We often hear the term “sandwich generation.”  This is a label coined by the media to describe adults caring for both their children and their elderly parents.  They are in effect, sandwiched between two generations of their family.

Within this group is a subset I like to call the Dagwood Sandwich Generation.  Some of us are members of families that generally have children early in life rather than later.   I’m a Dagwood.

As a Dagwood, I have been very fortunate to have found employment with a forward-thinking company that provides flexible working arrangements for its associates.  I have been the beneficiary of some type of flexible working structure since 1995.

Johnson Storage & Moving’s custom-fit policies have benefited five generations of my family!

In the beginning, I was able to remain successful as a general manager because I had the ability to work from home in the evenings after my son had gone to sleep.  This allowed me to keep up with my workload without having child-care conflicts. 

I just got back from a Dr. Pepper plant in Texas where managers told me about people laughing at work a lot more since they began the transition to becoming a High Performance Work Place (HPWP). As a person who has been writing a book about work practices that are good for both business and the individuals working for them, I was impressed. Manufacturing is not known for its fun factor.

I visited a plant in which workers feel respected. Workers in the plant are trusted to do what is best for their company as they go about their work and even share responsibility for hiring new people. This is a plant where workers and the company are doing well.

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.

Parents need better, more modern workplace practices.  MomsRising has worked on this for years.  Flexibility, telework, and non-linear career paths are all workplace practices that are good for business, mothers, kids, and everyone else.  Our own Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas wrote a book called The Custom-Fit Workplace, on just this challenge.  With real, proven solutions.

Click to donate & receive an autographed copy!

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?