On my way to Swords to other day, I lost my way and ended up in Navan. Other than being another spectacular lack of map reading skills, it also added quite a bit of time to a journey that should have been quite straightforward. It also happened at 5.50 in the morning, which did not help my mood at all. The roads were clear, as you would expect, until… the clock struck six, the traffic went down – Hickory Dickory Dock.

Driving against the traffic at six in the morning proved to be a mesmerising experience where one car followed another, followed another, followed another, all rolling at the same speed with the same space in between. Grand scale hypnotising which I did genuinely find unbalancing as a driver coming the other way.

But then it did hit me that at six in the morning, mothers and fathers were on the road in order to be at work at 8 or 9am in or around Dublin. It also struck me that in order to pay the mortgage, probably both parents were heading down at six in the morning, hence pushed to a ridiculous situation of going to work in order to pay for the mortgage and the additional childcare costs that need to be paid in order to pay for the mortgage. Childcare cost that can be as high as the mortgage in the first place.

And the commitment to secure what is a basic need (shelter), means that family are not only up at a ridiculous time in the morning, they will also be back at a ridiculous time at night. Having got the kids out of bed in the morning and dispatched to the crèche/before-afterschool club, the evening is about picking the kids up and stuffing them back to bed. When the kids are old enough to be told to work hard at school in order to secure a good job later, they are faced with "parental role models" often in "good jobs" where the level of energy left at the end of the day is barely enough to pour a glass of wine, stuff ready prepared meal (expensive and not necessarily nutritious) in the microwave. So what kids are seeing are parents worn out and unable to do anything too demanding and very easily slipping into a lemon state in front of the TV. That’s the role model kids see.

The notion that the parents could be working very hard during the day is meaningless since it is invisible. Kids used to be able to see Daddy work on the farm/shop and Mammy to be involved in the community. An understanding of the amount of effort required in order to reap benefits was easy to grasp. Today, work is highly cerebral and automated and anyway kids are not allowed there. No wonder that when society claims that you can have every whim at the click of the mouse, kids believe that hard work is no longer necessary.
There is another consequence to work being the focus in a society where self-actualisation* has become such a cardinal value. Working life, being portrayed as a path to self-actualisation, taps very much into individual drive. When downsizing/plant closure/restructuring are latent, between thinking group’s efficiency, we save our skin. We live in a state of constant defensiveness. Nobody is constructive when defensive.

By contrast, a family by definition needs to put the good of the whole before the good of the individual in order to operate sustainably. This is much more difficult to do, being selfish is easier than being benevolent. Coming back drained from work, the level of energy required in order to think collectively is simply not there.
Family dynamics, that used to be taken for granted, need now to be chosen and agreed. And the two biggest challenges or decisions that a couple must now decide on are defining where individual space stops to allow for family space to start, and what are the roles within the family.

Traditionally, those questions did not need to be asked since it was the man who brought the money home to sustain the family while the woman looked after the family emotionally and practically, the kids would do their bit as per what their capabilities would allow. At five, William Cobbett was responsible for chasing the birds out of the family vegetable patch, I was responsible from an early age for walking my younger sibling to school.

As women are now highly educated and working, their expectations have also shifted, and rightly so. However the redefinition of roles as part of the dynamics of the family has not been given so much thought. When it has, the conclusion is that either the father or the mother will have to pay the consequences career-wise because the workplace is still appalling at allowing for meaningful work/life balance or focus on quality "working time" over "quantity of hours". As putting one’s career on the back burner is not always possible and roles are seen as equal rather than complementary, power struggle arises within a couple, stretching relationships further. The kids meanwhile are not given the opportunity to contribute and left in front of their playstation. Do you ever hear: "It will be done quicker if I do it"?

In order to go on the career ladder, third level education is seen as just the beginning, masters are more or less a must. Even if a masters is undertaken straight after a degree, life long education will probably require another one at some point. For the purpose of getting this, a fair amount of time and dedication has to be put in, let alone personal sacrifice when family responsibilities are also part of the daily remit.
Once graduated, a demanding work environment that favours short term returns and still operates much on a command and control type fashion means that for at least 8 hours of the day, we are fighting our corner.

How to manage the transition from this kind of environment to home, where collective good means that a much more collaborative and long-term approach needs to be in place? How do we give "time to time" when it is already late, we are wrecked and the tensions of the day are likely to unleash?

If you decide to stay at home in order to bring the kids up and be a parent, how do you reconcile the emotional investment of having studied and worked to reach a certain position and having part of your identity tied up in this and then give it up. Since today’s education is about creating workers over citizens, how do you reconstruct an identity that is meaningful? It is possible to do so, but my own experience, as well as, from what I gather from other parents having experienced the same thing, it is hard, unnecessarily hard. Being a parent when one is feeling vulnerable, down-rated, out of control and utterly inadequate is not an easy task.

Anybody having read Dickens’ "Great Expectations" realises that at the end Pip is the loser. He had a dream, lived it but when finally realising that happiness was not the result, could not return to his former more simple life. So he carried on, differently, but carried on. Again the role model that kids see, are parent riddled with guilt, suffering from low esteem and deeply unhappy.

So not only we become aware of not being the parents we hoped to be, we cannot cope given the opportunity. Either case, kids are paying the price.

At individual level, we ought to ask ourselves whether we are not climbing a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall. Do we want to be remembered by our kids as stressed out, forgetting that between the past and the future, there is a present that needs to be lived? Is it really enough to say that we want the kids to be happy if we cannot quantify/qualify what happiness is about? What is our tangible definition for success? If success cannot be defined, neither can failure. Unfortunately, as we live in a society that measures success in material terms, redefining a more meaningful living will also have an impact on our overall identity. In many ways, it is about deciding to "Be" instead of just "Have".

But living in a society, there are questions that we need to answer collectively. Should witnessing the Celtic tiger be at that price? Before carrying on any further, is it not time we ask whether businesses are there to support society and this means allowing individuals and family to carry out their non-work related responsibility decently, or are individuals solely existing as cogs to a business logic that still privilege profit? If this question is not answered real soon, not only the current generation of worker is likely to totally lose the plot, the next will be too damaged to even build a better society, let alone better businesses.

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*Self-actualisation: Self-realisation