You can tell that no one prepares for the pandemic, and that's true. But the point is that this applies to everyone, not just those with kids. What if I have an ailing parent or a sibling? What if I run an orphanage on the side? Just give the same benefits to everyone instead of cherry picking people who make life decisions that are of no consequence to their day job. If you think that's too much to provide to everyone, then I will argue that it's too much to provide for just parents.
If the obligation to care for them (during work hours) has increased due to COVID, then you absolutely should get more work flexibility to take care of that. Because that's something you must do for their health and well-being, not something that you just feel like doing because you want to.
> What if I run an orphanage on the side?
Presumably you ran that orphanage outside of work hours pre-COVID, and can continue to do the same now. This is kinda a silly hypothetical though... I wasn't aware that orphanage-as-side-hustle was such a popular thing for non-parent tech employees.
You might want to suspend judgement of parents until you’ve tried your hand at it.
I believe this is addressed in the article, and in many of the policies, where they describe the individual receiving these benefits as a `caregiver` not `parent`. What I find interesting is that the conversation seems to be geared solely around parents while others that take care of family in need are not brought into it.
Were you working on your side hustle during normal work hours before the pandemic? No? So is the pandemic stopping you from working on your side hustle after work hours now? No? I didn't think so.
> Parents deserve all the concessions that can be afforded, but people without kids should also be afforded the same.
I think you're looking at this in the wrong way, as if employers are giving parents some sort of special gift by being flexible around child care responsibilities. Child care has to get done, period. It's not opt-out. Your side hustle can wait until after work hours... as it always has.
> Having children is a personal choice in the end, but nothing special in anyway. People should not be penalized for not making that choice, just like they should not be rewarded either.
Ah, here's that tired argument again. Yes, it is a personal choice. But are we really going to penalize children because their parents, when deciding to have kids, failed to take into account the possibility of global pandemic making child care interfere with their work responsibilities? Parents aren't getting "rewarded" for having kids here; they're simply getting time to do that which they must do. Child care is unique among non-work obligations in that it's not something you can reschedule, put off, or decide not to do. There's no "reward" here.
I still don't understand how you think non-parents like us are being "penalized", though. My work day during COVID is, scope-wise, exactly the same as it was pre-COVID. I get out of bed, work for 8-10 hours, and then stop and do whatever I want. I was already working from home most of the time pre-COVID, but as a bonus, people who went to an office every day now get their commute time back! If anything, non-parents are getting a reward during COVID that parents don't get, because their former commute time is now filled with... you guessed it... more child care.
This was always OK before the pandemic. Everyone stopped working at 5, and I got to get ready for my hobby at 6. All good.
Now, parents need to be available for their children at 5. So they have to leave at 4. Someone has to stay until 6 to "make it up". It's a priority that we allow them to be available for their children. So I will have to let go of my hobby, so they can be with their children.
They might even justify it by saying "I will come early on thursdays to compensate, and you can start later". The thing is that I don't care about starting later on thrusdays. I want to be free at 6 on wednesdays.
And because my calendar does not include the magic "children" word, I automatically get the lowest priority when discussing schedules. Holidays during thanksgiving ? No sir, you don't have children, you would probably be sad and alone anyway! Those nice summer days ? Well, Henry wants to take his gasp children hiking during summer break, you can have a week in november, while his son is at school! And so on...
The children word is systematically used as an argument to justify some kind of priority for parents when defining schedules over those who don't have any children. And COVID made that really visible because people with children suddenly had even more constraint than those without - and you can guess who had to be even more flexible. And because non-parents are systematically being shown that they matter less, this creates resentment.
There are unfortunate life circumstance that falls upon you. These do exist and I would also definitely be more flexible to help someone undergoing them. Your child is not an unfortunate life circumstance. He is the consequence of a choice you made. Just like my schedule is the consequences of choices that I made. There is no reason to consider that your choices matter more than mine.
The only relevant "choice" here is the choice that companies made to close their offices and require employees to work from home. For people with children in their homes that is going to mean they are less productive, even if there is a babysitter available. If your company told you that you are required to do your work while riding on a roller coaster, where you would likely be much less productive, you would be right to ask the company for to reduce your expectations until you are allowed to return to your office. Since parents are being required to work from an environment where their productivity will be lowered, it is reasonable and everyone should expect that their expectations will be adjusted downward to reflect that. If your home environment does not significantly reduce your productivity then there is no reason to think your own expectations should be adjusted downward.
You would be exploiting a system put in place to help families survive a pandemic for your own personal gain.
I'm with you though. If I have personal obligations, I shouldn't feel any pressure to help out a coworker by working later than normal with no additional incentive just because they have children and I don't. And if I decline to help out that coworker, I shouldn't be publicly shamed.
The child rearing consume what the childless have earned under the "do what's best for everyone" motif of social programs. Who's getting the best? Do the childless get to participate in this best?
I really don't understand how you can have a perspective that leads to this question.
You argument doesn't work in that it can just as easily be applied the other way if we assume having kids is the default state. We could further argue that not having kids is an advantage, hence why should parents be penalized for not having made the same choice as those that didn't.
The amount of children we’d need to become next generation workers and support our generation are exponential and cannot be sustained. I suspect that as for the last decade or two, old age benefits will keep shrinking and shrinking anyway because there is no way we can keep having, feeding, and sustaining the exponential numbers required.