Is Going Home Possible?
By Evan Gahr, Richard Miniter
Anne Haley Brown sounds like the quintessential career woman. She boasts an Ivy League education, an elite law school degree, and a stint at Los Angeles’ best known law firm.
But snagging a law firm partnership is the least of Brown’s thoughts these days. This mother of two young girls, who hasn’t worked since her second was born, has a more compelling task than fighting for a corner office: "I’ve got to get my daughters ready to stand on their little feet."
After that, Brown may return to work. But at the moment she isn’t exactly pounding the pavement. The Stanford University law school grad may have been trained to bring witnesses to tears on cross-examination, but the only crying Brown sees regularly now are the misty eyes of her two youngsters. And that suits her just fine: Ever since her daughters were born "work just doesn’t have the same importance to me.’’
Amidst the nation’s ideologically charged child care debate, home-by-choice mothers like Brown barely register on the radar screen. Although day care is deemed a necessity to which the government must devote huge sums, these women—who run the gamut from secretaries to physicians—have discovered another option, a calling really.
It’s one which feminists scorn, the mainstream media generally overlooks, and the Clinton administration ignores. Betty Friedan set the tone by deriding women who stay at home as inmates of comfortable concentration camps. More recently, Hillary Clinton let slip with the sneer that she wasn’t the kind of mother to stay at home and bake cookies.
But many women with credentials to match Clinton’s do stay home. Last year, Pepsi-Cola North America ceo Brenda Barnes, one of the highest ranking women in U.S. business, and on a fast track to an even higher spot, resigned to stay home with her kids. Her decision sparked intense, albeit fleeting media interest. But it was hardly an isolated event.
A recent survey of 900 female graduates of Harvard’s medical, law, and business schools found that 85 percent thought decreasing their work hours after they became mothers might be detrimental to their careers—yet 70 percent did it anyway. And 25 percent of mba graduates left the workforce entirely after a birth. Among mothers generally, far more concentrate on their children when they are young. (See the data on page 47.) This in spite of many contemporary expectations that motherhood will be a two-week detour—pop the kid, get back to work, climb the corporate ladder.
But a funny thing happens on the way to the office. Many women find that work just doesn’t have the same glimmer when there is something warm and breathing to compare it to. Who wants to exchange pleasantries at the office water cooler when you can be at home making goo-goo eyes at your baby? Many women told they should "have it all’’ seem to be coming to the realization that all they really want is right at home during those years.
Psychologist Brenda Hunter, author of The Power of Mother Love, says that "Women are unprepared for the transforming event that motherhood is. Many fall in love with their children and do not return to the workplace."
Laura Collins, who quit her job as an art director for a Los Angles real estate firm, echoes those sentiments. "You have this little baby. Suddenly all these feelings come out that never happened before that make you want to stare at the baby for hours and nurture and hug her."
Like many women, Collins drifted into her role as an at-home mom. At first, she continued to work after her daughter Emma was born in 1994. During her lunch hour, Collins would drive home to play with her baby. Along the way one day, she listened to talk radio host Laura Schlessinger warn against leaving a child’s upbringing to a nanny. Do you think if kids could make the choice they would really choose a nanny? asked Schlessinger. The words hit home with Collins, who thought of herself as the quintessential career woman. Eventually she told her husband, "I can’t do it anymore.’’
"I haven’t regretted it for a second. I felt I was cheating my children." The little secret here is that kids benefit tremendously when their mothers stay home. It’s a secret for a number of reasons. For one thing, advertising that fact forces mothers who leave their kids with day care workers to face uncomfortable questions about their decision. Plus, lots of interest groups attack all arguments that might undercut the rationale for increased government involvement in child care.
"No one wants to report the truth because we might make someone feel guilty," says Heidi Brennan, public policy director for the support group Mothers-at-Home. Many individual mothers, however, find their own way to the conclusion that they are not replaceable.
Some try the caretaker route, only to find it woefully inadequate. Cathy Ross, for example, tried to balance her kids’ needs with her job responsibilities at a California advertising agency. Eventually she quit. Referring to her 11-year-old son and her twin six-year-old daughters, she says "the mom they get after school at three o’clock is a lot more receptive than the one who barreled through the door at six and had to cram homework, baths, and dinner into a two-hour time frame.’’
Ross, who lives in San Clemente, says that her kids seem more secure now. And she has time to listen to their concerns. That’s particularly important because children tend to "store up’’ things, and aren’t likely to vent in a neat two hours.
Of course, what’s best for kids often takes a back seat to politics. In an era when activists can’t invoke "our children" often enough in their quests to justify various government programs, how do advocates treat women who actually bend their own lives for their children? The Washington Post recently editorialized that the "child care problem in this country isn’t helping moms stay home." Brenda Hunter notes that last year’s White House Child Care Conference "made the professional caregiver the national heroine," while at-home mothers were ignored. "Women who make the decision that their children are the most important part of their life" command no respect among liberal elites, she warns.
For many at-home mothers, the decision to be there for their children carries considerable financial and personal sacrifice. Heidi Brennan says it’s a common misperception that staying home with your kids is a luxury for the rich. Actually, Census Bureau figures show that couples with one parent at home have much more modest incomes than others. Households where both parents work make about 50 percent more. (See the graph on page 54.)
Most families, however, contend that that’s ultimately a small price to pay. Leslie Spencer and her husband cut their budget to the bone so that Mrs. Spencer could stay home after her daughter was born in 1995. The Spencers refinanced their car loan, dispensed with cable TV, stopped going out to eat, and even ditched call waiting. Yet these measures didn’t quite offset the lost income from Mrs. Spencer’s public relations job. To make up the difference, Spencer started a small home-business. She even founded a support group, Home-based Working Moms, for women who do the same.
"The real liberation is to be free to raise your children," says Laura Collins. "That’s more emancipating than being a slave to your employer and missing out on those great years of seeing your kids grow up."
Evan Gahr is a New Yorker who writes frequently for tae on education and culture.
America’s newest
corporate address
is home sweet home
By Richard Miniter
Brent Winters runs Innovative Solutions & Technologies, an international software company, from the upstairs bedroom of his Joplin, Missouri home. His wife Robin fields his calls as another employee, a hard-working salesman, toils away in the den.
Sales grew by 92 percent last year and are expected to top $800,000 this year. Brent knows he has to hire more staff, but he refuses to move his booming business from his three-bedroom house. Why would he? "I can take a peek at my son and be back in my office in 30 seconds," he says. Another bonus: "I have lunch with my wife every day."
Brent Winters is a lot more than a quirky software company owner. He’s one of more than 12 million Americans who run a full-time business from their home. The vast majority are keeping their business based at home specifically so they can spend more time with their family. Instead of returning from a distant job filled with stress and fatigue, home-based entrepreneurs can greet their children as they file off the school bus.
Working at home isn’t just good for families, it is often good for checking accounts. At-home entrepreneurs save money by not commuting and not paying office rent. And many earn good incomes. Nearly 3 million home-based entrepreneurs earned more than $100,000 last year, according to a recent study by the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater’s Home-based Business Project. Professor David Buchen, who conducted the research, expects the number of high-earning home enterprises to grow .
There are more Americans working at least part of the time from home than most people realize. As many as 40 million Americans conduct some work from home, says the National Association of the Self-Employed. These are a mixed bunch which include telecommuters, part-time business owners, and independent contractors.
By any measure, the number of at-home workers is rising. Certainly the membership lists of the organizations that have sprung up to serve at-home businesspeople are surging. Just two years after it was formed, the non-profit Home Business Institute has more than 50,000 members.
Other organizations like Small Office Home Office and the American Association of Home-based Businesses are also helping make it more acceptable to run a business from home. "I used to buy those novelty tapes that have office noises so that people wouldn’t realize I was working at home," says Connie Colten, president of Colten Creations, a Santee, California home business. "Now it is hip to be home."
Many famous entrepreneurial ventures were incubated in domestic settings—Apple Computer was born in Steven Wozniak’s garage, Lillian Vernon cooked up her famous catalogue company on the kitchen table of her New York apartment, and Mo Siegel started tea-maker Celestial Seasonings in his rented A-frame outside of Boulder, Colorado, using a screen door to dry herbs. What sets many of today’s home-based business owners apart is that they don’t intend—ever—to leave home. And the desire to spend more time with their family is the number-one reason for this, according to Link Resources, a New York-based research group.
Experts cite these factors for the explosion of home-based businesses:
Family life. Many college-educated women start home businesses when they become mothers. Catherine Karabetsos and Karin Hall formed Quality Customer Service and Sales, a Wheeling, Illinois-based cosmetics telemarketing firm, in Hall’s den in 1991. Karabetsos’s four children and Hall’s two children play nearby as the business partners send faxes and take calls. The $230,000-per-year enterprise now has five employees, all of whom are mothers working at home. "We wanted to be full-time moms and full-time marketers," says Karabetsos.
New Technology. Powerful new personal computers allow entrepreneurs to run complex enterprises without mail rooms, receptionists, or accountants. E-mail automatially arrives in the right place. Word processing and voice recognition software make secretaries obsolete. Computers can send and receive faxes, and even answer the phone. Tasks which once kept bookkeepers employed—calculating payroll, processing invoices, updating ledgers, paying taxes, and cutting checks—can now be done with the click of a mouse. Much of that software, fittingly, was first designed by Intuit founder Scott Cook in his California home. While many of these technological tools have been available for almost two decades, only in the past five years have they become cheap, easy to use, and widespread.
Changing capital flows. As competition from non-bank lenders increases, traditional banks are having to work harder to find new business customers. As a result they are starting to take home-based companies seriously. Venture capitalists, who saw a number of successful software start-ups begin in the founder’s living room, now see starting a business at home as a plus—it saves precious capital and boosts productivity. GE Capital, an aggressive non-bank lender, is also targeting home-based entrepreneurs. As a result, unprecedented amounts of capital are pouring into home enterprises.
Easing government regulation. Many local governments now realize that small businesses create large numbers of jobs. They are beginning to loosen zoning and other restrictions that once barred entrepreneurs from running their business from home. Gaithersburg, Maryland, went from cracking down on home businesses by counting cars in residential driveways and issuing tickets in 1987 to writing special exemptions to allow firms to operate in residential neighborhoods in 1994. As a result, Gaithersburg is now one of the fastest growing home business markets in the country. Even big cities like San Francisco are revising their zoning rules. One beneficiary is Amy Holmen, producer of a national daily radio series with cbs’s Charles Osgood. She works out of her greenhouse-like living room from her Russian Hill neighborhood.
The benefits of downsizing. The Fortune 500 have trimmed their payrolls by more than 4 million since 1985. That released an army of well-trained business managers to their homes. Many decided to stay there, creating their own firms and bringing a new level of expertise to home-based business.
Many home entrepreneurs fit the Paul Sessel model. He runs Creative Displays, which decorates commercial structures with lights, out of his four-bedroom house in Overland Park, Kansas. Sales have climbed more than 115 percent since he bought the firm three years ago—to more than $584,000 in 1996. Though he hires as many as 30 part-time employees during the peak winter months, Sessel has no plans to move operations from his home. "The best benefit to running my business at home is that I can work at any hour day or night," says Sessel. He values the increased time with his family. Sessel recently hired a new employee who will work from his own home.
There’s lots of lobbying going on in Washington these days in the name of improving the lives of children and families. Imagine the social benefits if social conservatives did a little lobbying for measures that removed regulatory roadblocks and let parents work nearer to their children—say in the next room?
Richard Miniter writes often for The American Enterprise.
THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, MAY/JUNE 1998
