Barbara Correa writes about work and family for the Los Angeles Daily News.
In a show of Mom power, Momsrising.org is crashing the Presidential candidate debates in California this week to spread the message that millions of U.S. kids have no health insurance. Momsrising members plan to hold up baby onesies embellished with slogans like: “I ♥ Healthcare’’ and “I’m Worth the Effort’’ as candidates file into Hollywood’s Kodak Theater tomorrow afternoon. For more info, see http://www.momsrising.org.
My friend H. is a single working mother who has a daughter with a serious medical condition. The only way she can handle her child’s lengthy doctor visits is to use her federally-mandated 12 weeks of unpaid leave in spurts, instead of in a single stretch. But she's worried because her employer isn't thrilled with the arrangement. She says they'd rather have her schedule a leave in one solid block planned well in advance. As we all know, however, that's not how it goes when you've got an ill child or parent to take care of. What parents need from the Family & Medical Leave Act is flexibility, which is one thiing most companies hate.
Right after H. told me about her situation, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (soon to be free online) about the tug of war being played out between HR departments and working parents all over the country. According to the article, the Labor Department asked for comments on the FMLA last year and was flooded with responses and is considering defining the law more specifically.
In the meantime, some companies are goiing to extreme lengths to check up on employees claiming the leave. One firm, Matrix, even advertises spying services on its Web site to catch workers using family medical leave fraudulently.
For more information and eligibility requirements for FMLA, see the Labor Department site.
You would think that motherhood would be a piece of cake compared to working as a spy for the CIA. But, as outed operative Valerie Plame reveals in her new book, giving birth to twins was what brought on the real panic attacks.
Plame was a covert CIA operative until her identity was revealed in a Washington Post op-ed in 2003 and became the Plame Affair . She had boy-girl twins in 2000. She talks about her experience with post-partum depression in Fair Game; My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House in a blog she wrote for The Huffington Post during a five-day book tour last month.
In one entry, Plame addresses questions she says nobody asked about the book. Her favorite seems to be the chapter on her depression. "With the birth of my twins in 2000, I experienced serious postpartum depression and initially had absolutely no idea what was happening. I think it's fair to say that up to that point in my life, I had demonstrated a high degree of coping abilities under significant stress and had always come through just fine,'' she writes.
I just loved reading this, because that is exactly how I felt. I have moved to foreign countries without speaking a word of the language and walked dark alleys in scary places to cover stories. But I never had the feeling that I was truly in over my head -- until my twins were born.
As one Mom commenting on her own bout with PPD writes: "Before I had kids, I thought childbirth and nursing could be compared to basic training — you know, like ‘war lite’. After I went through childbirth and the first three months, I came to the conclusion that child birth *is* the female equivalent of real war.''
Not that you needed another reason to get the kids to bed early, but here you go: a new study from the University of Michigan finds that every additional hour per night a third-grader spends sleeping reduces the child's chances of being obese in sixth grade by 40 percent. Wow. 40's a big number.(see story)
The less sleep they got, the more likely the children were to be obese in sixth grade, no matter what the child's weight was in third grade, said lead researcher Dr. Julie Lumeng. The research was published in the November issue of Pediatrics.
Among children who slept 10 to 12 hours a day, about 12 percent were obese by sixth grade. Of those who slept less than nine hours a day, 22 percent were obese by sixth grade!