Want to have a good cry and learn something? Then watch this video about babies and the dreaded “Mommy Wars.”

The moving video below tells the stories of multiple moms who used to judge other moms. Hey, we all judge people — we get it. But throughout the video, all the women learn that they all do things differently for a reason. The video’s campaign is simple: #EndMommyWars.

Related on EcoSalon

2 Horror Films that Depict the Terrors of Motherhood: ‘The Babadook’ Wasn’t the First

4 Grown-Up Benefits of Crying When the Going Gets Tough

I Ate My Baby’s Placenta …On Purpose

The post The Mommy Wars are Ridiculous and Need to Stop [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

Why is a woman with a briefcase still so much less appealing?

As Erica Jong noted less than two years ago, American society has been engaged in “an orgy of motherphilia” for the past two decades. Cultural phenomena like Sarah Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies” and Angelina Jolie’s ever-increasing brood have combined to hold up motherhood as the greatest possible good — whether or not it’s economically, environmentally or emotionally sustainable for the women who are expected to bear and love all these future children.

In May, Amy Allen of The New York Times examined one of the latest additions to the feminist literature on balancing work, children and your personal life: French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter’s book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Many reviewers have criticized Badinter’s book for being a shrill condemnation of attachment parenting, with only anecdotal evidence to support its claims. Badinter’s objectivity has also come into question, since she has ties to companies that sell infant formula.

But as Allen points out, many reviewers also overlook the fact that Badinter’s book touches on a conflict that EcoSalon has also discussed in some depth. The conflict that mothers face — if they even have the luxury of making a decision on whether or not to work  — is usually framed as largely a internal and psychological debate, between the working mom who has to leave her children behind, and the stay-at-home mom who sacrifices her economic independence.

That debate, which is usually referred to as “the mommy wars,” makes parenthood a binary decision. It also frames traditionally masculine values — reason versus emotion; logic versus intuition; work versus home — as positive, and traditionally feminine ones as negative. Since most women don’t take political movements into account when deciding whether or not to have kids, framing the debate in this manner runs the risk of pitting woman against woman. If you have to choose one side, it’s easy to demonize the other.

But as Allen states, “either vision of feminism challenges the fundamental conceptual oppositions that serve to rationalize and legitimate women’s subordination.” Instead, we must face the central conflict in Badinter’s book, which is not internal, but structural and external. Affordable, high-quality day care and paid parental leave would go a long way towards resolving the moral, emotional and psychological conflicts that many women suffer.

In today’s current working and social environment, no matter what a woman chooses, there will be a cost, even to the point of foregoing children entirely. And framing the debate in terms of “choice” allows everyone to overlook the real conflict. In a just world, both men and women would be putting together a working environment that didn’t exact such a high emotional and financial toll from half the population. Until then, we can just keep reading books that we hope will help us figure it out.

Image: GeneralMills.

The post ‘The Mommy Wars’ are Less a Matter of Choice Than of Selective Sacrifice appeared first on EcoSalon.

In a perfect world, all restaurants would serve these.

10. Someone at this table has bedbugs.

9. This Christmas you are going to get four separate copies of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild from various acquaintances and your mother. This is inevitable; you cannot change it.

8. When the Mommy Wars draw to a bloody close in 2044, the few surviving men will be chained in the natal mines. Only one woman will be able to bring them back. That woman is you.

7. You will be an active part of a future movement to disenfranchise voters who refer to champagne as “champers.”

6. Right at this very moment, an actress is preparing herself to accept a moderately prestigious award for playing a complicated prostitute. In the future, awards for portraying complicated prostitutes will become not only the highest honor a female civilian can achieve but the statuettes will become a form of currency.

5. Your ankle, which feels kind of weird right now – it doesn’t hurt, exactly, but there’s kind of a twinge when you point your toes or walk in a certain way – is going to feel like that for the rest of your life.

4. When your waiter asks you to sign the credit card receipt, she’s going to refer to it as “getting your autograph;” a portion of each of your immortal souls will die instantly.

3. If life brings you tears, use the salt from those tears to make salted caramel macaroons, open a very expensive dessert shop, and charge $4 a piece. Later charge $6 apiece. People will pay it.

2. You were put here on this earth to design a line of artisan-style pizzas for a mid-range casual dining chain; for this purpose and no other were you formed out of nothingness.

1. Due to a series of odd and unrelated coincidences, you will never watch an episode of “Maude” again for the rest of your life.

The post 10 Fortunes You Never Got In Your Cookie appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best of the week at EcoSalon, hand-picked for your clicking pleasure.

Define…

… a well-stocked vegan pantry: what are the essential items you need to make healthy, tasty animal-free meals? Find out here.

…great historical fiction: Scott Adelson takes a look at ten novels where “once upon a time” is a ticket to a past we should never forget.

…sustainable fashion: what does that phrase really mean to you? {r}evolution apparel took to the streets of Seattle to find out.

…“Mommy War”: in the wake of the backlash from Anne -Marie Slaughter’s provocative article in The Atlantic on the role of women in the modern world, Andrea Newell asks – is the real problem our workaholic culture, and what can we do about it?

…good coffee: when fast, drive-thru coffee is this wasteful, can we ever call it “good”?

The post The Friday 5: Defining Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Don’t make this about working mothers – we need a workplace change for everyone.

When Anne-Marie Slaughter’s The Atlantic cover story appeared, it sparked a firestorm of criticism ranging from accusations of setting women in business back by telling her story of leaving her dream job in the high ranks of government to step back in her career to be there for her children; to stomping on feminism; to boohooing about her elitist stature and the choices she’s made when many women have none. Although it’s not surprising that her story caused so much backlash, thankfully it has also generated great discussion around some important issues. And, despite the furor, they aren’t just about working mothers, or even just women – but the need for our work culture to change for everyone.

The story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” is poorly titled, but still spoke to many who appreciated that Slaughter had the courage to tell her story of stepping back and wanting to be home for her children. Many women are used to feeling inadequate after reading stories of other women who made it to the top of their demanding professions, raised exceptional children and saved the world.

A Focus on Women
I first saw Sheryl Sandberg speak at the 2011 Women in the World Summit and she wowed the audience. We are contemporaries, and she is clearly a superwoman. Afterward I followed many of her talks and speeches and while I admired her mission to motivate and support women in business in their quest to be leaders, she also made me feel a bit resentful (something Slaughter alludes to in her article). As she motivates, she also expresses disappointment in our (hers and mine) generation in our failure to become leaders and places the blame squarely on our shoulders.

I was not alone in wishing she also championed the large number of women who occupy the middle ground – who don’t necessarily want to lead multinational corporations but want to sit at the table, who want to be heard, be recognized, and be equally compensated, but who still think it’s important to spend a significant amount of time with their families or pursue interests outside the office. These are the women, and a growing number of men, who are leaning back or on the fence about opting out of the workforce or into another career (if they have that choice) because that situation is so hard to find.

Does much of the blame falls on our American work culture? To hear Slaughter put exactly those feelings into words is tremendously satisfying. Can women be both leaders and great moms? Absolutely, but as Sandberg points out, you don’t see many of them, and it’s not completely due to a lack of ambition, but some very real workplace barriers.

Since Slaughter’s article came out, a large body of work has sprung up debating the issues that she raised. You might say that she isn’t covering any new ground as a “we all need balance” piece, but she has started an important discussion. Framing her argument around working mothers got many people’s backs up, but once you step back from that (as she does late in the article and in subsequent discussions), her argument and proposed changes should apply to everyone – meaning fathers, single parents and childfree women and men.

Toxic environment
It’s no secret that our work culture is, frankly, unsustainable and unhealthy. The U.S. has been a workaholic society for years, but the recession has exacerbated the weaknesses in our work culture. CNN calls the U.S. the no-vacation nation, highlighting the fact that most companies give employees only a few weeks off a year, and most expect employees to keep in touch with the office while on vacation. The U.S. lags far behind many European nations that employ liberal vacation policies and encourage their employees to use their time off.

Mother Jones reported that many businesses are posting double-digit profit growth while continuing the current employee workload and declining to hire more workers. “Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans.”

A full-time job used to require around 50 hours a week (allowing for lunch and a moderate commute). Now, for most, that number is low since we put more hours in at the office and can, and do, remain connected to the office nearly every waking moment with mobile technology. As our work culture continues to wring more and more work out of us, is there really time for much else?

In Glass Ceilings and 100 Hour Couples – What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us About Work and Family, authors Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy dissect the growing trend of highly educated women who are turning their backs on leadership and leaving the workplace – the same trend that Sandberg is lobbying against. Moe and Shandy report that dual-income families (the 100+ hour couples), show the most stress and damage from our current work climate. They conclude that an ideal arrangement involves one parent working part-time, yet meaningful part-time work is extremely hard to find.

However, concessions just for working parents can breed resentment in childfree women and men who might have their own, less recognized commitments outside of work like elder care, volunteering, hobbies or a sick spouse. That’s why change should apply to all employees, beginning with a fundamental shift in our work culture veering away from constant work obsession.

Flexibility Plays a Role
Slaughter admits that her regular full-time job as a professor is flexible and it was a shock when she entered government service to have to be on someone else’s timetable. This is where many who have spent their entire professional lives at someone else’s beck and call booed and hissed at her “complaining” which really came off more like a realization of what other professionals deal with. She quotes Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, as saying, “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.” I would amend that to say that flexibility is the only way to accommodate the myriad of personal situations people have outside of work, and children is just one of them.

Slaughter talks about being open about being a parent and having to tend to parental duties outside of work – not to bore her co-workers, but to set the tone of her work environment as family-flexible. Many women know this to be a potential minefield. When I worked in corporate America, I saw family commitments and subsequent time away from work used as a club in both salary raise negotiations and promotion discussions for several coworkers. Supervisors couched it as the employee being “not available” and “missing meetings,” and so on. It’s easy to point to other employees who have not missed work for these reasons as examples of promotion, so there is a reason many parents feel penalized when trying to balance both. It’s also something Sandberg fails to realize when telling women it’s entirely within their control to become leaders, despite having children.

What About the Men?
Slaughter writes, “Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver.” Men believe they have to be the primary breadwinner, because most workplaces refuse to see them as anything else. When men leave work or miss a meeting to tend to one of their children, more often than not, they feel the need to offer up an explanation, because the underlying thought is, “Why doesn’t their mother go?” (This is not necessarily true for single dads, of course.)

In this work climate, job stability often hinges on a worker appearing to be constantly available for every meeting and task. Where women bend or step back in their careers to care for children, men become more rigid to ensure their job security. I know a man who lost his job of seven years last week, one where he worked partly at home and commuted a long distance to work since his wife worked in another town, because the company terminated all flexible work arrangements. Other employees had asked to also have flex arrangements, and rather than accommodate them, they told all current flex workers they had to be in the office daily or find another job.

All Talk and No Change?
Now that a high-profile figure has raised the issue in such a public forum and it has clearly struck a chord – will anything change? Immediately and on a large scale, probably not. But companies that are ripe to consider flexible work arrangements might be persuaded by this discussion, and those that already offer it can see how important it is for employee attraction, retention and overall happiness. And, as long as we keep the discussion open, we might make progress not just for parents, but for everyone.

Images: Victor1558, Victor1558, Ed Yourdon, Mirimcfly

The post Not a Mommy War – This is About Our Unsustainable Workaholic Culture appeared first on EcoSalon.

You have a child. Congratulations! Now you just have to raise it.

You’ve been living in the lap of green luxury with your partner. You spend a minimal amount on food because you’re so good at gardening, farmers’ market shopping and home cooking. You recycle, compost and ride your bike everywhere. Life is good. Simple, affordable and semi-logical. Then one of you brings it up: children.

“It’s a good time to start,” says one of you. “Plus, we’re not getting any younger.”

Children: a perennial favorite. Children are wonderful! In celebration of this, let us ponder on all the reasons they’re not.

20. They might have that one family gene that Uncle Bob has. The one where he thinks he is part alien, part groundhog. Or was a spy. While also being a famous rock star.

19. Someday, somehow, you know that it is your children who will act as the agents of your own death. They’ve already stolen half of your chromosomes. Who knows to what other lengths these tiny genetic replicants will go? You’ll have to watch every move they make. Haven’t you known since your own childhood that all it takes is step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back? Children cannot possibly be trusted to maintain your spinal integrity. The world is full of aging sidewalks bulging with rips and tears, and your bone density is low enough as it is.

18. What if they’re all cisgendered? What will you blog about then? 

17. The manifold and shimmering joys of spinsterhood will never be yours.

16. Your daughter is going to have an iPhone by her fifth birthday, and she’s going to use it exclusively for internet bullying.

15. Capitalism, you know, man? Capitalism.

14. American children eat practically every day. Do you have any idea how wasteful that is? Do you even know how many small female-run businesses you could support in Nigeria with that kind of money? Seven. You could support seven, and they would all make the most amazing shoes. Well, not shoes exactly. More like slippers. Incredibly comfortable slippers. But you decided to have children, so instead of reviving their local economy, all of these women got malaria and died, leaving behind 26 motherless children, none of whom have any slippers.

13. There’s an 80% chance that any child born after 2011 is going to end up posting at least four videos of themselves wearing a cat mask to Xtube. I’m sorry, but there it is.

12. What’s your family’s stance on negotiating with terrorists? What if one of your children is kidnapped? Do you pay the kidnappers, or do you write off your losses and focus on the survivors? What’s your absolute price ceiling? Do you adjust for yearly inflation or stick to a flat rate? If one of your children is ransomed, won’t that set a dangerous precedent for his or her younger siblings?

11. They probably don’t even know what Dim Sum is.

10. Your children are going to absolutely hate Radiohead.

9. If you take your baby on a plane with you to visit your family on the East Coast, and your baby cries, and the man in the seat in front of you whips his head around and glowers unpleasantly, you’re going to feel really uncomfortable for the entire six-hour flight. Also, the flight attendant will forget to bring you your ginger ale, but you’ll feel too self-conscious to remind her to bring you one the next time she checks in on your row. You don’t deserve a ginger ale, because you’re a terrible mother who can’t even keep her own baby from crying, you terrible mother of a crying baby.

8. Think of all the juice boxes, granola bar wrappers and other packaged crap they’re going to beg you for. YOU, the queen of recycling and organic eating!

7. Your son is going to have a Flickr account if Yahoo doesn’t kill it first, and it’s going to be absolutely terrible.

6. None of your children will finish graduate school before the age of 35. The only degrees available will be an MBA in gaming apps or a doctorate in dessert photography. All of your offspring will be unemployable. This is also right around when Social Security will give out.

5. Any child born after the Global Banking Act of 2017 must serve three years as an unpaid intern in Bank of America’s deep-sea titanium mines.

4. You’re still going to die, you know.

3. You know that cats suck the air right out of babies’ mouths, don’t you? So you’ll always have to worry about that. Cats are witches, and witches hate babies.

2. What if only one of your children is gluten-intolerant, but you convince all of them that they’re gluten-intolerant because it makes arranging dinner easier? What if then your daughter goes to a birthday party without your supervision and accidentally has a cupcake and realizes that you lied to her and the revelation drives her to madness?

1. You can’t just walk away. Ever.

Image: photologue

The post Children Are Great, Except When They’re Not appeared first on EcoSalon.