Family-friendly policies are pure Government verbiage, writes Kathyrn Holmquist

March 1st will be Family Friendly Work Day. A radio ad told me to check www.familyfriendly.ie for details, but when I visited the website I could find little about it.

Somehow that makes sense. Lip service is all parents have got out of policy-makers in the past decade. They just don't take us seriously. We've become economic slaves to a lifestyle that isn't a life. Our country may be prosperous, but our private lives are poor. Most parents are so exhausted by juggling work and family that they haven't got the energy or time to enjoy their children.

Supposedly this agonising problem has been taken on board by the National Framework Committee for the Development of Family Friendly Policies under the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (representatives include IBEC, ICTU, Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Department of the Taoiseach, Department of Finance, Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs and the Equality Authority).

I wonder if these groups understand the enormity of the problem. We're all too familiar with the double-income, over-stretched mortgage trap. To buy a house, a couple needs two good incomes. They also need to borrow to the absolute limits of their ability to repay. When the couple become parents, they both have to keep working, even though one of their salaries barely covers the childcare costs.

By the time most working parents get home in the evenings, it's nearly time for their children to go to bed. At weekends, parents want to spend time with their children, but they end up spending most of their time on chores and shopping.

"I feel that there is practically no quality time to spend with my son. Weekends are spent shopping and cleaning instead of with him," one parent told RollerCoaster.ie, a parenting website that has just published a survey on parents' frustration in combining work and family.

It found that 80 per cent of parents who work outside the home full-time feel that they are not spending enough time with their children. Nearly 50 per cent of parents who work part-time outside the home feel that they and their children are losing out - making part-time work a better, if not perfect, option.

Given the choice, 72 per cent of parents who work would opt for part-time work outside the home instead of full-time work. However, parents don't have a choice. Financial necessity is preventing parents from availing of flexible work options.

Meanwhile, parents live with constant guilt. Family-friendly? It's a term, not a solution. Take working from home. As one respondent to RollerCoaster put it: "(I have) guilty feelings about children while at work and (I am) resentful of kids when attempting to work from home." Another said: "If I leave work on time, I feel guilty because people think I'm a clock watcher (and I'm in a management position) so that's not good. If I leave work late I feel guilty for not being with my daughter."

Is Family Friendly Work Day going to change these entrenched attitudes? Existing on a hamster wheel of paid work and home-work combined, many parents fear that they are too tired to relate to their children in any meaningful way, according to Anne O'Connor, registered clinical psychologist and founder of RollerCoaster. Only 20 per cent of respondents who work full-time felt that they were spending enough family time with their children, compared with 84 per cent who are at home full-time and 52 per cent who are at home part-time.

When parents haven't got enough time, two things happen. First, parents are too tired to provide their children with consistent direction and discipline. Consistency is what children need, but providing this requires energy and attention. O'Connor comments: "Parents are worried because they are too tired to provide discipline. Sometimes, parents know that they should intervene in children's behaviour, but they are too exhausted to get up out of the chair."

The second damaging spin-off is the parental relationship itself. Marriages are under such pressure that parents have no time to spend nurturing each other. This is bound to have repercussions in family breakdown.

So what can we do about it? Most parents believe that the Government should pay parents to work full-time in the home and subsidise those who choose for family reasons to work part time, according to O'Connor's research. Lone parents believe that when they get jobs outside the home, the Government should allow them to keep their various lone-parent allowances.

There's a general election coming up. Isn't it about time that we parents demanded that society support us? In the last general election, lip service was paid to the problem of overstressed family life, but little was done. Government policy has been to encourage more women into the workforce because with a booming economy, more workers were needed. Now that we're in an economic slowdown, will the Government start to value women workers even less? Parents' role is certainly not seen as valuable. The children's allowance has increased, but it's nowhere near enough to take pressure off families.

Tax allowances for children would be just one practical step a sensible government would take. Tax allowances for childcare costs would also ease pressures, enabling some parents to take the option of working part-time, since currently a full-time job is required to pay for childcare.

A "birth strike" is the way some commentators have described the falling birth rate in Europe. Having children has become such an unattractive option in Ireland, that a birth strike may be the only way potential parents can convince Government to make parenting easier.

We're raising the next generation. If Irish society is to continue to grow and develop in a positive way, society needs our children. Society also needs us to put time into our children, so that they grow up to be responsible adolescents and adults. If the National Framework Committee for Family Friendly Work policies took this seriously, they would give parents paid parental leave of at least one year after a baby, and let all parents - mothers and fathers - work three-quarter time on full pay.

Not that I think that's ever going to happen.