The Family Sacrifices We So Rarely Talk About

On September 8 legendary CNN anchor Bernard Shaw died at 82.?

In 2000, at the age of 61, he announced his retirement after 40 years in journalism. In 2014 he told NPR that he made the decision to retire because the sacrifices he and his family had made had begun to “gnaw” at him. “I will never know the sacrifices they made so that I could do what I did,” he said. “The countless weeks away from them, the missing of so many precious moments in a child's and a wife's lifetime, experiences.”

But he’d actually gone a step further during a tribute program at the time of his retirement. He told Sam Donaldson, to Donaldson’s utter incredulity, that looking back at all that he’d missed with his family that he didn’t think it was worth it.

It’s remarkable to me, in 2022, that our ideas of men, women and family remain so constricted. I was struck, during the debates about childcare subsidies that were ultimately stripped out of the “Build Back Better” plan, how many people felt comfortable debating if women “should” work and, even more astonishingly, if they wanted to. The idea that a woman might not see the time spent away from her children as “worth it” was taken as a given by many pundits.?

And yet it would sound odd to hear people debating whether or not men should work — or if they want to. This despite the fact that men’s labor force participation rates have fallen about 20 points since 1948. The assumption, rooted in some hazy nostalgia for a 1950s America that never really existed except on TV, is that men want big, important jobs, women want to care for their home and family, and that is that. Neat little boxes for neat little binaries.

And yet, at the very heart of human experience, people of all genders want a lot of the same things. We want to be surrounded by the people we love and to have the time and energy to enjoy their company. We want to be challenged by work that has meaning and purpose and provides us with the resources to live a good life. We want financial security and stability. We want to be there for the births of our children and hold the hands of our dying loved ones. We want to celebrate closing the deal, winning the case, winning the game. We want to ring in holidays by eating delicious foods and exchanging thoughtful gifts.?

When we shove these needs and desires into weird gender constructs we do a disservice to ourselves as humans. Too many men take the promotion they don’t really want, pursue a career they don’t really love, say yes to the high-profile but overly demanding project, because they are “supposed” to. Too many women leave jobs they love — or get passed over for a promotion they want — because of their own and others expectations about what they are meant to prioritize.?

Balance, for too long, has been a concept aimed at women. The word became equal parts cudgel and cruel joke. A woman was meant to “find balance” (as if it is hiding somewhere and all one needs to do is discover where) at work so she could then provide balance for her hard-working spouse. In this equation women are allowed to have ambition and professional achievements, as long as they can fit them around the obligation to care and the enablement of their spouse. Men, on the other hand, are allowed to care for and connect with their family, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their work.?

What if, instead, we started to see everyone as full human beings? If we reframe the entire debate to be about how we enable human flourishing for everyone without regard to gender identity or family configuration, we might be able to imagine family-friendly policies -- both corporate and public -- as being beneficial to everyone.

Tami Forman is the founding chief executive of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that empowers stay-at-home mothers and other caregivers to restart their professional careers. Since its founding in 2016, Path Forward has worked with more than 100 companies, including Amazon, Apple, Comcast NBC Universal, Netflix, SAP, Walmart, and Verizon to launch, implement and expand returnships and other return to work programs for mid-career professionals.