Taking a Businesslike Approach to Managing Family Productivity

Who’s winning the tug-of-war between your work and family life?

Do your children demand two pieces of picture ID when you arrive home from a three-week business trip?

Does your boss fire off angry e-mail about the thriving toddler gym you’ve erected in your office?

As we tread tentatively toward the 21st century, the work-family conflict remains one of our most challenging unsolved mysteries. How can men and women achieve success in their fields without sacrificing their personal lives? How can they attain fulfillment as spouses, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters without abandoning their most cherished career goals?

Family teamwork--the cooperation of family members in furthering one another’s goals--is one strategy endorsed by many counselors and sociologists. As businesses slowly--sometimes reluctantly--become more family-friendly, many families are attempting to become more career-friendly by incorporating business management practices into their day-to-day routines.

Civil rights attorney Paula Pearlman, 42, of Los Angeles and businessman Mark Shapiro, 49, have been married 14 years and are rearing two children, Marit, 9, and Sarah, 7. The family holds periodic conferences “where everyone gets to air grievances and speak without being interrupted,” Pearlman says. Recently, an intensive family “board of directors” meeting resulted in the streamlining of the quartet’s early-morning routine of getting ready for work and school.

Larry Morris, 38, chief financial officer of HKM Productions, a Hollywood production company, his wife of nine years, Sandy Reimer-Morris, 40, a prominent Hollywood makeup artist, and their two children, Tyler, 5, and Sarah, 3, employ a large communal “critical path” calendar to ensure that personal and family priorities do not conflict.

“Having kids has really caused me to become more aware of how I’m using my time,” says Morris. “And I think I’ve become both a better manager and a better father because of that.”

Irene Goldenberg, UCLA professor of psychiatry and author of “Counseling Today’s Families,” cautions that families, like businesses, must avoid certain capitalist pitfalls. Intra-marriage rivalries, like intra-office duels, can lead to resentment, sabotage, alienation, loss of morale and, in the worst cases, divorce court “pink slips.”

Declines in labor productivity can occur when family members fail to help one another with chores or feel neglected, overworked or underappreciated. These can lead to “strikes” and “slowdowns” that require heated negotiations between “management” and “the staff” before peace can be restored. Home crises provoke some working spouses to take “sick leave” not from their jobs, but from their homes. They remain ensconced in the predictability of their workplaces rather than face the dissonance at home.

Gayle Peterson, a Berkeley-based marriage and family columnist, believes that the soundness of a dual-income couple’s relationship is the most important steppingstone to family health. Peterson says couples who sacrifice their relationships for the sake of their careers or their children often end up damaging or losing all three: “I often remind parents of the instructions they hear about the use of oxygen masks in the event of a drop in cabin pressure in an airplane: Secure your own mask first before putting a mask on your child.”

Peterson suggests that couples make career decisions bilaterally, “because if one pursues a career without the other’s full support, there’s going to be resentment and the family will suffer.”

Cynthia Whitham of the UCLA Parent Training and Children’s Social Skills Program, says spouses should continue to “date” throughout their marriage. “The children will see their mother and father courting and loving each other. They’ll grow up wanting this closeness in their own marriages too.”

Children, no matter what age, can become contributors to the family team, says Los Angeles child psychologist Bonnie Mark. “Even a 3- or 4-year-old can be taught to clean up clothes, make the bed, care for pets and take plates from the table to the sink.”

How can dual-income couples create a more productive and nurturing family environment while sprinting down the fast track? First, experts urge that they develop strong self-esteem and discard any “protective delusions” that may inhibit them from admitting passions for both work and home life.

Second, couples can attempt to incorporate rituals into their family life. “It’s important that children have routines for TV time, meal time, good-night time--the regularity and predictability give them a sense of safety,” Whitham says.

Finally, parents are encouraged to openly share their career aspirations with their children.

“Many parents don’t tell their kids anything about their work,” says Rabbi Earl Grollman, co-author of “The Working Parent Dilemma.” “So all the children know is that their parents aren’t home with them.”

There is no magic remedy to the family-work conflict. But, says Frances Goldscheider, co-author of “New Families, No Families? The Transformation of the American Home”: “The work we do for the people we love has far more payoffs than the work we do for the people who pay us.”