In the Spring of 2019, less than a year before the pandemic would change workplaces around the globe, parenting expert Emily Oster wrote a prescient piece for the Atlantic titled “End the Plague of Secret Parenting,” arguing that if parents speak openly about their obligations, their colleagues are more likely to adapt. “We need to normalize the experience of parenting while working,” Oster said. 

The experience of parenting, though, is vast and complex. A fact that’s not often talked about is that 50% of pregnancies include complications, an important reality for employers to understand in providing support for their working parents. Oster, a bestselling author, founder of ParentData, and professor of economics at Brown University, shared the lessons of her new book, The Unexpected: Navigating Pregnancy During and After Complications in a fireside chat at From Day One’s July virtual conference on innovative employee benefits to support families and caregivers.

Most people, Oster posits, naturally feel like they can wear both the “career” hat and the “parent” hat. Companies, however, don’t always share this view. “So often in the corporate culture we are in, people are encouraged to not have both of those hats on or to hide one of the hats while they’re at their job,” Oster said, adding that many people tell her they hide their child’s doctor’s appointments from colleagues, even saying the appointments are for themselves instead. 

“This is where we are losing people,” Oster said. Companies need to be more flexible, recognizing the needs of working parents. For example, “when people have small kids, there is a time of the day that is very valued: 5 pm to 7 pm. Structuring a job where you can’t get home until 7–that's like saying you can’t see your kid,” Oster said. “This is an inefficiency in the labor market.” Smart companies, Oster says, will let great employees be with their kids when they need to be and offer them flexible options, such as logging back on after the kids go to bed.

While many forward-thinking companies have solid plans in place for parental leave and the transition back into the workplace, those policies fall apart when it comes to the early and middle childhood years, noted Jessi Hempel, senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn, who moderated the conversation. Said Oster: “Your child does not disappear at four months.” Support during this stage is less about time off and more about flexibility. Leaders should consider what flexibility options are possible within their business’ scope of work, Oster recommended.

And leaders need to walk the talk. “Culture is set from the top,” Oster said. “When the people at the top are very invisible about their parenting, or very judgmental about parenting, or not open to this kind of flexibility, that trickles down.” It’s one thing to talk about being family-friendly, but more impactful to act that way. “The time that you say, ‘I can't schedule a meeting that goes past 4:45 because I’ve got to be home for my kid–that’s what matters,” she said. 

Flexibility encourages women to stay in the workforce. Currently, labor force participation for women with children under the age of five is at a historic high. “I think that is a result, to at least some extent, of a move toward remote work,” Oster said. With so many working parents in the labor market, there is even more reason for employers to continue to develop flexibility and cultural understanding. The shortage of affordable child care is limiting workforce gains for women, according to new research, adding to the need for flexible work arrangements.

“Flexibility can have a lot of different meanings and a lot of different cultural innuendos,” Hempel said, noting that even the ideas of “remote work” and “flexible work” can get incorrectly conflated. For parents, Oster says the core types of flexibility that are attractive are the ability to set your own hours and the ability to work from home on short notice while caring for a sick child. She emphasizes that the latter is not taking time off, per se, but still mostly working while managing issues at home at the same time. 

This is integral to retaining excellent employees for the long-term. “If you keep someone through a period when maybe they are not able to give you 150%, their kids are eventually going to get older, and then they can give you 150%,” Oster said. Flexibility engenders loyalty, Hempel added. 

Another way employers can support their working parents is by recognizing that no parent–and no birth–is identical. In her new book The Unexpected, co-written with Dr. Nathan Fox, Oster digs into how parents can anticipate and deal with unexpected pregnancy complications.

As an economist, Oster is interested in numbers and probability, which prospective parents have trouble thinking about rationally when going through pregnancy. She and Fox explore the importance of putting probability in context when having conversations with doctors, which can often be brief and fraught. “What's the conversation we have to [have to] get to a decision? Is this relevant for the decision we're going to make? Our goal should not be to just talk about every possible eventuality—that's irrelevant. It should be to think about what do we have to choose about,” Oster said. 

Oster says that learning about even the smallest probability of a dangerous complication can send parents into a panic—often unnecessarily. “Even economists who write about probabilities for a living are not very well-equipped to understand particularly small probabilities,” Oster said. “It is a core limitation of humans, but maybe it serves us in some ways as well from an evolutionary standpoint.”

What can employers take from this? In order to provide supportive, flexible options for parents, leaders should recognize the anxiety of expecting parents and how that–plus the fairly common possibility of actual complications—could impact their work performance and needs. Incorporating this empathy into HR strategy will make the workplace more attractive to parents, instilling loyalty to employers who offered support when workers needed it most. 

Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

[Featured image by SDI Productions/iStock by Getty Images]