My favorite Mother’s day gifts from my sons were their original stories, songs and poems. But what I needed when they were infants and toddlers was something children can’t deliver: affordable time off when they were born and when they were sick.

So for all those candidates and elected officials interested in the women’s vote and eager to prove their support for motherhood and families, here’s a sampling of what mothers want and need, not just one day a year but every day:

The right to care for a sick child or personal illness without losing our paychecks or our jobs. Moms need leaders to actively support the right for workers to earn paid sick days and champion local, state and federal policies that would guarantee this protection. Make sure no one has to choose between being a good parent and being a good employee — and that no one has to serve you flu with your soup.

Meet Annie Spiegelman, a Bay Area mom who blogs as “The Dirt Diva” on matters of love, gardening, and cultivating a healthy planet.  Just in time for Mother’s Day, Annie shares her interview with Rachel’s Network Co-Director Laurie Syms on the evidence that women in Congress, regardless of party, support the environment at rates that outpace their male counterparts.

A Rachel’s Network report entitled “When Women Lead: A Decade of Women’s Environmental Voting Records in Congress,”  compares the environmental voting records of Congresswomen and Congressmen from the 107th through the 111th Congress.  The conclusion:  in both houses of Congress, whether red or blue, women are greener!

Here’s Annie’s personal account of a moving conversation:

How did a girl raised and hardened on the streets of New York City become a passionate environmentalist, geeky master gardener and full-fledged compost queen? I read Rachel Carson’s bestseller, Silent Spring.

rue or False:

1) A pregnant woman can be fired for carrying a water bottle on the job to stay hydrated and prevent bladder infections.

2) A pregnant activity director at a nursing home can be terminated because she requires help with some physically strenuous aspects of her job to prevent having another miscarriage.

3) A pregnant delivery truck driver can be forced out on unpaid leave because she has a lifting restriction and needs light duty.

The answer to all of these questions is true. These scenarios are based on actual cases, in which courts interpreted existing law to deny these pregnant women protection.

Unfortunately, this happens all too frequently in America. Across the country, pregnant women who request minor adjustments are forced out of their jobs unnecessarily and denied the minor modifications to workplace duties, rules, or policies that would enable them to continue working and supporting their families.

by Rachel Sarnoff, Executive Director & CEO
Healthy Child Healthy World
www.healthychild.org

Happiest Babies Are Soothed by 5 S’s

Can simple soothing take the place of sugar? That was the takeaway from a new study published this week in the journal Pediatrics. In a study involving more than 200 infants, researchers found the “5 S’s” baby-calming tactics worked better than the sugar-water supplements traditionally given to infants after experiencing pain, according to ABC News. The 5 S’s tactics were developed by Dr. Harvey Karp, a founding board member of Healthy Child Healthy World and author of “The Happiest Baby on the Block” book and video series. Yet another reason to “shh-shh-shh”!

Carcinogens in the House

Cross posted with author permission from the Huffington Post.

Wow.

So many readers of my last blog post thought I was endorsing Rick Santorum, his policy prescriptions and all the anti-gay and anti-women statements he has made when I wrote that I’d miss him in the Presidential contest.

Not at all.

As I wrote, I don’t agree with his policy prescriptions, but I wish that we had people in both presidential campaigns who are forcing our country to confront the hard issues of how we raise our children and support our families at a time of growing single-parent households and growing childhood poverty.

Case in point:  The inane media debate over who works harder—stay-at-home mothers or mothers who work outside the home—and the fact that less than a week later, it seems to be over.

There is no question that Hilary Rosen should have chosen her words more carefully when she said that Ann Romney, mother of five sons, “never worked a day in her life.” Raising children is work. It’s immensely rewarding work, but it’s work just the same. Ann Romney is justifiably proud of the work she’s done raising her children.

Now that the spotlight is on motherhood, rather than fanning the false flames of a “Mommy War” that doesn’t really exist, it’s time that we as a nation recognize that regardless of whether or not mothers’ work is paid or unpaid, the work of caregiving is important to us all and should be valued.

Photo by Flickr user Digital Sextant

That’s right: Mothers’ work should be valued.

But too often it’s not.

This, in a nutshell, is Facebook’s problem: In a few weeks, when Facebook goes public, it will not have a single woman on its board.

It’s not as if this problem will be solved by adding a single woman to the board. But it’s an important step, and one Mark Zuckerberg should take now.

 Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote that part of Facebook’s mission is to build tools that will help create the “direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.”

So why doesn’t Zuckerberg doesn’t extend this philosophy to the way he runs his own business?

The concept of unlimited vacation or “no vacation policy” is becoming a popular idea. Large companies like IBM, HubSpot, and Netflix have kicked the standard two-week vacation policy to the curb.

Over the years, we’ve worked with many organization, big and small, to help them implement a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). A big part of this process is helping management and employees understand what it takes to make a “no vacation policy” actually work.

Naturally, people love the idea of unlimited vacation. You hear about it and you want it for yourself. But it’s easy to say, harder to do. “We’re going to have unlimited vacation from now on!” just doesn’t cut it.

Management expects employees to jump for joy, but instead what we find is that employees and leadership have a lot of questions and concerns. We hear things like:

“What do you mean? You’re taking away my vacation?”

“How will I ever take a vacation then?”

“Is this just a sneaky way to get me to work MORE?”

A report released by Human Rights Watch on Feb 23, 2011 titled Failing Its Families offers a critique of the historical and current support provided by the United States government for family-leave programs. The US is cited as one of just three countries worldwide offering no legal guarantee of paid maternity leave for working families.  The question of a legal guarantee for paid paternity leave, or paid guardian leave was not raised in the report. The 1993 Family Medical Leave Act does provide for up to 12 weeks of job protected unpaid leave for men and women, yet covers only about half of the workforce.

There is of course also no guaranteed support provided for non-working families in the US, unless the mother is living at such a level of poverty that she and her baby qualify for a government aid program. Yet in these cases poverty is the reason the aid is provided – it is not in general provided as recognition of the fact that a new member has joined society and we all want to make sure that she/he gets off to a good start.