Home Synopsis Buy the Book About the Author Subscribe to Our Newsletter The Mommy Brain Blog Read an Excerpt Reviews Q&A The Mommy Brain
The Mommy Brain
How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter

The Mommy Brain Blog

Monday, March 27, 2006

back from Spain

I spent all last week in Barcelona and Madrid promoting the launch of Inteligencia Maternal, the Spanish translation of The Mommy Brain. What an eye-opener it was to get an opportunity to have so many conversations with one dozen women (and one man) reporters about what life is like for parents in Spain. On the one hand, moms get four months paid maternity leave (contrast to our pathetic 6 weeks unpaid)plus comparatively close families means the grandmas do a lot of the childcare for free. Yet on the other, the working hours are brutal (checkout time from many offices is 8 p.m. and the loss of the siesta means that's working all the way through) and the expectations very high especially in the last several years as the economy has raced ahead. It began to make sense why Madrid's birth rate (excepting immigrants) is so low, lower than two kids per family. Many of the questions I got were from working mom journalists who wanted to know when and how they were going to get more support in raising their families. It looks to me like some US corporations are in the vanguard in realizing the need to come up with more flexible hours and conditions -- but too few, and too slowly.....The funniest question I got, though, was from a 60-year-old macho reporter at the Madrid newspaper La Razon, who mentioned Freud's theory of women having penis envy. "Must men now have uterus envy?" he asked. It may have been funnier in Spanish....

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home