In light of Trump’s inauguration and announcements about his desire to see federal employees back in the office, I’ve seen a few tweets about moms who work from home for the federal government. According to these stories (which never seem to come from the WFH moms themselves) these mothers are dismayed that they can no longer work from home because they would need to make new childcare arrangements (and presumably, because they enjoyed the balance of being able to work from home and spend more time with kids, unburdened by a commute or dead time in the office.) These tweets are never sympathetic to such moms. They basically exist to say a few things:
These moms were running a scam all along, and couldn’t possibly be working if they were also taking care of their kids.
If these moms actually cared about their kids, they wouldn’t work at all, from home or otherwise.
I understand the confusion about why working from home should change anything about childcare. Surely, if you’re working a full time job, you need childcare, even if you’re doing it out of your living room. And that’s generally true. Most moms who work from home aren’t attempting to be a full-time SAHM while also faux-working at a zoom job. Sometimes, they’re taking shifts with a spouse who also works from home, perhaps with flexible hours. But more often, they have childcare, usually some kind of part-time daycare or nanny. In fact, a mom was lambasted for that exact arrangement by the same obnoxious scolds a few weeks ago. I wrote about that here.
But there are still many reasons that being forced to return to an office could shake things up for a WFH mom, even if she was a hard worker. Picking a child up from school typically happens at 3 or 3:30. If you work from home, you can pop over and do this in the amount of time it would take an office worker to pick up a coffee from a nearby Starbuck’s. If you work in an office, you need to make arrangements for aftercare. The commute also eats up potentially hours of time that could be spent with your children. Even if you are a diligent worker, returning to an office (especially as a parent) can be a major downgrade, with limited upside for productivity. After all, having worked in an office for almost ten years, I can attest that much of the time spent in offices is spent doing basically nothing. Or in my case, trolling Reddit as a fictional British teenager.
(At this point you might say, “CHH, who would listen to you about work? You’ve been fired a million times!” This is true, but my being fired often had less to do with productivity or work ethic and more to do with poor social cues and my inability to “shout my wins,” whatever that means.)
But anyway, all this talk about WFH moms is driven by a binary: there are SAHMs, and there are working moms. SAHMs lovingly dote on their children all day through arts and crafts and homemade cookies, while working moms are out of the house until 6 PM, closing big boss contracts while their kids are ignored by exploited, indentured servants. SAHMs are, according to this line of thinking, unambiguously superior. WFH moms, by contrast, are failing at both, trying to have their cake and eat it too, or simply grifting for corporate welfare.
But actually, moms who work from home—scratch that, parents who work from home—are returning parenthood to its roots, where there was no clear distinction between a work space and a family space. If moms working in offices all day is a perverse and unnatural experiment, the same is true of dads working in offices—also an extremely recent concept.
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