Totaling up the hours, the total hours of paid work by both parents was about 676 hours – or 28 days per year. In the 1960s, about 38 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home, and by the 2000s, 75 percent did. Work: The section on Work starts with the statistics.

Her book addresses the causes and effects of time confetti, and possible solutions. The cover of the book is a visual depiction of time confetti. She describes our modern schedules as 'time confetti' – a wonderfully descriptive image. Why are we, beneficiaries of the widest opportunities for education, good health and advancement ever known for women, living such miserable, stressed-out lives? Is it our jobs? Our families?īrigid Schulte is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post with two school-age daughters. Welcome to our lives – the lives of early 21st century working women juggling responsible careers, family, home and marriage without catastrophe! How did we get here? We have the kind of lives that our mothers and grandmothers fought hard to achieve, so that we, their daughters and granddaughters, could indeed grow up to be anything we wanted, including doctors, scientists, astronauts and, yes, even lawyers. The cell phone I'd just been using to talk to one of my kids' teachers has disappeared into the seat crack. The car tax sticker on my windshield has expired. on a Tuesday and I am racing down Route 1 in College Park, Maryland.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time, $16.45, Amazon.Brigid Schulte begins this easy-to-read book that both hits home painfully and hilariously mirrors so much of the 'overwhelm' of our lives, with a word picture: It is just after 10 a.m. We have, and it’s already a life-changer. If you read any book this year, make it this one.

The book mixes the personal experiences of Schulte and other parents like her (as well as the Danes, who seem to have mastered work-life balance), and fact-based studies by neuroscientists and sociologists to come up with a 360-degree view of how we got to where we are today and how we can crawl our way out of the holes that we, and society, have created. When told that she-and every person-has over four hours of leisure time a day, the busy mother of two dove head-first into a research project looking at the absence of downtime in modern life-especially the lives of mothers, whom she calls the most “time starved” people of all. The name says it all: Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time is a brilliant read by Washington Post journalist Brigid Schulte that aims to help men and women snowed under by life’s mounting, impossible demands. If your New Year’s resolutions include reading more and also finding the way out of the overwhelm of modern life, then we have a book that’ll pull double-duty for you.

Overwhelmed work love and play