The Company of Dads Podcast

EP9: Will The Pandemic Change Work and Parenting?

• Paul Sullivan • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Interview with Dr. Jamie Ladge / Expert on The Trade-Offs Parents Make and How Work is Changing

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

Jamie Ladge, an associate professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, comes at the work-life debate with a lot of questions. Why is it hard to be both a good parent and a good worker? Can fathers be competent dads and professionals? Will involved dads be penalized like working moms have been? Where does the change start? (Hint: Not at the top.) Listen to her answer these questions and also provide suggestions on what companies need to do to adapt to the new world of work and advice on how men and women can be parents and workers without guilt.

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I'm Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their parenting role. I know this from firsthand experience as a lead that my three girls, three dogs, three cats, and some remarkably three fish continue to be. I did this all while managing my career and striving to be an above average husband. One thing I know for sure about being a dad is it's not a normal role. You're not doing what dads have traditionally done. Going to work and leaving the parenting to mom or someone else. Nor are you always welcome in the world where moms are the primary caregivers. But here at the Company of Dads, our goal is to shake all that off and focus on what really matters family, friendship, finance, and fun. Today my guest is Jamie Latch. Doctor latch is an associate professor of management and organizational development at the Damore McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. She's also a distinguished research professor at the University of Exeter Business School. It's a research interest that made me so keen to talk to her today. She's coming at the work life debate from both the mothers and the fathers perspective. She wrote a book called Maternal Optimism Forging Positive Past Through Work and Motherhood, and in a forthcoming book she also contributed a chapter entitled Impossible Standards and Unlikely Trade Offs. Can fathers be competent parents and professionals? She has three sons and her ex-husband is very much a dad. Welcome, Professor latch, the Company of Dads podcast. How are you today? I'm great. Thank you for having me. Good. First question, I know you. You live outside of Boston. Your professor in Boston, and, you went to school in Boston. So key question here. Tom Brady, greatest athlete ever or greatest athlete in the entire universe? Oh, boy, can I say both. What are you have to write? That. Yes. They kick you out of Boston if you did. I know that now we are listening. So. Yes, of course. Greatest of all time. Everywhere. All over. You lose your Boston card. They. You know, I don't know. Okay, so, professor, let's just start with, you know, how did this become your area of of interest? What was it about? You know, mothers. But also, you know, fathers, because it's the Company of Dads podcast. What was it about, you know, fathers that that piqued your curiosity as a as an academic, as a researcher? It was fathers actually. Because I was doing all this research on motherhood and in fact, when I was a doctoral student at Boston College, I spent years, you know, researching all things motherhood, pregnancy experiences. Returning to work after maternity leave. In fact, my dissertation was on reentry experiences of first time mothers. And it was the fathers that constantly the fathers in the academic world that would say to me, well, what about the dads? You write so much about mothers. What about dads? And I'd be like, well, what about the dads? You know? Is that really interesting? Is it really something interesting to say, you know? And I realized that that was really, not a good way to think about things, but that, father, that I was I was very much out of touch with, or I was very much in line with what societal expectations were we're talking about. And I needed to get get that out of my system and focus on the dads. And interestingly, I actually replicated a lot of the work that I did on motherhood with fathers. And so one of the first studies we looked at was, what was the experience like for first time fathers, as they navigated their transition? To, to having a child and navigating those experiences and what that, life was like, would look like for them. And then we did a bigger study, that looked a little bit more broadly at those experiences as well. That's it. What were the big differences between, you know, first time mothers and first time fathers with, you know, as you said, the reentry into to the workforce. What were the biggest differences between the two? Well, I mean, so not much to be honest. I mean, for mothers, there are there are physical and logistical issues. And, you know, a lot of it depends on, you know, what's negotiated at the couple level. But, you know, we particularly were focused on fathers who wanted to be involved. Fathers, who had that, who had set that expectation for themselves and their wives as well. And so we we wanted to know what's it like to be an involved dad? What are the pressures, the experiences that you have in reentry? Do they take the kind of breaks, and parental leave that, that mothers take? I mean, they often don't because they're, they tend to be more stigmatized for, you know what I would say? Taking it too far. Right. It's okay to take a couple of weeks off, but four months paternity leave. Well, now you've now you've, you know, defying expectations of what it means to be, you know, masculine and what it means to be a man. But those were the things that we were really interested in. And so, I mean, parenting, I would say, is hard work no matter what. And I think we often ask, we might be asking the wrong question sometimes, you know, because, you know, someone says, well, why don't dads step up more? And I would say, well, why would they want to? This is the hardest job on earth, right? I mean, just because it's just some of the caregiving disproportionately falls on on mothers. Parenting is hard all around. You know, there are plenty of playbooks. I wrote a book called Maternal Optimism. I'm not always optimistic about about parenting. Of course, I have three teenage boys, so that might be put things into perspective a little bit. But it is, it's it's hard work. Right. And so it's, it's, you know. I can't imagine the book would have done as well if you titled that Maternal Pessimism. I just don't see that, you know, flying off the. Shelf after Covid hit. I thought about it for a second. Yeah. I love it. That's one, you know, in your paper, you know, on impossible standards, you write, you know, many questions remain with respect to what it actually means to be an involved father today and the ways in which organizations, i.e., you know, companies can encourage a more holistic view of men as ideal parents and professionals. And there's lots to unpack there. I mean, if I did my LinkedIn math. Correct. You were a graduate student right around 2000 ish 2005. Is that fair? When did you. Yes, yes. In that time. So when you look at the sort of 15 years or so between when you finished your, your, your PhD and the start of the pandemic, and now the, you know, two years since the start of the pandemic, what have been the the progress points, the encouraging points? And then, of course, the flip side of that have been, you know, what have been the discouraging points, the things that haven't, you know, moved as they relate to, you know, fathers taking on a greater role as, as parents. Well, the biggest progress for point progress, point is having conversations like these. When I look at your background, I see company of dads. I see organizations that are popping up on about fathers. I think just just the conversation itself that that didn't happen, in such explicit way as it may have happened. You know, maybe few dads used to get together and talk about parenting, you know, over a beer or, you know, in the privacy of their own homes. But we weren't talking about it in such a public way and with such a public debate. It was very much a kind of a hidden discussion point. We didn't talk about it that way. It was always about mothers when we talked about implementing new policies. This is where I went wrong. Even with my research, I focus so much on mothers, and I realized that I have to say, the two papers that I published about fatherhood were published even before my dissertation, which was on motherhood. And I think that just speaks to even academics wanting to see this work out there, wanting people to start having these conversations. And then I think the other thing that we've learned is that when fathers are involved, when we when fathers enter the conversation, that actually only helps mothers. It doesn't hurt them. It helps them. Because now everybody's part of that conversation. We used to just have affinity groups that were just for working mothers, and now it's about working parents. And I know I've been very cognizant of, opening up that that line of communication and just talking more about it. And I think it's become more commonplace for fathers to be able to talk about their role. You know, that it's not so much a, it's just as much a badge of masculinity to be a good dad as it is, you know, to be a good worker as well. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I agree that's what I'm trying to do with the company of dads, but I've had some really kind of curious moments since I left the New York Times in October. And, a couple of them involve guys that I've known for a long time, you know, golf buddies that I play golf with for six, seven years and one of particularly came up to me and he sort of whispered and he said, you know, I like what you're doing. I like to be involved, but, can you not use my name? And I'm like, you know, it's, the company of dads is we're going to create community. We're gonna have some fun together. We're gonna have each other. Parent is like, yeah, I don't want my name. You sounds like, you know, we're not taking, like, puppies and putting him in a bag and weighing it down and throwing me in the river. And he wasn't alone. There was a there are so many that came up and they, you know, I didn't I would have never known that they were the that I've always been very open about it. I've got, you know, maybe because I have three daughters and it's, you know, I'm the dad sitting at ballet. I'm not sure, but it always struck me. And these are guys, you know, accomplished in their career as well. Educated, you know, well-meaning. And yet they still want to keep it quiet. Yet on the flip side, you know, and this is not a badge of honor. This is a badge of of poor judgment. I'm in my third, term as class parent for one of my daughters. You know, you do it for one, then you have to do it for all of them. And you would think now, in 2022, when you'd start, they'd say, you know, okay, you know, class parent glad heroine. They're they start off every call, every zoom call with okay class moms. So great to have you here. And I have this running joke or I'm the guy on the zoom, you know, lifting up my finger saying, and dad, class and class dad. So we still have this. But, you know, in your research, we've moved, we've moved, we've made progress. But what is it going to take for us to to sort of make, you know, it normal for the dad to be the lead dad and and the mom to have a career that's much more time consuming and less flexible. And the dads picking up, you know, more of the stuff at home and yet they're both fulfilled. What are we going to have to do to to get there? Yeah. And I was going to say, I can tell you a similar story. I remember when my kids were in elementary school, there was, a stay at home dad who was our, student class advisor and, and president. He was always there at the school. And I remember listening to this one group of women say, it's enough already. He needs to get back to work. And I'm thinking to myself, what? He's a great dad, you know, why would you even say that? And so it's not just the men that I think, you know, hold those, societal expectations near and dear. I think I think some women do as well. And I think that's just it. I think the societal expectations about what it means to be a mom and what it means to be a dad are so deeply ingrained in the way that we think that it does make it very difficult to to let those things, to let those things go. I think, just for starters, you know, even what you just said about, you know, all the room moms and we need to change our language, right? We need to we're always talking about inclusivity and and, you know, I mean, we need some inclusive language around parenting. Where. And it's not just moms and dads. It's also same sex couples. And and, I mean, families, the family, traditional families have gone away a long time ago. And so we need to adapt with those times. And unfortunately, it's so deeply ingrained and embedded in who we are that it's going to take a lot to start to normalize what is no longer mean normal anymore for what appeared to be normal. And used to be, though, I mean, I think it's gotten a little bit better. It used to be, you know, these are things you'd hear from older generations, and I think I'm hoping I always say I'm counting on the current generation, who have kind of grown up in a whole host of different, with different scenarios and different dynamics that that might start to shift even more. But, but I think it'll take a while. I'm doing some new research right now that's Covid related on working parents, on one of the things that we're finding is that while the dads are more involved, they're still embarrassed about the number of hours that they're working, which is not as much as they're used to working. And so meaning that they're not working enough, they're not putting enough in. Yeah. So we asked we asked them how many hours are you working? This was the beginning of the pandemic and I didn't do this particular interview. But one of our research assistants looked at the interview, said that the guy literally whispered into the zoom, I'm only working two hours a day. And he was embarrassed and horrified to say that, because you have to whisper it. And and I think it's I mean, it's not just the ideal norms at home around what it means to be a mother and father. It's the deeply ingrained, embedded, like workplace norms that make us think that we can't say we've only worked a couple hours today because we did some really cool things with our kids, you know, like, who would ever say that? You know, because there's so much fear around, what those implications might be career wise. And so, you know, but the. Reality, the reality, professor, is how much time gets wasted in an office, how much time is like you're going around and to chatting with your buddy. You go outside for a walk, you go get a cup of coffee. You know, somebody comes over to your desk. I mean, that person may have only been working two hours as it was when he was in the office. Now he's. Yeah. And ironically, those are the things that people miss the most about being in the office. The nonsense. Yeah, because they could get the work done wherever. Right. It was the, you know, it was the social stuff that was, that mattered. So, you know, it's one of the things I think of as, as a dad that, you know, if I wanted to put into my calendar back at the New York Times, go into an office, I put on my calendar, you know, daughter's, soccer game. And blocked out two and a half, three hours, everyone be like, oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, he he's at the soccer game, so that's fine. But if I put in my calendar, three hours, talk with daughter, read, uninterrupted, in room with daughter. People would be, like, slacking off. What what are you doing? You know, and I still think that. Whereas, you know, if you have empowered employees, they're going to get the work done regardless. And if they need to take two hours or they want to take two hours to be with the child, either to watch them do something athletic, musical, whatever or just to be with them, that should be fine. I mean, do you see your research any are any companies, you know, thinking. Along those. Lines, is that something that's, you know, too much to ask in 2022? You know, there's a there was an article in the Wall Street Journal years ago, I think we I don't know if we quoted it in this, chapter, but I know that we've quoted and I've quoted in another work, where the CEO, a male CEO, actually put his family schedule up on a big whiteboard so that people could actually see where his, you know, these are uninterrupted times that you are these are times when you cannot, you know, interrupt me. These are the times I'm with my family. And then when I up happening is people on his team followed suit. So it became normal that people would know, you know, these are the times that are off limits because these are my family hours and these are these are my work hours. And so I think there are examples of that. They're probably far and few between. I think there's more examples of normalizing the, you know, what I would call the, the Seinfeld episode where, George Costanza left his car in the parking lot because he wanted to show that he was still there, or people that leave their lamps on, you know, at work to make it seem like they're back or they have automated emails in the middle of the night. I mean, I've heard a whole host of stories like that, but, those are the things that end up still getting, you know, normalized in this study that we just did the Covid, study. I'm working parents. You know, one thing that was really interesting for both mothers and fathers is the normalization of, or almost like a relaxation of ideal parenting norms. And you saw this in all these different memes, you know, out there about, you know, people drinking, like during the day with their kids or their kids are duct taped to a wall while, you know, they're they're in a meeting or something like that. And I mean, it's some of those borderline, on child abuse, but they're really not all that funny. But in a way, it was kind of saying, listen, the world has gone to, you know, what? And so we need to relax some of these norms. But yet at the same time, they're sitting there on that computer duct taping their kids, so they can work, which really exemplifies that while they were freed from these norms, there's still that fear. And I think the fear wins, you know, when you have to, balance those things. It's that fear again that that just, seems to take precedence, which is why I think, these norms don't seem to fully dissipate. So if we had to set up kind of, a chicken, or the egg scenario here to sort of bring about change, you know, is that change led by by the company, by the organization, or is it led by, you know, fathers and mothers saying, look, this isn't this isn't right. The mother saying, I don't want to have the second shift anymore. You've got to do more of the parenting. And the father saying, look, I don't want to be that, you know, totally absent dad. I don't want to get a badge just because I show up. I'd pick my kid up once a month. You know what comes first? Is, is it the human or the company that that leads this change? It's such an interesting question. This is the question I throw out to my students all the time when we talk about work life balance, who's responsible, you know, is it the individual? Is it the company? Is it something societal? I think the answer is all of the above. I think you can lead by example, which is the one the thing that individuals fear the most because they fear, you know, their jobs. But if they lead by example and they say this is and in our research world we recall is positive distinctiveness, we would say we're not going to be like everybody else. We're going to show people that that like that CEO that I mentioned that put his his family schedule up on the whiteboard, you know, that is an example of saying this is my reality and deal with it. And I want your reality as well. Again, that's the approach that most individuals don't want to take. Now, you can from an organizational standpoint, you can put a whole host of policies in place. And companies often do this. They put work family policies in place. They did this even more so with Covid, but then nobody takes them, right? Nobody takes advantage of them because of that fear. Like I said before, the fear wins out. So, and this this is research that's been going on for years that say that people you don't utilize most of the, family friendly policies that are out there because of fear that they're going to lose their job, are going to get demoted or be seen as counted out. So I think it really has to start from both angles. But there's another one too. There's the people in the middle right, the middle managers, which are who used to not have such an important role. Right. There's probably a lot of memes about middle managers and but but if you empower the middle managers who are I think right now to during Covid are the ones that are really seeing the struggles that working parents are facing and they're dealing it with them themselves, then they're, you know, I'm kind of a middle manager right now. I'm the chair of my department. And so I see firsthand what some of my faculty are dealing with and I'm willing to make concessions for them because I see what they're struggling with. I know what I'm struggling with, that things that maybe people in the senior leadership might not see because they're trying to come up with some holistic, one size fits all policy for everybody. Which is not to say that that's not meaningful, but when what it comes down to is the people in the middle really having to kind of manage up and manage down at the same time around these issues. I love hearing you say this, because one of the ideas early on for a slogan for the Company of dads was change starts in the middle. And my wife thought that was a horrible idea because she thought, you know, nobody wants me a middle manager, they're an emerging manager. I was like, okay, change starts with the image that doesn't have the same ring to it as change starts it. But I think, like the people who are the senior executives now who are running the companies, I would bet, that they suffer from some form of confirmation bias. Whatever they did in life is what got them to that point. Whether they had a spouse who stayed at home, whether they had, nannies and child care, whether they, you know, were somehow able to balance it, I don't know. But whatever they did got them there. But that those managers who are, you know, emerging managers, my term middle manager, year term professor, just remember you said middle manager, not me. Who are right. They're they're closer to the people that they're managing and they're closer to the experiences that those people, are having right now. And, you know, they, you know, but for a few years ago, we're colleagues. And now there's a power, dynamic power imbalance in place. What can the the most senior leaders do to empower, you know, those those middle managers to make the changes to keep the workforce, you know, productive and to to sort of give up the ghost that there's such a thing post 2020 is as a distinction between home and work. What can those managers being empowered to do the way you think of, you know, a general empowering his his field officers? I mean, this might sound a little pie in the sky, but I wrote this down earlier and I, I think it's important. I mean, I think there are certain you can normalize you can give managers a skill set, right, to normalize, parental support. Right. Just in the way you can provide other types of skills. I don't know that that can happen from above, other than providing mechanisms to allow them to normalize that. Right. If you're going to constantly put barriers up so that these managers can't actually manage, you know, in many organizations, I mean, Google, for example, you know, allegedly, they're not really managers as we normally think of managers. They're not it's not about command and control. It's not just about delegating tasks. It's about listening. Right. It's about problem solving. And I think if you empower your managers to be problem solvers, right, to be listeners, and to not be so command and control, then you will allow them to then then that that process can be facilitated. They can they will see normalizing, like I said, parental support as a management skill, as just part of their, you know, daily repertoire of managerial tasks on top of, you know, all the other things that they have to worry about. But in your research, particularly the research on pandemic parenting, are you seeing any sort of movement in that direction? Other companies that are really trying to do this again, not out of out of sort of an enlightened self-interest, like if they don't do this, the system isn't going to work the way it did in 2019. I think you're starting to see and in some of the emerging research that I'm doing right now, and I don't have enough data points to to say this, but these are things that we're sort of hypothesizing right now is that I think and what I'm doing, frankly, myself as a middle, or emerging manager, I'll use your term now. Is is is doing is empowering myself to do the right thing to, to lead with care right over and above whatever policies are out there and then to, to pay the price later or to manage up and say, you know what? These folks really need this kind of support and here's the support that they need. What do you think about that? I actually just got off the phone a couple of my colleagues. I'm doing scheduling right now right. Teaching scheduling. And someone pointed out to me, well, the way we schedule our classes really aren't all that amenable to working parent hours, because people are trying to figure out they can't really do the 8 a.m. classes. They really can't do the classes that end after 5:00 because of rush hour, you know? And I thought, wow, I think that's the that's my new thing. I'm going to the senior leadership and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to talk about this because we should be if that's that's a simple solution to a really difficult problem for so many people. And, you know, we just it's just another example of just being a little bit more flexible and thinking outside of the box. So again, these are anecdotes. I don't know that I can necessarily say research wise, but I think when you empower people, you know, they're they're more likely to be creative and come up with creative solutions, and, and lead with care. Like I said, the lead by policy. Yeah. That's a great example. I mean, there's another piece in the paper I referenced early on, in which you wrote about something along the lines of, you know, the downside of involved fathering is it involves companies questioning fathers commitment to work. Now, of course, any working mom who would hear that would say, well, what the hell are you talking about? Sullivan? That's happened to working moms, you know, forever. You're a senior executive, and it looks like you're you're, you know, choosing to go home to your family and not be at work. And I remember there's a. Yeah, I went to Chicago for for graduate school and there's research, you know, 20 years old now, but talked about, you know, the penalty for women who stepped out of the workforce for some period of time versus those who never had kids and never had to step out of the workforce and what it did, it was a Chicago service based on their compensation over the course of their career. But when you you know, that original point that involved fathering may come at a cost of course, involved mothering has already come at a cost. What a company's do? Because the flip side of that is, if you don't give people the space to be parents, whether fathers and mothers, what are they going to be? Are they really going to be like, you know, the superstar employee? Are they going to be, you know, a half man, half miserable functionary who's not fulfilling his or her own own potential? How do you, you know, address that conundrum of, almost kind of the knock that people have to take for being involved with with their children. Yeah. I mean, I think I think you said it perfectly, you know, I mean, men are just experiencing what working are working dads that want to be more involved. They're experiencing what working this, you know, experience for a long period of time. And a lot of cases it's worse for men, right. Because the stigma is is, has been shown to be far worse if you ask for flexibility. And we may have talked about this before, but, you know, you can't take it too far too, because when men take it too far, then they're really counted out. And, well, are they really management material or are they? But I think maybe we're just asking the wrong question, because I can remember there was a there's a case study from Harvard Business School from years ago about the case of the part time partner, and it's about a woman who wants to they want to promote her, but she's been part time and there's no precedent for it. And in some of the commentary, it says something like, well, the the question is, what's wrong with the person that does want to work long hours, right? Why can't we flip the script a little bit and say, what's wrong with the person that doesn't want to be home with their kids and family? And why can't we normalize that in organizations? And, and we're going to have to frankly, I think I think companies now are starting to realize, given, you know, what we're learning about the great resignation and what, you know, Covid is sort of taught us that people aren't going to stand for it anymore. They need that balance. Maybe they it was that we wanted it before. Now we need it. There's it's an imperative now. It's not a it's not a nice to have. It's not it's an imperative. It's what we all need for our mental health and sanity. And by the way, we're starting to talk about mental health now in a more normalized way. And you know, I'm not saying I'm not equating work life balance to mental health, but there is a lot of psychological and and physical distress that comes with an inability to balance your work and, and family lives. And so as long as we can normalize those conversations and recognize that, I think companies now are starting to see, okay, this is going to be part of our it's not just about, okay, great. We have this policy and this policy in this policy, we're done. We've done what we said we were going to do. No, it's about actually showing that you care and and lifting that veil on, you know what these policies were intended to do and actually saying we actually can't or we can be a little bit more flexible, and we're not going to judge you for it. And again, I think that it goes back to that leading by example when you have executives and leaders in organizations that are doing just that, then it helps others to say, hey, okay, great. Now I can see myself in that leader. You know, so, I mean, I think it's still going to take a long time to lift, you know, those norms and make that more of a reality. But, you know, I think, I think it's just an important. I mean, we don't have a choice. I mean, there's more dual career couples. There's more single parents out there. You know, this is just a challenge that so many families, you know, are facing and they're going to, I think, push organizations in that direction, whether they like it or not. I mean, in your research, are you seeing any sort of generational divides, you know, obviously a 25 year old or 2017 was probably not even in middle management yet, let alone senior management. But are you seeing sort of the younger generation, not sort of asking, if they can have more time with their family just taking it or assuming that this is just normal for them to have? What I mean, are we you know, we put a lot of burden on millennials to sort of save this from climate change, but might they save us from from this as well? I mean, I have been telling my students for the better part of the last ten plus years, like, we are counting on you. You know, you say you want this flexibility. These are all the things that older generations have wanted but been afraid to ask. You know, it's up to you to to make that happen. Although I will say I think they're a little bit, you know, there's a little they may say they want that flexibility. They may say they're willing to ask for it. I mean, I think they're willing to they're not willing to go to companies that they can't when they can't get that. So their choices might be driving that. But at the same time, they still say, I want to work really, really hard for the first, like five years of my life, and then I'll make so much money that I can, you know, then then I'll have all the balance in the world and I always say, okay, if that happens, great, come back and, you know, fund and endowed chair for me. But it's probably not going to happen for most of you. I think I said that too, probably when I was in undergrad. But I do think I do think that that it's up to them to push the envelope, you know, on some of these, these changes that we've kind of been hoping for for a long time. Professor. This been great. Thank you for being my guest on the Company of Dads podcast. I always like to give my guests the the last word. So last question. The last word. If you could say, you know, speak directly to those middle managers or senior managers, those HR executives, if you could tell them, you know, one concrete thing that they could do that would make it easier for working mothers and lead dads to find fulfillment, both at work and at home. What would you tell them to do? Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to that normalizing parental support as a management skill. You know, let's train managers how to be supportive. And again, it's not just parental support. I think there are other, other forms of support that are non-work related that we just have to start to normalize in organizations if we're going to expect the best from people. You know, that that that we need to just recognize that people have lives outside of their workplace that are meaningful and important to them. And when those, meaningful life scenarios are fulfilled, they'll probably be far better at work, that we have at work. I mean, certainly my research suggests that, they'll probably even identify even stronger with their career, knowing that they have, you know, these other outlets in their life and they have the support from their managers or from HR and or from their peers. So that's what I would say is just normalize that support as much as possible and talk about it. You know, these are conversations that have to be had in organizations. Not these are not just mother conversations. These aren't just Bible conversations. These are people conversations. You know, this is life. Thank you. Professor, I've really enjoyed talking to you and I'm grateful for your time today. Thank you. Thanks for having me.