Workplaces fail to support parents of teens: employees with adolescents often feel left to wrestle alone with their unique worries - Agenda: Work/Life - Statistical Data Included

HR Magazine, Sept, 2002 by Martha Erase-Blunt

Raising a teenager not only is stressful but also can be a distraction for an employee. Newly minted driver's licenses, latchkey after-school arrangements, bullies and school violence, unhealthy relationships, concealed depression--those are just some of the shadowy dreads that preoccupy parents of adolescents, who often feel helplessly torn between job and family responsibilities.

"I worry that I may miss a sign that something is wrong, like drug experimentation. I worry about my daughter walking home alone from the bus stop and into an empty house," says Robin Carden, a fulltime registered nurse in private practice and the mother of toddlers and a teenage daughter. Carden's concerns about her older child's safety from 9 to 5 are typical.

Compounding Carden's fears are her frustrations with what she sees as her employer's lack of sensitivity about the teenager's needs. "My company seems to be more tolerant of my younger children needing me. My teen needs me as well, but they don't recognize that."

For example, she says, when her preschoolers are sick, "I can easily call in absent to work to stay home with them. But if my teen has a concert during school hours or has to be at basketball practice at 4 p.m., I have to beg, borrow and steal to get time off or leave early. I believe that teens whose parents don't take an interest in their lives are the ones who tend to choose the wrong path, so I want to be there for her as much as possible."

Working parents of teens are under a great deal of pressure when school is out, says Carol Sladek, work/life consultant for Hewitt Associates, a global HR outsourcing and consulting firm headquartered in Lincoinshire, Ill. "Younger children may seem more needy in terms of maintenance, but parents feel some control over the child-care situations they are put in. As children get older and more independent, parents lose this control and must spend more time and effort in vigilance. Family tensions from the night before spill into the workplace the next day."

There's no simple fix, but employers are beginning to realize that they need to support parents of teens in specific ways to ensure productivity and retention, says Sladek. "What we see most from these parents is a demand for more-flexible time. After the layoffs and restructuring of the past year, many employees are working harder and longer, so the push is on employers to give time off in smaller segments--an afternoon here, a Friday there."

At the same time, employees are seeking effective parenting tools. Employee assistance programs (EAPs) and resource and referral programs are filling the void creatively. For example, United Behavioral Health in San Francisco supplies a spectrum of work/life, employee-assistance, behavioral health and disability support programs to 25 million employee members.

Recent studies bear out Carden's instincts about her daughter's needs. A new analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health by the University of Minnesota's Center for Adolescent Health indicates that the best way for parents to protect their teenagers from risky behaviors is to be available for them.

"Frequently, we see that when young people are close to their parents and family, they are less likely to report involvement with health-risk behaviors," the study concluded. "Parents need both the skills and support to develop and maintain close, caring relationships and connect with their children as they progress though teenage years," a feat that has become more difficult as "work demands increasingly encroach on parent and family availability. ... When we as a society do not support parents to be effective as well as available, teenagers suffer."

Baby Boom Echoes

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the 12-to-19 population is the largest it has ever been--31 million--and will grow to 34 million by 2010. The rise parallels the growth in households in which both parents work full time, translating into millions of teens left alone at the end of the school day and in the summer--including those on the lower end of the age scale. One in five American 14-year-olds spends some time alone during the parents' working day.

Children without adult supervision are at significantly greater risk of poor academic performance, truancy, stress, risky behavior and substance use, according to the National Safe Kids Campaign in Washington, D.C. The rate of violent crimes--murders, sexual assaults, robberies and assaults--committed by and against juveniles triples on school days between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., according to the National Institute on Out-of-School Time at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass.

Such serious family problems are bound to precipitate stress and lost productivity in the workplace. Consider, for example, an employee whose ninth-grader has failed to phone upon arriving home from school. Half a dozen calls and one missed staff meeting later, even when the teen has been located, the employee is much the worse for wear.