Working in the field of Working families for 25 years means we have watched many initiatives come and go, many efforts of businesses to ‘get it right’, to retain female talent, secure pipelines, introduce flexibility, sort hybrid, match parental leave, grow ERG’s and so on.
So much change. So much efforting. So many best intentions.
Some of it works and some doesn’t, often at the mercy of the gap that exists between policy and practice, culture and the lived experience. And sometimes ofcourse with the abdication of personal responsibility “if only ‘they would’ fill in the gaps….
Can we see and embrace a bigger story of who we are? Afterall the thing that is often looked between the working parent and the organisation is the child.
If we widen our lens in this complexity to include the child, our future generations then is there anything more important than putting our focus there?
Children, quite simply need emotionally and physically available and present care. In order to thrive, to lay down those much-wanted neural pathways that form the basis of secure attachment in the brain, a child needs attunement. Someone who can attend to, attune and anticipate and meet needs. That’s very simply put (see me later if you want more detail). Ofcourse they can get that from other caregivers but the very first attachment, the important one is with mum, once that is secured the little one can then transfer attachment to other caregivers. But will, as anyone with older children, even grown up ones know, require fairly regular topping up.
Families, in order to do this, require participation, community, support. And yet as we all know most of us do not live round the corner from our own parents and don’t have grandparents on tap these days.
I wonder if a different story could include this wider view, so that organisations feel there part in this in all of the boundary ruptures that so called greedy jobs require (aka can you make a meeting at 6pm? we need to pull out all the stops on this, I know you’re on holiday/its Friday night/it’s the weekend but…..) Wil the new story give rise to organisations who become the ‘hero of heroes’ by putting that cliched term ‘wellbeing’ front and centre.
The challenge is not that this is complicated to articulate, its simple and rooted in deep truths of the health of our future generations, but it’s hidden in busy. It’s hidden in the everyday stories we tell ourselves of what is possible and what isn’t possible that takes the oxygen of creativity with them. It’s hidden in outdated narratives and societal norms that are hard to shift. But not impossible. It’s the old stories that are broken, the stories of what ‘normal’ looks like, but not humanity. The change we see in the world amongst the crises we are living, the goodness that is becoming more abundant in our charity and our care, creates a reimagining of who we are as human beings, of what matters most.
As the pioneering architect Buckminster Fuller wrote: ‘you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, create a new model that makes the existing models obsolete’.
We work with working families because we are passionate about the health of future generations. If you’d like to talk more about this, please get in touch.