Overwhelmed : work, love, and play when no one has the time
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Can working parents in America, or anywhere, ever find true leisure time? According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is "that place in which we realize our humanity." If that's true, argues the author, then we're doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity. In this book the author, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but "contaminated time" in which we are in frantic life management mode until we are sound asleep? She first asked this question in a 2010 feature for The Washington Post Magazine: "How did researchers compile this statistic that said we were rolling in leisure, over four hours a day? Did any of us feel that we actually had downtime? Was there anything useful in their research, anything we could do?" This book is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together. Here the author speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration. She investigates progressive offices trying to invent a new kind of workplace; she travels across Europe to get a sense of how other countries accommodate working parents; she finds younger couples who claim to have figured out an ideal division of chores, childcare, and meaningful paid work. This is the story of what she found out. -- Provided by publisher.