Around the Watercooler

Want to commiserate about the Monday back to work blues or get tips on scheduling playdates from your desk? This is the place to quench your thirst for all things work/life related. Watercooler's editorial host is Jennifer Sey, the VP of global marketing for Dockers. She is joined by Vicki Larson, a journalist and single mom who writes at The OMG Chronicles Denise Berger, the global leader of the Women’s International Network (WIN) at Aon Corporation; and Kerry Rivera, a real mom from the "O.C." who is the Marketing and Advertising Manager for Toyota.

The Executive Mom's Answer to Childcare: The Stay At Home Dad.

This generation of working moms has a childcare option almost unheard of in previous decades: the Stay At Home Dad (playgroup code name “SAHD”). According to a Census Bureau report, full-time stay at home dads took care of 189,000 children in 2002, up 18 percent from 1994. These are married fathers with children under 15 who are not in the labor force primarily so they can care for kids while their wives work outside the home. more

And Nanny Makes Three.

I often joke that I was raised in the bosom of Island Women. That’s because my parents divorced when I was very young. With my dad out of the house and money tight, my mom needed to work—and her job required a lot of travel, which meant she also needed help taking care of me and my sister. Until I was 10, we always had live-in help, a.k.a. “The Nanny.” more

A Husband's Perspective on Working Mom Overdrive.

In my single days I was a complete failure with fast women. I’m not talking about the kind of ladies who moved through men like fire through a dry forest. I’m referring to females who make quick decisions, achieve goals rapidly, and grab all the life they can into their waking hours.

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What Opt-Out Revolution?

We all remember playing tug of war in gym glass right? The objective was to pull hard enough to push the other team’s flag over the goal line, often causing its members to fall to the ground.

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Kids & TV: The Boob Tube Is OK.

American Academy of Pediatrics says that children under two should steer clear of the boob tube. But, a recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation on families and their television viewing habits found that plenty of parents happily use TV as a babysitter.

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A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Generation Gap.

There used to be this thing called a generation gap. The term referred to the distance in understanding between people with more than, say, twenty years between them. Where women were concerned, the term captured the often sharp division between the stay-at-home mothers of the nineteen fifties and sixties and their daughters, women like many of our moms on the front end of feminism’s second wave. But the gap has closed.

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The Cost Of Time Off.

You may have heard the statistic that women earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns. Is it women’s choices that drive the pay differential? Do women earn less than men earn mostly because men never step off the ladder -- their wives do? It’s not that simple.

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One Small Step For Womankind.

There will soon be 11 women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies. The latest is Indra Nooyi, who will run PepsiCo, the soft-drink and snack giant that had $33 billion in annual sales last year. That’s a lot of Pepsi.

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A Voice Of Generation Y Heard From: Are Success and Motherhood at Odds?

Ken was a handsome executive-type. He drove a red Corvette and took care of Barbie, who arranged playdates for Skipper and Stacey, adored her baby, Polly Pocket, and fussed with her jumpers and up-dos at least three times daily.

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Working Mother Fear Factor.

My fears have always revealed themselves to me through dreams. I am terrified of heights. So I have dreams of free-falling off the Golden Gate Bridge. I am afraid of losing control, of being unprepared, of failure. So when I was in school, I had recurring nightmares about having to take a final exam in a class I never attended. I am terrified of bugs. So I dream that I am on Fear Factor in a tank filled with cockroaches.

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