Ellen Galinsky

Interview with Ellen Galinsky

Do you see yourself as a leader? What is your vision?

I see myself as leading a leadership organization which I co-founded and serve

now as President. Our vision is to provide data to inform decision making on

the changing workforce, changing family, and changing community. It is our

intent to surface critical issues where data will make a difference just as

these issues crest and then to design, conduct and disseminate non partisan,

high-quality, rigorous research that can inform decision making. Thus, being

ahead of the curve and influencing important decisions (whether those

decisions are made by government, employers, families, or citizens) are what

put us in a leadership position.

What led you to work in this field?

My personal experience has always been the driving force in my career. I

have always taken the very real questions that I have had or that I hear from

others and turn them into inquiries that can help others. For example, when

I became a parent, I wondered if and how parents grow and change. That led to

my book, The Six Stages of Parenthood (Addison Wesley, 1987). When I began

to look for child care, I researched and co-authored The New Extended Family:

Day Care That Works.

In the research that I did for those two books, I kept hearing about work and

family life. In the beginning, the people whom I interviewed thought that

everyone else was managing these two worlds and only they were having

trouble. Those unnamed, unacknowledged feelings led to my first studies on

work and family life and ultimately to the co-founding of the Families and

Work Institute.

One study or project leads to new questions, to new answers, that then lead

to new questions.

What difficulties have you experienced managing work and a family

and what coping strategies have you used?

My children are 31 and 27 years old. In fact, my daughter's 27th birthday is

today, May 20th. I have a mother who will turn 94 on May 24th. And I have

been married for 36 years.

I have been at home with my children, worked part-time and worked full-time.

My mother is well now, but had complications following surgery when she was

90. So, as you can imagine, I have faced many of the issues that your

readers have faced. And I have run an organization so I have the

perspectives of an employer and an employee. Having these experiences

enriches my commitment to finding well-researched strategies that work.

If I had to select one strategy that works, it would be ongoing problem

solving. This entails 1) understanding the specific problem; 2) generating

multiple solutions; 3) evaluating what would work and what wouldn't work

about each of these proposed solutions; 4) selecting one solution to try; and

5) evaluating how it is working and if it isn't, beginning the process all

over again.

I also think that listening to others, understanding their perspectives makes

family life and work life work!

What were some of the surprising facts you discovered when you were

researching parents and children in a work and family context?

The most surprising finding is that what we think children think and what

children actually think can be quite different. For example, in my study, I

asked children: "If you were granted one wish that could change the way your

mother's or your father's work affects your life, what would that wish be?"

I asked parents to guess what their children would wish and the majority

guessed that their children would wish for more time together. In fact, the

largest proportion of children wished that their parents would be less tired

and stressed. That doesn't mean that time is unimportant to children. It

means that if they were given just ONE wish, they would like to see their

parents less stressed out when they are together.

I also found that while three in five parents say they like their jobs a lot,

only two in five children think their parents like their jobs a lot. We

often come home and complain. Or we tell our children that we don't want to

leave them to go to work...without telling them that we do like our jobs.

These findings can affect how we parent!

You conducted a nationally representative study of 605 employed

mothers and fathers with children birth through 18, and 1023 children, ages

8-18 that led to the findings for "Ask the Children." What were some of the

processes you used to undertake this research and how did you evaluate such a

large sample?

Before designing the Ask the Children study, I took several steps to arrive

at the right questions to ask:

1) Bringing in researchers who study the impact of mothers' and fathers' work

on children for a day long meeting;

2) Conducting a literature review on the impact of parental employment on

children for the American Academy of Pediatrics;

3) Asking my daughter to interview children as a part of a college

independent study course she was taking;

4) Interviewing parents and children within families in person in 15 states;

and then finally

5) Designing the questionnaires for a representative sample of children 8-18

and for parents with children birth through 18.

Most of our research includes nationally representative samples. In this

study, we worked with Harris Interactive, a research firm and they conducted

the interviews with parents over the telephone. Children were surveyed in

their classrooms. Then the samples were compared with national probability

samples and the data weighted accordingly.

Do you believe that mothers can succeed at managing work and raising

a family at the same time without making compromises in either arena?

Studies show that you can't tell very much about how a child will turn out

simply because that child's mother works. It is how we parent that makes a

difference. And it is whether our children are a priority in our lives. So,

yes, I do believe that we can mother and father well if we work at it.

What challenges do you see emerging for women and men who want

fullfilment at a personal and professional level in the 21st Century?

Work is becoming more pressured and many women and men in the United States

are feeling overworked. We just released a study on this topic this past

week (see our website--www.familiesandwork.org  for the executive summary).

Managing work and family in a 24/7 world is the biggest challenge we face.

How can corporations be innovative in meeting these new demands and

still be profitable?

Our study on feeling overworked identified 13 contributors to feeling

overworked. For example, employees who do more work that they define as

low-value feel more overworked. Employees who have less flexibility feel

more overworked.

While most people see work and family life as a zero sum game (if you give to

one side, you take away from the other), our research clearly finds...and

finds again and again, that a good work life enhances family life and job

performance. In other words, employees who are part of efforts to eliminate

work that is a waste of time or have more flexibility tend to be more

productive, committed, loyal, and more likely to want to stay with their

employer. It isn't a win/loose. It can be a win/win.

With respect to your on-going National Study of the Changing

Workforce in the US, what are the major trends which have emerged so far and

what initiatives have been instigated as a result of this?

Because our National Study of the Changing Workforce is funded by companies,

it is targeted to address their burning questions about the US Labor Force.

The last study investigated the biggest predictors of job performance. We

found that a good quality job and a supportive work environment make more of

a difference than wages and benefits, in predicting loyalty, commitment, and

retention. Salaries and benefits are thus necessary but not sufficient.

By defining the predictors of performance as the job itself, the work-life

field has begun to focus on work redesign as the next step in family

friendliness. Our website also has the executive summary of these findings.

On a macro scale, do you see a growing disparity between fatherhood

and motherhood or a convergence of these unique roles in the family unit?

I wouldn't define it is a disparity or a convergence. Men and women are both

different and similar in way that research is still uncovering. Our National

Study of the Changing Workforce found that over the past 20 years, men are

more involved in taking care of their children. And men and women are

equally likely to experience work-family conflict.

And while men are more involved in parenting, many women have enlarged their

roles to be economic providers (we found that in a 1995 study which we aptly

named, Women: The New Providers).

What do you see as being essential in the parenting of children?

In my Ask the Children book, I identified 12 parenting skills. They include

raising the child with good values, making the child feel important and

loved, knowing what is going on in the child's life, spending time talking

with the child, being involved in his or her school or child care,

encouraging the child to want to learn and to love learning, establishing

family routines and rituals, not loosing control when the child makes the

parent angry, attending the important events in the child's life, and so on.

As I read the research and as we conduct our own, we find that there are two

essential ingredients of parenting: warmth/caring (in other words, love) and

responsiveness (reading and responding to the child's cues and clues).

Everything else we do falls under these two important parenting skills.

Are you satisfied with the way in which children are being educated

at schools?

No....there is too much emphasis on how children fare on tests and not enough

emphasis on children as learners in the United States. We will be conducting

a new Ask the Children study on Children and Learning to try to shift the

debate to more of a focus on learning.

What are your long-term aspirations?

To continue to ask the questions where answering them will make a difference.