Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, wanted the data behind why she—and many women she knew—felt that they didn’t have enough time for everything and everyone in their lives. So she called a time use researcher at the University of Maryland, John Robinson (who is known as “Father Time”). Robinson told Schulte that contrary to what she felt, women today aren’t as busy as they were in the 1960s. In fact, they have 30 hours of leisure time per week—and he could prove to Schulte that she did, too.

Schulte—angry that he presumed to know about her life and simultaneously terrified that he was right and she was frittering away her leisure time—started keeping a time diary. But she found that she couldn’t fit her time into the neat categories Robinson prescribed. What should she call the half hour she spent at work, on the phone with the pharmacy filling a prescription for her son, eating lunch, and simultaneously surfing the Internet to figure out how to get a death certificate from China?

When Robinson and Schulte finally met, he took out a highlighter to point out all the leisure time in her schedule: minutes spent lying in bed exhausted, the time she took to exercise, and even spending two hours with her daughter by the side of the road waiting for a tow truck. She didn’t consider that “leisure time” but “bits and scraps of garbage time.”

The 30 hours of leisure time were a fiction. But how, Schulte wondered, can we balance the three great arenas of life: work, love, and play?

Schulte looked at work first. In America, work hours for white-collar workers have been rising since the 1980s after falling for a century. “Our Protestant work ethic has gone into overdrive,” she said. We value long hours and devalue leisure.

The United States has the highest number of working mothers of any country in the world; most American children are being raised by dual-income parents or by single parents. But our laws, policies, and culture haven’t caught up with reality. Our family structures have changed because more women are working than ever before, but our workplaces haven’t accommodated the change. “We still think the ‘organization man’ of the 1950s is the best worker,” said Schulte. And we give “lip service” to flexible and family-friendly policies but don’t utilize them.

Yet our obsession with work doesn’t make us more productive. In France, they take August off, get paid parental leave, and work shorter hours than in the U.S.—and they’re just as productive as Americans in terms of GDP per hours worked.

And we’re losing more than just pleasure. Schulte explained that leisure time is where we daydream and imagine the new possibilities that can make big change happen. “Your best ideas come in your off moments,” she said. Our brains need to oscillate between uninterrupted, concentrated work time and down time. We need time to get inspiration and then time to bring that inspiration back into our work. “Just as we have 90 minute sleep cycles at night, we have 90 minute attentive cycles during the day,” said Schulte. We work best when we work in short pulses.

Yet the U.S. remains the only advanced economy without parental leave or vacation policies. Americans also leave the most vacation days behind of any country, save overworked Japan and South Korea, where people have gone so far as to check into prison to get away from work.

We haven’t caught up at home, either. Women are still doing twice the housework and childcare that men are, said Schulte, even when women are working full-time. The culprit is a “stalled gender revolution.” Men are doing more than in the past, but the amount of time they contribute at home has remained static since the mid-1990s. Women are still the default parents and caretakers.

It wasn’t always like this. “We evolved to be cooperative breeders,” said Schulte. Only now we expect mothers to do it all.

Schulte traveled to Denmark—where time studies showed men and women had the most leisure time of anyone on the planet—to find out how they do it. Danish women have almost as much leisure time as Danish men (and more leisure time than Italian fathers), while elsewhere in the world there is typically a large gap between the sexes. The U.S. is very different from Denmark—bigger, more diverse, with a different political structure. But we can still learn from the Danes, said Schulte. They work intense, bounded hours. They don’t value working overtime but efficiency, and the ability to get your work done in a reasonable amount of time. They also value gender equality so highly that they have a minister of gender equality in their government. And, they value leisure—time off to become refreshed.

The U.S., said Schulte, needs to make large structural changes in the workplace, and in its policy, to prize leisure time instead of busyness. We can also make small but significant changes in our lives.

In the audience question-and-answer session, a woman asked whether men and women are simply wired differently. When her husband took time off from working to watch their young sons, he took them to and from school and to the park, but he didn’t cook or clean. When she was on vacation, she did everything her husband did—and all the chores.

“There’s no brain wiring that says don’t do the dishes,” said Schulte. “That’s cultural expectations and that’s custom.” Studies have shown that women are not wired for multitasking—in fact, multitasking makes both men and women “as stupid as being stoned.” It’s about figuring out how to divide labor fairly, coming up with common standards, and women asserting that their time is valuable and important, too.

What is Schulte doing to help the next generation—her children—live differently?

She said she’s teaching her kids to put joy first on their to-do lists. She’s trying not to overschedule them, and to make more time for human connection. She’s trying to learn to let them fail. She’s trying to let them have unstructured time. And she’s trying to model a balanced life with time for both work and leisure.

The post Why Do Americans Hate Lives of Leisure? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is just after 10 a.m. on a Tuesday and I am racing down Route 1 in College Park, Maryland. The Check Engine light is on. The car tax sticker on my windshield has expired. The cell phone I’d just been using to talk to one of my kids’ teachers has disappeared into the seat crack. And I’m late.

I screech into the crowded University of Maryland parking garage and wind ever higher until I at last find a spot on the top deck. My palms are sweating. My breath is shallow. My heart races and I feel slightly sick. I throw the car into Park, fumble ineptly with the parking ticket machine, and race down the stairs.

Only later, in revisiting this frantic day in my memory, will I realize that the sky had been that poignant shade of autumn blue and the leaves tinted with red. But as I live it, the stress hormones coursing through my veins tense my entire body and collapse my vision into a narrow, dizzying tunnel. Because I am filled with dread.

This is the day I have been avoiding for more than a year. Today, I am meeting with John Robinson, a sociologist who for more than a half century has studied the way people spend their most precious, nonrenewable resource: time. Robinson was one of the first social scientists in the United States to begin collecting detailed time diaries, counting the hours of what typical people do on a typical day, and publishing scholarly tomes summing up the way we live our lives. For his pioneering work, his colleagues call him Father Time. And Father Time has challenged me to keep a time diary of my own.

He told me that his research proves that I, a hair-on-fire woman struggling to work a demanding full- time job as a reporter for The Washington Post and be the kind of involved mother who brings the Thanksgiving turkey for the preschool feast and puts together the fifth grade slide show, have thirty hours of leisure time in a typical week.

Today, he is to dissect the mess of my time diaries and show me where all that leisure time is. I feel as if I am a bug, pinned on a specimen tray, about to be flayed and found wanting.

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting. I am always doing more than one thing at a time and feel I never do any one particularly well. I am always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door. Entire hours evaporate while I’m doing stuff that needs to get done. But once I’m done, I can’t tell you what it was I did or why it seemed so important. I feel like the Red Queen of Through the Looking-Glass on speed, running as fast as I can—usually on the fumes of four or five hours of sleep—and getting nowhere. Like the dream I keep having about trying to run a race wearing ski boots.

And, since I had kids, I don’t think I’ve ever had a typical day.

There was the morning my son tae kwon do round house kicked me when I went to wake him up, which sent my coffee splattering over every single book on his bookshelf. I hurriedly wiped the pages dry so they wouldn’t stick together and render the entire library useless. Which of course made me glaringly late for work and threw my plans for the day into the shredder. My sister Mary has these kinds of days, too. She calls them Stupid Days.

There was the day when my husband, Tom, was overseas again and I flew in late to a meeting with school officials to discuss why our then ten-year- old son, who knew more about World War II than I ever will, was floundering in fifth grade. I dragged along our second grader, still in her pajamas and slippers because she’d stayed home sick. And I nervously kept an eye on my BlackBerry because I was in the middle of reporting a horrific deadline story about a graduate student who’d been decapitated at an Au Bon Pain.

Then there was the time when the amount of work I needed to do pressed so heavily on my chest that I’d said no when my daughter asked, “Mommy, will you please come with me on my field trip today?” We’d been through this before, I told her. I couldn’t come with her on every field trip. Then her big blue-gray eyes started to water. I felt all the breath drain out of me. I thought, at the end of my life, would I remember whatever assignment it was that seemed so urgent—I don’t even recall it now— or would I remember a beautiful day in the woods with a daughter who had been struggling with unexplained stomachaches, was socially wobbly since her best friend moved away, and who still wanted me to be with her? I went. I spent three hours in the woods with her, guiltily checking my BlackBerry, then, after putting her to bed that night, went back to work for another four.

I have baked Valentine’s cupcakes until 2 a.m. and finished writing stories at 4 a.m. when all was quiet and I finally had unbroken time to concentrate. I have held what I hope were professional-sounding interviews sitting on the floor in the hall outside my kids’ dentist’s office, in the teachers’ bathroom at school functions, in the car outside various lessons, and on the grass, quickly muting the phone after each question to keep the whooping of a noisy soccer practice to a minimum. Some appliance is always broken. My to-do list never ends. I have yet to do a family budget after meaning to for nearly twenty years. The laundry lies in such a huge, perpetually unfolded mound that my daughter has taken a dive in it and gone for a swim.

At work, I’ve arranged car pools to ballet and band practice. At home, I am constantly writing and returning e-mails, doing interviews and research for work. “Just a sec,” I hear my daughter mimicking me as she mothers her dolls. “Gimme a minute.” She has stuck yellow Post- it notes on my forehead while I sit working at the computer to remind me to come upstairs for story time.

My editors can recount every deadline I’ve blown. My son, Liam, once recited every single one of the handful of honors assemblies or wheezy recorder concerts I’d missed in his entire life. I was even failing our cat, Max. I asked someone at the pet store what I could do to make him stop scratching up the carpets. “He thinks you’re his mother. He’s showing he needs more attention from you,” she’d said. “Can’t you find time to play with him every day?”

“Can’t I just squirt water at him instead?”

At night, I often wake in a panic about all the things I need to do or didn’t get done. I worry that I’ll face my death and realize that my life got lost in this frantic flotsam of daily stuff. Once, my sister Claire told me that when you smile, it releases some chemical in the brain and calms anxiety. I have tried smiling. At 4 a.m. In bed. In the dark.

It didn’t work.

On some level, I know that who we are depends very much on how we choose to spend this ten minutes or that hour. I know from all those bumper stickers that this is my one and only life, and from the Romans that time flies. And I know from the Buddhists that we should embrace the moment. I wake with every good intention of making the most of my day— to do good work, to spend quality time with my children, to eat less trail mix, to stop driving off with my wallet on top of the car. But then one of the kids throws up, or the babysitter calls in sick, or the kitchen faucet starts gushing water, or some story breaks and everything collapses.

I fast-walk across the University of Maryland campus like it’s Judgment Day. I’m hoping these hectic, tardy, and chaotic little scraps of time that I’ve been tracking will add up to a meaningful life. But as I rush into the sociology building where Robinson works, I’m more afraid they’ll show anything but. I’m terrified that all the mess that I usually keep stuffed behind a friendly, competent, professional, if harried, veneer will come spilling out.

The post The Test of Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And yet, 53 percent of working parents in a study published by the Pew Research Center last year said they found it very or somewhat difficult to balance their work and family life. Thirty-four percent of those parents say they always feel rushed, even to do the things they have to do. This is only one of a slew of studies that illustrate how overwhelmed many Americans feel trying to “have it all.” In advance of Brigid Schulte’s visit to Zócalo to discuss why Americans can’t balance work, love, and play, we asked experts: What single cultural or policy change could ease Americans’ time crunch?

The post Your Life Doesn’t Have to Be Completely Insane appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Doors were opening, right? Women, though not many yet, were showing up in engineering classes and getting degrees in business and accounting in record numbers. In 1985, the year after I graduated, for the first time in history, more American women than men got college degrees, a trend that has only accelerated since. Now, a majority of graduate degrees and Ph.D.s go to women.

Sure, we knew discrimination lurked out there. But feminism, so many of us thought, was for angry, humorless man-haters who didn’t shave their legs and only seemed to talk about abortion. We were beyond that, right? What we considered “women’s issues” seemed to reek faintly of special accommodations for people who just weren’t up to snuff. We were ready to march headlong into the much more important “man’s” world. Of course we had no idea how to do that, let alone how to do that and at the same time have a family, or whatever form of life one wanted outside of work. We were determined to have equal partners at home, even though we had no role models to show us how, and no clue that as fast as you can say “maternity leave,” time-use research shows most couples slide into traditional gender roles after the birth of a child, even when they never intended to. Still, the heady, idealistic, and supremely naive attitude I recall among all of my female cohorts can be summed up as: We’ll figure it out.

And lest you think that I and my friends at a not-so-elite college in Oregon were the only ones so ignorant of what the world and our lives would really be like, on page 142 of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s much-buzzed-about new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, she describes the same phenomenon in the 1980s in the esteemed corridors of Harvard. “My friends and I truly, if naively, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore,” she writes. “We mistakenly thought that there was nothing left to fight for. I carried this attitude with me when I entered the workforce. I figured if sexism still existed, I would just prove it wrong. I would do my job and do it well.” My personal mantra was similar: “Keep Your Head Down and Do Good Work.”

But in thinking that if we failed, we had only ourselves to blame for just not trying hard enough, this is what we got: The United States has among the most mothers who work of any developed country on earth—close to 80 percent of all school-age children have mothers who work for pay outside the home. Yet unlike other countries where many mothers work full-time, we have no affordable, accessible, and high-quality child care system. We have no federal laws mandating paid parental leave, paid sick days, or even vacation days. We have no right to request flexible work. Americans, including working mothers, work among the most extreme hours of anyone on the planet. Whatever flexible arrangements a worker has been able to negotiate—in order to care for a child or an aging parent, or simply to have a life—are ad hoc gestures of mercy or goodwill from one’s immediate supervisor. Oh, and if you benefit from them, social science research shows that you’d better be prepared to be seen as a slacker.

Women, though they are about half the workforce, make up only a handful of Fortune 500 CEOs, 14 percent of top executives, and 7 percent of top earners. Eighteen percent now have a seat at the table in Congress. The wage gap between men and women starts immediately upon graduation, according to the American Association of University Women.

At home, global time-use studies show that compared to women in other nations, American mothers spend the most time with their children and have the least amount of free time to themselves. Though American fathers have stepped up in recent decades, American mothers still do about twice the housework and child care. And even after the 2008 recession pushed more women into breadwinner roles, economists at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College found that the division of domestic labor became slightly more fair, but only because working mothers stopped doing as much, not because fathers at home did more.

Clearly, this “feminism is over, keep your head down and do good work” strategy has not worked. At least not for most women.

Sandberg is in a rare position. And in her book and the “Lean In” consciousness-raising circles she hopes to create, she exhorts other women to follow her lead. Her strategy still demands good work, and hard work. But instead of putting their heads down, she writes that women who want careers and family need to learn to lean in to them, not to leave before they leave, to sit at the table, speak up, raise their hands, learn how to negotiate, and demand full partnership from their mates.

This call to a renewed feminist mission has not and will not be easy. Women who speak up and show their ambition are often punished by a world that still expects deference and niceness from women. As feminist legal scholar Joan Williams writes, “Women don’t negotiate because they’re not idiots.”

But Sandberg’s reminder that the women’s movement isn’t over is essential, because many young women still feel the way I did back in college. Sandberg writes that today only a quarter of all women in the United States consider themselves feminists, though, when “feminism” is removed from its hairy baggage and defined as believing in social, political, and economic equality between men and women, women’s support rises to a more robust 65 percent. (An anemic number which, frankly, is surprising in itself in the 21st century.)

Chandra Mason is a social psychologist at Mary Baldwin, a women’s college in rural Staunton, Virginia. After years of pondering the stalled gender revolution, she turned her attention to the work and family expectations of college students as they anticipate their futures. Each succeeding generation of women, the literature shows, confidently overestimates their ability to “just figure it out,” and vastly underestimates just how hard that will be.

“They’re prepared to work harder. But when you talk to some of them about the need for a feminist movement, they stare back blankly at you,” she said. “They accept the wage gap. There’s such a confidence, that ‘I can do anything’ attitude. They don’t really know how things are going to be. But they’re calm and confident that they’re going to cross the bridge when they get to it and they’ll figure it out.

“In some ways, I’m really happy about it,” Mason continued. “I hate the thought that someone’s going to curtail their dreams. But at the same time, I worry that they are underprepared for the reality that’s waiting for them.”

To gauge how young men and women think about their futures, Mason’s pilot study included a focus group of male students at a predominantly male institution. She found that they thought only of finishing their education and getting established in careers. At some point, they imagined they’d have families. “But they weren’t spending any time thinking or talking about it,” she said. For the most part, the opposite was true, she found, in focus groups with female students at Mary Baldwin. As young as 19, most of the women could talk at length about what they hoped for, planned, fantasized, and even agonized about when it came to managing family and career.

Mason said few of her students, as Sandberg warns, spoke in terms of scaling back their dreams out of fear that they couldn’t have both career and family. But more than 100 young women at a Midwestern university studied by psychologists Janell Fetterolf and Alice Eagly did. Even as demographic data show a clear rise in female economic independence, the researchers found that “in all conditions, participants expected to have lesser salary and more domestic work than their husbands.” And this was true even when they anticipated having advanced degrees and full careers.

Mason said she’s conflicted, pressing individual students to focus on the looming challenges, and to figure them out for themselves, while also being a big advocate for public policy changes so each woman doesn’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. “But this is the real world,” she added, “and until someone comes up with real policy, then we are all out there fending for ourselves and trying to make the best of what we’ve got.”

Feminist writers have criticized Sandberg for concentrating too much on this “fixing the woman,” and not enough on the outdated laws, policies, attitudes, workplace cultures, and powerful gender norms that have kept both men and women stuck since the 1980s. But like Mason, Sandberg lives in the real world. She, too, writes about the need for policies and laws that better match the reality of working families.

But the truth is that the cultural conditioning about gender roles that shapes a woman’s—and a man’s—internal world is as powerful as it is unconscious. To move the stalled gender revolution forward, to redesign work and workplace culture, gender roles, and the way we organize families for both men and women, requires change on both the personal and the political fronts. Sandberg acknowledges as much, calling it the “ultimate chicken-and-egg situation. The chicken: Women will tear down the external barriers once we achieve leadership roles. The egg: We need to eliminate the external barriers to get women into those roles in the first place.”

Emboldened by the 20-point gender gap in the recent election, Representative Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, is preparing to re-introduce the Equal Rights Amendment. Remember that? The amendment to the constitution pushed by those hairy-legged feminists guaranteeing equality under the law regardless of sex passed both houses of Congress and was heartily endorsed by then-President Richard Nixon in … 1972. Without it, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia maintains that the constitution does not bar sex discrimination, saying “if the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, you have legislatures.”

As Maloney explained, “American women are empowered in so many ways. We’re treated so much better than women in so many other countries. But there’s so much unfinished business.”

The revolution has been stalled for far too long. And we’ve got to start somewhere if men and women are going to have a fair shot at living their best lives. A raft of research is beginning to emerge that men feel trapped at work, stressed that they don’t spend enough time with their families, and that they, too, are desperate for change. We all—men and women alike—are smack in the middle of one of the most massive upheavals of the social order in millennia. We all have a long way to go to just figure it out. And one place to start is to reclaim and embrace the true meaning of feminism—the personhood of women. And to fight, not for women to just better fit into the old structures, but to make them anew. For everyone.

And at the very least Sandberg, and all the heat and noise surrounding her book, has got us all to begin to lift up our heads and talk about it again. Out loud.

The post ‘Leaning In’ to the F-Word appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A few years later I was pregnant with our second child, our daughter, when the physician’s assistant in my doctor’s office urged me to reconsider an amniocentesis test I’d just declined. “You don’t understand,” I remember her telling me in hushed tones. “You are a high-risk pregnancy for … chromosomal abnormalities. You are old.”

I was nearly 39. This time, my chart referred to my “advanced maternal age.” Fertility specialists had already warned me I’d nearly waited too long to have children. I’d seen that my risk of delivering a baby with Down syndrome, the chromosomal abnormality my PA was referring to, was now about one in 137, a far cry from the one in 1,667 odds I would have faced if I’d had a baby at 20, when my body was most ready.

Funny thing, though, no one, not my doctor, not the fertility specialists, not the worried physician’s assistant, ever mentioned my husband’s age, though he is seven years older. We all assumed he would be able to make healthy babies forever, just like those paragons of virility, Hugh Hefner, Larry King, and the late South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, nicknamed by his staff “Sperm” Thurmond, all of whom fathered children well into their 70s.

Turns out, we may have all been wrong. Emerging science suggests that men, like women, have a biological clock: the older the father, the greater the risk of infertility and of passing on genetic mutations like autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and epilepsy. Which raises a tantalizing prospect: Could this knowledge begin to reverse the trend of people starting families later and later in life, alter the priorities of men and women alike, and reshape the way we all live and work?

In fairness, medical conditions like autism, schizophrenia, and even fertility are complex. The risk of genetic mutation shown by new studies is still relatively small. And social change usually comes in slow drips rather than sweeping revolutions, as a result of a host of factors converging at once. But that’s where this gets interesting. There are a host of factors converging now, from economic and demographic trends and rapid advances in technology to new studies on productivity and shifting social and gender norms. Throwing the pressure of a male biological clock into the mix could be just one more factor tipping the balance toward change.

But first, the science. New studies are finding that men not only experience the same decline in fertility that women do as they hit their mid-30s–a 35 year-old man has half the chance of fathering a child within one year as a 30-year-old–but that as men age, they face increasing risks of passing along genetic mutations that result in neurological disorders.

The latest news from a study of autism published in Nature hit like a bomb. Researchers found that while a 20-year-old father passes on an average of 25 new genetic mutations, a 40-year-old father passes on about 65 mutations.

The researchers linked their finding and the worldwide trend of fathers’ delayed childbearing to the “epidemic” of autism. (The Centers for Disease Control estimates one in 88 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder, an astounding 78 percent increase from 2000, when they first began tracking the disorder.)

Reaction to the news has ranged from widespread unease to a certain giddy schadenfreude among some feminist writers. At a neighborhood gathering, a friend who’d had his children later in life agonized about whether his children’s health problems were really all his fault–wracked by the kind of guilt that I’d only seen before in my women friends.

But rather than ask the larger questions about why men are delaying childbearing in the first place and whether that could change, some of the proposed solutions are to simply lean on technology: Bank your sperm for later use, advised an editorial accompanying the Nature study. “Freeze your eggs!” became the clarion call on the web and social media in the days after the report was released.

“That’s just nonsense,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a fertility specialist in New York whose book, The Male Biological Clock, was largely ignored when it came out a few years ago. “It’s a Band-Aid. What we need is change. Economic change. Social change. Lifestyle change.”

If, as evolutionary biologists have argued, women choose older mates because they are better providers for their children, could the new science, coupled with the rise in education and earning power among young women, throw that old calculus off? What if financially independent women decided that taking fewer risks with their children’s DNA was worth more than a stable provider? Would we begin to see shifts toward more gender equity at home and at work?

“The age difference between a husband and wife is a big predictor of gender inequality,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, explaining that even a small difference in earnings affects how a family makes decisions like who should stay home with the children or dial back a career. And a man typically being older means he’s had more years in the workforce and higher earnings–not to mention that persistent wage gap. As a result, a majority of couples favor the man’s career, leaving the woman, even if she works outside the home, primarily responsible for organizing and doing the lion’s share of childrearing and housework. The age difference that contributes to this stubborn imbalance is a strong social norm that hasn’t budged, ever, Cohen said. “But if women have more options in the marriage market and don’t put the same emphasis on wealth and income and shift to biological virility … it’s interesting to think what could happen.”

In recent decades, the age of first marriage and the age of first births have been rising for both men and women. But men are delaying childbearing because women are delaying childbearing–as I did–in large part to finish their educations and get launched on careers. The workplace can be a punishing place for someone in her 20s with a lot to prove, and a management structure designed to make you work long and hard to prove it. Add to that a load of student loans to pay off, the desire for financial stability, and a prevailing philosophy that having children is a private responsibility which thus does not require social supports like paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and you have a perfect recipe for delay.

Working as a journalist in my 20s, I knew virtually no one who was taking time out to start families. We feared that once we fell off the steep and narrow career ladder we were climbing–which was harder for a woman to get on in the first place–we’d never be able to get back on. So we worked long hours well into our 30s. Aided by advances in contraception, we put off having kids until we couldn’t any longer without facing what Harvard economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett calls the “creeping non-choice.” And it wasn’t just professional women staring down their biological clocks. From 1970 to 2006, the proportion of first births to women 35 years and older increased nearly eight-fold.

By the time we could wait no longer, many of us needed the help of technology. Though advanced reproductive technology, or ART, has been around for a while, surveys show that most of us don’t realize that it can’t outsmart an aging body. In 2009, for instance, only 36 percent of all ART cycles resulted in a live birth. And most of those were to women under 35.

Delay means fewer babies altogether. The U.S. fertility rate has been dropping in recent years, with the steepest decline among men and women with some college education, to about 1.1, which is lower than the countries with a fertility “crisis” like Japan, Spain, and Italy, far below the 2.5 level for U.S. women with no high school education, and lower than the 2.1 level required to replace the population. Scandinavian countries like Sweden, where parenthood has also been delayed, actually have among the highest birth rates in the developed world, the result, said Indiana University sociologist Linda Haas, not only of supportive family policies, but flexible workplaces and a sweeping commitment to gender equity, which makes it easier for men and women to have both meaningful work and quality time at home.

The American workplace, meanwhile, is still designed to reward the kind of Ideal Worker who doesn’t exist anymore, if he ever did–a single breadwinner with no family responsibilities and no desire for a life, someone who is ready and willing to work 24/7 for 40 years straight.

Could a ticking male biological clock take on the Ideal Worker and reshape the workplace? Perhaps not on its own. Perhaps not anytime soon. But it could be part of a “cresting wave” of change, said Ellen Galinsky, who studies workforce trends and directs the Families and Work Institute. Galinsky has found in recent years that both men and women report they want more time for life and flexible hours, autonomy, and engagement at work. More men are reporting a desire to be involved fathers and feeling just as much or more conflict between work and home as women. Galinsky said some enlightened workplaces are responding to a shifting economy, aware that the most productive, creative, and healthy workers aren’t necessarily the ones with their butts glued to the chair in the office for 10 hours straight.

Younger workers with a less tethered vision of life (less tethered to one career, one office, to a landline phone) may be as powerful a force as any scientific evidence for rethinking how and at what age people balance work and family. Gen Y’s expectations for a more fluid workplace are pushing against old norms. “It’s very clear, if there’s any generational difference I see in our research, it’s that young people want whole lives,” Galinsky said.

Leslie Zaikis, herself a member of Gen Y, left corporate America to become one of the first employees at the start-up Levo League, a Gen Y networking site. She points to surveys that show Gen Y men and women value flexibility over pay, would rather be unemployed than work in a job they hate, expect to change jobs often, are willing to take risks, and expect to work within a more democratic organizational structure, one where giving their regular input to the CEO is not unheard of. They want to be passionate about the work they do, make an impact, Zaikis said, and, most importantly, have a life at the same time. Zaikis herself works flexible hours, taking time to train for half-marathons, and focuses on the quality of her work, not when and where she does it.

“Will there come a time when we do listen to our biological clocks and have children earlier? Yes,” she said. Both men and women in Gen Y are already eschewing “prestige” firms and instead seeking out start-up and tech companies with a “cool factor.” These companies, she said, have already begun emphasizing working smarter instead of valuing face-time and long hours.

In its research on workplace trends around the world, Accenture, the consulting firm, has found that both men and women in Gen Y have no plans to work themselves into the ground and to the nether edge of their fertility, like older generations–like me. Gen Y has “had it all before,” Richard Westphal, Accenture’s North America Talent Strategist wrote me in an email, “so they don’t see why it should be different at work.”

But change is hard. That point hit home when I ran into my friend’s son, 22 and just out of college. Ben hadn’t even heard the news about the male biological clock. And while he, like the rest of Gen Y, plans to have the kind of work that still allows him time to canoe and play the violin, having a child in his biological prime is the last thing on his mind. He has friends with close to $100,000 in student loan debt. They are struggling to find jobs. Once they find one, they don’t expect to stay in a job for long or anticipate a job with benefits like healthcare, much less paid parental leave or on-site childcare. Ben told me he looks at the cost of houses and wonders if he’ll ever be able to afford to buy one. And, a good student, he’d made particular note in a sociology class of the fact that raising a child to age 18 in the average middle-class family costs close to $300,000–with the childcare bill second only to rent or mortgage–not counting college. “I saw that and thought, ‘Oh crap, I’m not having kids any time soon,’” he said. So when could he see himself starting a family? He shrugged. “Before 40.”

In the end, I was lucky. I have two beautiful, healthy children. And I hope, as studies have found, that being an older parent has made me calmer, more patient, and able to spend more time with them. But I’d like to imagine that the future for them will be different, more forgiving, where choices about how to work and when or if to have children and how to share caring for them with their partners are real choices, not dictated by outdated workplace culture or social norms. I’d like to imagine that their career paths could look more like winding trails across a broad field with all sorts of interesting, rewarding, and profitable places to go at different times and at different paces rather than one narrow ladder to be scaled at full speed at any cost. I imagine them in smart workplaces that understand that people who live well, taking time for family or to go canoeing or to play the violin, actually do better work. Will the male biological clock be enough to get them there? We’ll see.

Brigid Schulte is a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Washington Post staff writer currently on leave to write Overwhelmed, a book on time pressure and modern families at work, at home and at play, to be published by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar Straus and Giroux.

*Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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