I was thrilled to see a great review of I Know How She Does It from Lenore Skenazy in the Wall Street Journal today. Lenore is the brains behind the “Free Range Kids” movement, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her writing tweak the over-protective and fact-challenged over the years (guess what? The crime rate in many places is lower now than it was in the 1960s when kids roamed freely). She had some great lines, and really got the book. There’s this:
“The problem, then, is not a lack of free time, according to Ms. Vanderkam; it’s our blindness to it. If we eat breakfast with the kids but not dinner, she writes, we feel bad we weren’t there for the family meal. Even though we were. Somehow the meal in the morning doesn’t count.
“A certain amount of guilt and frustration pervades everyone’s life, but women in particular have been trained by an endless stream of magazines, books, blogs and TV to blame these feelings on our work life. So if we miss a softball game due to a late flight, ‘we start down the road of soul searching and the need to limit hours at work or perhaps resign,’ Ms. Vanderkam writes. ‘But we don’t rend our garments over the softball game missed because another kid had a swim meet at the exact same time. No one ever draws the conclusion from that hard-choice moment that you need to get rid of the other kid.’ That is my favorite sentence in the book.”
It may be mine too! The review is behind the pay wall, but if you Google “The 44-Hour Workweek” and “Lenore Skenazy” you can read the whole thing.