John Kerry - Challenges Americans Face As They Balance Work & Parenting

We have to expand prekindergarten education and similar platforms for cognitive learning. I'm proud to have sponsored an effort that helps families by providing funding to increase and coordinate early childhood development initiatives. But this is only a start. It's equally important that we see to it that kids have something useful to do after school. Every day five million American kids are home alone or on the streets between the hours of 2 and 7 p.m.. In most cases, we consider ourselves lucky when the television can become their caretaker, because otherwise, too many kids might use this time to conceive a child, do drugs, or commit violent crimes.

Todays kids are especially vulnerable because we are in the middle of a huge transition in how families- or at least many families- are organized. The emancipation of women to go into the workplace and the advent of two earner families are not just economic, or social tends, they represent enormous changes in social structure that will take decades to work themselves out thoroughly. While there are thousands of self-help books on the subject, there's no guaranteed successful approach to raising kid's and working full time. We need to do everything we can to support parents in this effort.

I know from my own personal experience how complicated this task can be. In 1982 my first wife and I separated. When I was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984, she stayed in Boston with our children while I traveled to Washington. Trying to do my honor to my duties as a father as well as my duties to the people of Massachusetts, I would sometimes sneak away from my staff and put in a call to my daughters to check on their homework or just talk to them about the ups and downs of their lives.

On Thursdays or Fridays I'd fly back to Boston as soon as senate business was finished and would sometimes get back in time to catch the final minutes of Vanessa's soccer games. When they'd end, I'd usually run into the field and give her a hug and congratulate her on her effort, and it always hurt that I missed part of the game. (Sometimes, she didn't return the hug, and it was only years later, while watching a televised with her, did I learn the truth: She was embarrassed by the fluorescent orange hunting cap I occasionally wore to her games in the fall.)

Like most parents, I made my mistakes. But I learned a lesson during those years that everybody in Washington ought to learn about the challenge most American families face as they try to balance work and parenting. Some people mocked Al Gore for making this issue a priority in 2000, as though it were trifling concern affecting only spoiled baby boomer's working to many hours and living to far from their jobs. But its a very real problem for most families, while government cannot solve it, all our policies should reflect an understanding of how important it is to support parents who leave one job each afternoon to return home to the most important job in America.