This is a piece I wrote for the charity Working Families, as part of their 30th anniversary celebration, marked by the publication of Tomorrow's World, an anthology of perspectives on work-life balance.
Most of the pieces are well worth reading (apart from a few politicians posturing), and I decided to stay within their paradigm of the tension between "work" and "life", partly to speak honestly about my own 20 year history of balancing productivity, play and parenting. But regular Play Ethic readers will see my familiar agendas surfacing at the end... As usual, all comments welcomed.
Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'
Pat Kane
I guess I won't be the only contributor to this volume who's writing this piece under the very same wobbly conditions of 'work-life balance' that is our chosen topic.
In my case, I'm getting to grips with this piece as the school holidays begin: I'm four days over what (I hope) was a soft deadline. My daughter's been getting out of school at 12.15pm the last couple of days (was that a surprise announcement? Yes!). So I've had a few frantic mornings trying to master the inbox of self-managed tasks that face the average cultural freelancer. At the very least, this lifestyle demands clarity and efficiency when you actually do sit down in front of your interface.
After years of good and bad experiences, I've realised that I'm happiest when I can devote my energies fully to either 'work' or 'life' – however unsatisfactory those terms are - with as little overlap between the two realms as possible. Meaning that when my daughter emerges from the school gates, or after-school club, all of my affections and attentions are hers. And the best way to ensure that psychic commitment is to ensure that the anxieties of one's project-driven life are actually - or if necessary, forcibly - abated.
The necessity of a calm and tranquil mind (and heart, if possible) in the face of one's children also comes from a somewhat bumpy personal road. Post our separation eight years ago, my ex-wife and I made a binding pact to ensure that our children never had any sense of lacking access to either parent. We split our fortnight of care equally, weaving between each others' nearby households, allowing each other evenings and alternate weekends to sustain friendships and relationships (in different cities – Glasgow and London). But we've come together to ensure that none of our children ever returned to an empty house.
Both of us have our separate productive commitments. My childrens' mother is a well-established media editor, whose working week tapers to a climax of long, intense days in a city-centre office as the weekly deadline approaches. I'm a largely self-determined writer, musician and consultant, who can be very flexible when I'm in my daugthers' home town of Glasgow, but has a regular London routine (for work and new family), and occasional weeks-long stretches of touring or recording. I'm probably behind in my overall care hours, but I'm always keen to catch-up – and I'll be doing so over these school holidays.
The enabling conditions for all this are half personal and half technological. Tech-wise, texting and mobile calls (for last minute changes), social networks (for sharing family photos, keeping in touch with a student daughter), and synchronised digital calendars (which give us a picture of the weeks and months that allows for it all to be equitable and manageable). Personally…well, a friendship and mutual respect – and a narrative of family love – that keeps the whole network of care pulsing and responsive.
So far, so good. But what does such a picture of family life, in a flexible, entrepreneurial, post-marital world, imply for policy makers, government and employers? What are the "welfare supports" that could be imagined for this kind of family adhocracy? An experience full of motion and dynamism, passions, projects and – yes – a degree of instability and openness?
I can only look back on our own patchwork of arrangements over the years, and conclude that there are some marked tensions between state provision, civil society/social enterprise, and one's own family resources. In our state primary school in Glasgow, which both our children attended over a period of 14 years, we often availed ourselves of an 'after-school club' on the premises of the school.
It was started by a well-known and respected mother in the school, based on a day rate that worked out around £7 per day, and eventually growing (though the securing of development grants) to a well-appointed facility. Were our children always pleased to be there for the 60-90 mins it granted their parents to complete their tasks? No, not always: it was sometimes too boring, sometimes a continuation of schoolyard dynamics that they'd rather have gotten a rest from (though more often than not, I'd have to say, they'd have to be dragged away). The point for us was to be able and willing to respond to their anxieties – by cutting the days to a minimum, or arranging that the days coincided with other favoured pals that were going.
Yet I think that third space between school pick-up, and adult end-of-working-day (compelled by the after-school club, quite rightly, to be no later than 5.30pm on most days), gave our kids a precedent. They expected and wanted to be involving themselves in sports and arts classes – some they'd actively choose, some they would respond to as suggestions from us.
And again, the organisations providing these services were out there in the marketplace, in civil society, rather than state-provided – in our case, in areas of dance, drama and art. These had the advantage of being staffed by people who could claim a degree of excellence and classicism for the courses they provided – but the disadvantage of that being at quite a high cost price.
This experience has led me to believe that there should be some kind of state voucher scheme for after-school and children's club services. This would respond to the existing ecology of the situation of childcare. There's energy and idiosyncrasy that can come from the match-up between parents and children seeking services, and enterprising people in the arts and sports wanting to provide those services. But without some kind of subsidy, that match-up becomes a province of the affluent urban middle-classes.
Well-subsidised or free state provision must of course be part of the mix: we availed ourselves happily of such services over the years (indeed, we had a marvellous, and completely free game of father-daughter crown bowls in the summer sun, outside Glasgow's Kelvingrove Museum – also completely free - only the other day!). But there should be an element of the public budget devoted to supporting a sector which, in my experience, addresses the work-life balance - as it teeters between school-gate, end-of-workday, and school holidays – with great variety and quality.
Ultimately, we've taken a clear and encouraging lesson from our personal and social histories of childcare over these nineteen years. To wit, that the rights of the parent to be a rich, active parent – rather than some semi-present, semi-distracted enabler of the passage from childhood to adulthood – seems to be gaining ever more respect. Yet I believe there are still many new frontiers to be reached for in this area.
For example, the old demand of a shorter working week can now be addressed from a different, more development-and-nuture-oriented angle. It should be justified by the need to provide sufficient parenting time for the full development of one's children, and participation in building the social capital of our communities - rather than the usual arguments about 'sharing out the work' or providing 'recreation' for exhausted workers.
And perhaps when that rebalancing of care and work has been established, we can being to address what we mean by "work" itself – which is what I tried to do with my book, consultancy and blog The Play Ethic. To what extent can the patience, love, creativity and empathy that goes into the act of good parenting become an influence on the actual nature of the jobs and services we commit most of our waking hours to?
Of course, we all want to get away from the painful schizophrenia implied by 'work' and 'life' – the first constrained and compelled, the second voluntary and embraced. But over about a decade of advocacy of the power and potential of play, I now never underestimate how difficult it is for people to change their conception of what they do as productive, value-creating, collaborative people in organisations. Or more often than not, in order to achieve that identity, outwith organisations. An aspiration towards a 'play ethic' is something I still think is possible, given our growing post-materialist attitudes, our enabling technologies, and particularly given the current crisis of the work-to-consume paradigm.
But I think we need tangible experiences of unalienating, satisfying life to build up enough of what I call "lifestyle militancy". A militancy that emboldens us to challenge not just the length of working hours, but the nature of those hours, and even the very point of many of our divisions of labour, products and services.
Those experiences can come from many places. But they certainly come from where I started this piece: the open, honest demand of your child that you be present, engaged and a full participant in their unfolding towards adulthood. The school holidays is a good a place for that to start as any. A time that can brew up revolution, I'd say, as much as relaxation.
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (Macmillan, www.theplayethic.com), and one half of the 80's pop group Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk)
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