Thursday's Psychological Trivia Answer: Who Spent More Time With Their Children, 1965 Stay-At-Home Moms or 1998 Working Moms?

Thought for the Day: Tuesday's question was:
                                 True or False: At-home mothers in 1965 spent more time with their 
                                 children than working mothers did in 1998.

The answer is: False. In "Working Moms and Kids," Katy Abel reports the findings of a recent study by University of California sociologist, Suzanne Bianchi, in conjunction with the University of Maryland. The study found that working mothers actually spent slightly more waking hours with their children than at-home mothers did a generation ago.  Three hundred working mothers kept time diaries showing how they'd spent the previous 24 hours. The results were compared to diaries kept by '60s moms. Here are the results:

• "In 1998, working mothers spent an average 5.8 waking hours with their children.
• In 1965, they spent 5.6 hours with the kids."

It has been a while since 1998. It would be interesting to see what the results would be today. My guess is that the findings would be similar. What concerns me is that working mothers short-change themselves & may therefore, also short-change their children. It does not surprise me that mothers are taking less "me" time & opt to give more to their children. As I said in Monday's post, when mothers (and fathers, for that matter), take time for their dreams, they are a role model for their children. If your work is connected to your personal dreams, it is built into the equation. However, many people are working for a paycheck & not moving towards their dreams. 

If you are working in a job that is unsatisfying, it is important to be doing things that will help you move towards your personal dreams. Your children are watching & learning from your example. If you show them that there is no way for a parent to strive for their dreams, they will follow in your footsteps & sacrifice their dreams, too. Although you may feel there is no time for your dreams in your already busy life, start by spending some time thinking about what is missing. Identify what you want & then you will be able to find ways to incorporate it into your life. For ideas on how to make it happen, you can spend a few hours reading my book. If time is even more limited, you can spend an hour watching 20 short video clips to help you Jump-start Your Life in an Hour. You owe it to yourself & your children to be making your life as meaningful as possible.

One Person Can Only Do So Much?

Thought for the day: On this holiday weekend what is your dream for the world? Spring is a time for rebirth. I hope that spring will help you to reignite your dreams. This weekend I have been thinking about freedom, change & the circle of life. What are your dreams? I hope you will share one dream here. As the simple edit above shows, one person's dreams can do so much to inspire others.

How often do you see the problems facing the world & feel overwhelmed? We are all busy living our lives, feeling we can only handle the demands of work & family life. When we feel this way, we think thoughts like the one above, "I'm just one person, how can I make a dent in the problems of the world?"

In 1983, I was a 3rd year doctoral student at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, I was one person stretched to what I thought was the max. I worked part time as an intern, part time as a fee-for-service psychology assistant at the Greater Lawrence Psychological Center, was a full time student & mother of three children. I was trying to complete my doctorate & had to choose a topic for my Doctoral project. I was leaning towards working on something that would build on my Master's Thesis, which looked at what helps children cope with bereavement, father absence & war. I thought it would make the project easier to accomplish within a year.

That same year, the television movie, "The Day After," aired. It was a powerful, disturbing movie which portrayed the lives of a family in Kansas the day after a nuclear attack. After I watched the film with my family,  I angrily asked, "Where are the demonstrations? Why aren't there protesters against nuclear proliferation like there were protesting the Viet Nam War?" My oldest daughter was a teenager.  With the biting honesty of a teenager confronting what she saw as hypocricy she asked, "Why aren't you doing anything?" I told her I was too busy, going to school working & running a household, but her question haunted me.

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you may already have noticed that often I sleep on or "dream on" things & awaken with new solutions to problems. After I slept on it, I woke up & realized that I could do something. I decided to use my doctoral project as a way to discover what was keeping people from taking action against the nuclear threat. I decided to create & study a technique to help promote discussion of this difficult topic & to help stimulate activism. It was harder than what I had planned to do since I was going into a new area of research, but it energized me. I felt more positive about the project & actually completed it in a timely fashion.  In addition, as a parent, I was modeling the kind of behavior I wanted my teenage daughter to emulate. Instead of telling her, "There is only so much one person can do," I was showing her that, "one person can do so much."

What is your dream for the world? What can you do today to start moving toward your dream? The 1st & most important step is owning your dream. Tell yourself what you want to accomplish & then tell others. Just conceptualizing it will help you begin to see how to fit your dream into your already busy life. In this day & age, it might be as simple as googling the issue & posting something on your facebook page every day. I'd love to hear your dreams. Have you ever felt like there was nothing you could do to change something & found a way? I'd love to hear your stories.