at work had increased--either for college-educated workers or, depending on which scholars you read, for all workers. In her book The Overworked American, the economist Juliet Schor has claimed that over the last two decades the average worker has added an extra 164 hours--a month of work--to his or her work year. Workers now take fewer unpaid leaves, and even fewer paid ones.3 In the 1980s alone, vacations shortened by 14 percent.4 According to the economist Victor Fuchs, between 1960 and 1986 parental time available to children per week fell ten hours in white households and twelve hours in black households.5 It was also evident, however you cut the figures, that life was coming to center more on work. More women were on board the work train, andthe train was moving...
