Life in the Third Oikos: Ivana Greco
Litigator, mother, homeschooler, and caretaker: on the often false binary between stay at home and working parents
In The Third Oikos, I’m not just interested in the choices that individual households make. I’m also trying to understand whether there are more useful or accurate ways to understand modern households and family life than the categories we typically use.
In her home and in her career, Ivana Greco has illuminated how the binary between stay-at-home motherhood and being a “working parent” is often a false one. Ivana is a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita (writing and researching on issues affecting homemakers, mothers, children, and families) and was also a practicing attorney before becoming a homemaker.
In this conversation, Ivana shares the journey of her ambition in law and in the home while also caretaking for several elders and community-building. Her path there is highly entangled with her current professional role, where she writes and researches on the complicated role of modern day stay-at-home parents: anyone caring full-time for a child under the age of 12, even if they also work for pay. Ivana explains how current policy could better support stay-at-home parents, in their widely varying situations. She also gives tips to keep a family and community on the rails — mealtime, hiring, and keeping bulk snack-packs in stock to make your home a de facto gathering place for years to come.
I’ve previously chatted with Ivana on her Substack, The Home Front, about ambition and the household. Read all the way to the bottom for a small announcement.
—
Ivana: For the first couple years of our lives, my husband and I actually lived a couple of blocks away from each other in Washington Heights, New York. Then my parents moved across the bridge into northern New Jersey.
I went to public school K-12. I went to college in Maryland at Johns Hopkins, got my master’s degree in Paris, and then went to law school at Harvard.
I have one brother, so I don’t come from a big family, but my family growing up was always very tight. I have a very large extended family, and so family has always been really important to me. I also grew up Catholic and I had many friends who were Catholic and who were also part of larger extended families. That did definitely shape my opinion about the importance of family and the importance of children.
My husband and I got engaged when I was in law school, but we didn’t get married until after I graduated. I had thought I’d be a federal prosecutor, so I went and clerked for one judge and then another judge.
Then my husband got a job at Yale University. He’s a philosophy professor, and so we moved up here in 2014 and I started working for a law firm in New Haven right after we moved up here.
The Full Circle of Life: Ambition in Law and at Home
Nicole: You and I have talked about how ambition often overlaps in the domestic realm and also in the career realm. How did that take shape for you? Did you look at law as the peak of ambition? Were you thinking about starting a family? How did those two things begin to entangle?
Ivana: I had my first child not long after I started at the law firm, and even before that my dad had gotten quite sick with cancer. When my dad got sick, I was really involved in helping him. He died shortly after my first son was born.
I always knew I wanted to have kids, but I can’t quite remember exactly how I thought that would work in law school. I probably thought I’ll put my kids in daycare and focus on my career, but there wasn’t a point in my life where I’ve ever been just 100% focused on my paid job.
Nicole: How did you navigate beginning to take care of your dad, having a newborn, and being at a law firm? I really like that you focus on caretaking for elders as a common part of stay-at-home parenthood broadly.
Ivana: The law firm that I worked with was very flexible with me and I did many different work arrangements for them — I worked full-time, I worked part-time, worked on an hourly basis, I was on leave. They were very accommodating, but it was still very difficult.
I don’t know that I have advice to offer other than you really can only take it day by day. It’s very hard to have a grand plan about how that will go when someone’s got really serious health problems and you also have a little baby.
My dad passed away when my oldest son was eight months old. I was down there while he was dying, and I remember I was holding his hand with one of my hands and I was nursing the baby with the other hand. And it was just — here is the full circle of life.
My son’s middle name is the same as my father’s first name. It was one of those experiences that are really difficult, but also very beautiful. It really was just a question of taking everything one day at a time.
The False Dichotomy of Working vs Stay at Home Parent
Nicole: You also research and write about policy related to homemakers, mothers, children, and family.
Ivana: I research through a think tank, Capita, and we have done a bunch of independent research into families that have a parent at home — and we define that more broadly than some other places.
Capita’s scope of study: Families where a parent is caring for a child under the age of 12, full-time at home. They do not exclude people who work for pay alongside that.
That means that we talk to a lot of people who are taking care of their kids at home. Some are just at home with their kids, but others successfully combine work and keeping their kids at home. For example, I’ve talked to parents who are homeschooling, but then also have paid jobs that they do, whether they do that remotely or they do that in the evening after the kids are in bed.
Parents that combine home and work in this way make up a group of people that is both pretty common nowadays, but also often not recognized by policymakers. There are a lot of families that don’t fall into neat buckets.
Nicole: When you mention “families that don’t fall into neat buckets,” or even “the false divide between working and stay-at-home parents,” are there specific outliers you’re thinking of?
Ivana: One example is a nurse I talked to, who works a night shift three days a week, and then she homeschools her kids during the day. Her husband lets her sleep in when she comes home from the night shift and then he goes off to work. When she wakes up, she takes over caring for the kids. This family has personal goals for why they want to homeschool their kids, and they’ve taken advantage of flexible work options to make that work.
Nicole: I want to talk about stay-at-home parents and equal pay. In response to a recent Twitter debate, you wrote:
“If you want families to feel comfortable having a parent at home — I do — I believe conservatives must create a positive, pro-woman, pro-family vision of what that looks like.
Rolling back the legal rights of women to work or advocating for male heads of household to be paid more than their female counterparts is a political non-starter. Indeed, it is deeply counterproductive because it is alienating.
Happily, there is another way. It starts with recognizing that the work of the home is (as it has always been) critical to the flourishing of families and societies. Thus, those who do it should be protected and encouraged.
This means reforming the complex framework that governs our health and retirement benefits so homemakers are protected. It means making it easier for homemakers to move in and out of the workforce according to family needs.
It means also avoiding the twin traps of the 19th century (which said homemakers could not be fully equal because they were inherently lesser) and the 20th century (which said homemakers could not be fully equal because vindicating those rights required being in the paid workforce).
I hope in the 21st century we can propose a different message: the work of the home is something that is valuable, and those who do it are fully equal to someone in the paid workforce because of how valuable homemaking is.”
Could you expand on how to protect homemakers? And how we can make it easier for homemakers to move in and out of the workforce according to family needs?
Ivana: In the United States, you really have to look at the welfare benefit system provided by both the government and private employers if you want to understand how people live their lives. So when you look at those two systems, you start to get the sense that they are reasonably well set up for a traditional homemaker-breadwinner division of labor where the wife never works and the husband has a full-time career his entire life, and they’re also set up for a two-career couple where both spouses work full-time for the entirety of their career.
But they are not well set up for couples where maybe Mom is doing the vast amount of childcare, but she still does some amount of paid work. Or maybe Mom is at home for a few years, then she goes back into the workforce for a few years, then maybe she comes back out of the workforce when an older parent starts needing significant help.
Those kinds of people who don’t fit into neat buckets are not well served by our system. I’m interested in reforms that make things easier for these people who are doing really valuable and important work and are slipping through our safety and welfare benefit nets.
Nicole: What are some of the most compelling changes that you think are possible in the immediate future? Or levers that we can pull to serve this group of families better?
Ivana: One of the most obvious is that with the Social Security system, if you are working full-time and you become disabled, you are entitled to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is calculated based on how many years you have worked.
However, if you are a wife who started her career in the paid workforce, but then dropped out to take care of little kids — if you stay out too long, you are no longer eligible for SSDI. Even if you’ve paid into it for a decade, as long as your separation from the workforce is long enough, you’re not going to be eligible for it.
You also won’t have disability insurance through your job because you don’t have a job. And you also will probably not be able to collect the failsafe safety net, which is Social Security Insurance, which is for people who are very poor. If you’re married, your assets are probably too large to qualify for that.
That is a narrow sliver of people, because there are not that many homemakers who become permanently disabled after having paid significant amounts into the Social Security system. But it is a real problem for those that do. And it is indicative of the way that the Social Security credit system is not well set up to deal with people who are moving in and out of the workforce.
Nicole: What change would you recommend to work on this?
Ivana: With Social Security, the fix is conceptually very easy.
We would need to assign some period in which the government gives what are called “caregiver credits.” So you would still get credit in the Social Security system, even if you step out of the workforce to care for small children for some period of time. Many other countries have this setup where they’ll credit three years to your Social Security calculation if you step out of the workforce for three years to care for kids.
I’ll be candid with you and say that I don’t think it’s likely. The Social Security Trust Fund is under a lot of pressure right now. To the extent it’s being changed, they’re likely to make things less generous.
But that is, in theory, a fix which is conceptually very clear and would make a big difference for people.
The US considered caregiver credits at different points, but it never got the political backing to pass. At this point it’s probably too late because of the pressures on the Social Security Trust Fund right now. The places that did adopt Social Security credits often did it for explicitly pronatalist reasons — they were concerned about dropping birth rates — so they were trying to come up with different ways to make it easier for women to have children.
That was a motivating factor, at least in some places that have adopted these caregiver credits, that has never been particularly persuasive, at least not to date, for U.S. policymakers. There has not really been the same political push in the United States to adopt those kinds of measures.
Nicole: You’ve said with regard to a policy pitch by now-Vice President Vance:
“One of the most important ways to help address childcare costs is to help address supply problems: which means making it easier for small community providers, relatives, and parents to care for kids (if desired) rather than just subsidizing demand.”
Can you expand on that?
Ivana: There’s a lot of churn in the United States right now about how to do childcare policy well, where to direct resources, and where to think about reforming regulations. One of the avenues that I think is very promising is to make it easier for people to use what’s called friends, family, and neighbor care (FFN Care) as a source of childcare.
One reason why this is attractive is that in many places, the large daycare model is not well suited for many reasons. In rural areas, there just may not be enough children in a specific geographic location to make such a center really viable. Among communities that have strong cultural or religious traditions … it may be really important to them that their child is cared for by someone of the same background as them. Or if you are going to work and you have a toddler at home, you may just prefer it if your mom is able to take care of your toddler.
It’s a weird juxtaposition because there’s all this stuff in the news right now about how this might possibly be an avenue for fraud. And of course, fraud should always be taken seriously. But I do think these kinds of more flexible childcare arrangements are – for many people – what they would consider ideal childcare for their young children.
* FFN: Friends, Family, and Neighbor care refers to informal, flexible childcare arrangements outside of licensed centers, like a neighbor who watches kids in her home alongside her own. It’s distinguished from large center-based programs like Head Start. Whether FFN caregivers can receive payment through federal childcare subsidies like CCDF vouchers varies significantly by state.
Nicole: NYC has made the news recently because of mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for universal childcare expansion — a plan that aims to make childcare free for all children from six weeks to five years old, funded by a proposed tax on millionaires and corporations, starting with an expansion of free 2-K seats this fall in partnership with Governor Hochul.
A concern of mine is that if mothers want to stay at home but are in a place where every dollar matters, financial support for licensed childcare facilities alone tilts the scales in favor of one kind of family setup, rather than providing pluralistic policy that also supports stay-at-home parents.
Your work highlights that a) parents who are the primary care providers may also often be working, and b) they may have more complex motivations for staying home than policymakers often give them credit for — such as carrying for a medically needy child, accommodating complex learning disabilities, or doing additional care work for another elderly or sick family member.
Your recent report in Desert says:
“Our research found that a majority of parents with children under the age of 12, whether or not they are stay-at-home parents — and including close to half of Republicans — would be more likely to support child care legislation if it both strengthened families with stay-at-home parents and those that use licensed child care programs.”
Do you have recommendations on how Mamdani’s universal childcare proposal could be modified to strengthen families with stay-at-home parents as well?
In general, I believe childcare policy should be as pluralistic as possible. Good government policies should empower parents to make the choices that work for their own families, rather than slotting them into one lifestyle or another. I’m not super familiar with Mamdani’s proposal, but in general many childcare proposals are not universal at all. They only provide support for families where the parents want to work full time, and offer nothing to families with a stay-at-home parent. Often, the rationale is explicitly economic; there’s frequently discussion of boosting the GDP by making it cheaper for moms to work, or something along those lines.
Nicole: You’ve seen both full-time salaried motherhood (while working as a litigator) to more stay-at-home motherhood, mixed with elder caretaking, and homeschooling.
Again, I really appreciate your voice of reason in online discourse, having done the full gamut and having kids that are a bit older. What have you learned from seeing both sides of “working” and stay-at-home motherhood and what do people get wrong about this?
Ivana: I don’t think that there is “one path” or a perfect solution here. It is so family-specific, what combination of outside care, home care, et cetera, is the right call and will work best for that family. So I get aggravated when I see the discussion being framed as a very black-and-white thing.
‘Obviously it’s better for mom to work full-time and the kids to be in daycare.’ I get irritated by that, but I also get irritated by people who say, ‘No, the only right thing to do is to have the child home with mom all the time, and you should homeschool all the way through to when the child leaves the house.’ I don’t think that’s right either.
To the extent I have a strong opinion, it’s little babies. I don’t think it’s ideal if they’re in daycare. I don’t know exactly what the cutoff is, but I don’t want to see a six-week-old in daycare. I would like it if our society could make changes so that no one has to be freshly postpartum and send their six-week-old baby to daycare and go to work.
Nicole: To move into your household and family rituals: I’ve really enjoyed your dispatches from homeschooling and kid-rearing that you share on Twitter and Substack. What is a day in the life of Ivana Greco?
Ivana: My faith is really important to me, and my children are being brought up in the church. That’s a real source of connection and meaning for us. Although my husband is an atheist and he doesn’t share my religious beliefs, he’s very sweet about coming to Mass with us and really respectful of all the different parts of my religion.
We love books, so we’re always at the library. My kids probably check out two milk crates full of books every week.
Dinner is really important to us. We always try to gather around the dinner table and my husband’s home by then. To have us all in the same place is a cementing factor in our day and a lot of really important conversations happen at dinner. And then the big kids and I watch Star Trek every night — we actually have a lot of really good conversations about that.
Nicole: That is very sweet. How do you guys handle meals as a family of six? Do you have recommendations on just maintaining this habit over time?
Ivana: I’m not a very elaborate cook at this point in my life. I have a few standard meals that I rotate through: burrito night, pasta with meatballs night, breakfast for dinner night. My cooking right now is not very creative. I have to come up with something that all of the kids will eat and the adults will find palatable.
Nicole: This has already been a theme with the people I’ve talked to. When I chatted with Wilson Cusack for Third Oikos recently, he said the same. They also have four kids. Having a theme and structure for days of the week was immensely helpful in setting kids’ expectations, scheduling, and getting everyone on board. So I’m going to have to try this.
Ivana: Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I don’t like wasting food. I find it much more helpful to have the things I know for a fact that we eat and just buy those things over and over again, rather than being like, ‘Oh yeah, that recipe in the New York Times looks really interesting, I’ll give that a try.’ That may be for once the kids are older or move out of the house. But for right now, I have my pantry staples, which I buy on repeat, and then I basically just cook the same things over and over again.
Nicole: I also like cooking within my wheelhouse, whereas my husband is a much more creative cook — he’s energized by the challenge. I’ve been trying to figure out how to use Claude Code to order our regular Costco ingredient staples, then make the meal plan based off of that, because it’s comforting to me to just have the same set of ingredients in the fridge and be able to work from there.
Ivana: Especially with little kids, you have to do what works. It reduces the stress around mealtime, which makes the mealtime itself more open to creativity because we know what we’re going to eat so that stress is removed. The meal can be warmer, more connected, and more pleasant rather than fighting with a kid about eating asparagus that’s been cooked with Parmesan cheese on top.
Comfort with Chaos in Litigation and in Parenting
Nicole: That reminds me of some of the other tweets of yours about the managerial aspect of stay-at-home motherhood, and how you develop “Standard Operating Procedures” for certain situations.
“Having a protocol means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each predictable problem. There’s already plenty to think about, and so every place you can avoid additional decision-making is helpful. The incredibly useful Lazy Genius podcast calls this concept “decide once.” Instead of making a new decision each time, just make one decision, and stick with it until it no longer works. In my head, this logic means I have a series of “best practices” or “protocols” to address common problems.”
You mention these different axes where you’re thinking about the kids’ wellbeing, but also stretching the kids, but also making sure everybody gets fed, but also your wellbeing, and sometimes the bigger goal of just sitting down at a dinner that feels pleasant and connecting to everybody.
I like your orientation towards triaging priorities: asking what the primary goal coming out of a meal is, and then thinking about adding other goals where possible.
Ivana: The other thing that I would say is that if you want to be a homemaker, and especially if you want to homeschool your kids, it is really important to take care of yourself, because it is a big job.
I really try to prioritize that because I know that if I don’t, if I’m not functioning well, the rest of the family is just going to fall apart because I wear so many hats. I’m the source of the food, the house being clean, the education. My husband also makes it a priority that I’m able to get regular exercise, eat reasonably healthy food, and am able to get a good night’s sleep because those are the non-negotiables for me in order to be able to wear all the hats that I do.
Nicole: I loved the piece you wrote about stay-at-home mom burnout broadly, but you also tweeted,
”With a doctor who is burning out, we don’t (hopefully) tell him/her to suck it up, but rather to work with a trusted mentor on identifying and addressing pain points and searching for opportunities for genuine care of self. A wise SAHM thinks about this too!”
Do you have other recommendations on that note? I’m also interested in whether you have takeaways from managing yourself in your legal career, and how you brought that into the household, parenting, homeschooling, homemaking, and caretaking.
Ivana: There certainly are a lot of overlapping skill sets. As a lawyer, you have to be organized, have good attention to detail, and have to know how to work a calendar really well. I was a litigator and so you also have to be comfortable with chaos.
It’s very similar to being at home with your kids. You are going into a high-pressure, high-stress field. You have to be comfortable with tolerating some degree of chaos and things you don’t control. There are a lot of different fields like this, like working in the ER or doing litigation.
I think the same is true of being a homemaker — you just have to understand your kids’ attitudes are not really within your control and you should not pay attention to people who say that they are. If you have a bunch of kids in your house, there’s going to be a low level of chaos all the time. That is just the deal.
Part of being a stay-at-home mom is just acknowledging to yourself, “I’m in the ocean right now. The waves are moving around me. I’m not dictating where they go.” Your kids are really their own beings and so you don’t move them around like a marionette or a puppet. I think that’s really important to internalize.
Household Management
Nicole: I like that a lot — the comfort with chaos.
On a practical level, how do you deal with house cleaning and maintenance, and how has that evolved over time? What do you and your husband, children, other family, friends, or other people do to maintain your space?
Ivana: The most important thing is being really realistic about what you are able to do.
I’ve had more and less help at different periods in my life. I have a cleaning lady who comes and has been cleaning our house for 11 years and is great. When I quit my job as a lawyer, I was determined not to lose her, so we’ve always found money to keep her coming.
When I’m postpartum, I always send the sheets out to a laundromat nearby that does pickup and delivery, which is really helpful when I’m recovering from having a baby.
At one point my older kids were going to a babysitter one morning a week when I was postpartum, and right now I have a mother’s helper come on days when I have to do Zoom calls or other occasions where I need the kids not to interrupt too much.
It is not a static thing. I’m always sitting down and thinking, ‘Am I postpartum with a new baby? What is going on in the paid work realm? Based on the paid work that I’m doing, how much money do we have to dedicate towards hiring help?’ I think that the really important thing is not to be fooled by Instagram or what other people are doing, and to just ask, ‘What is really realistic here in terms of what I need help with?’
My kids do regular chores around the house: vacuum the dining room, that kind of thing — but I don’t have set chores for them. If there’s a bigger project I need done, I’m happy to pay my older kids to do it. For example, I was bugged by the lack of organization in our books. We don’t have a particularly extensive home library because we live in a small house, but we certainly have plenty of books. I told them, if you organize these books and put them into some kind of system, I’ll buy you a new video game. That went over really well.
Nicole: I remember being very motivated by getting paid every now and then to wash and clean out our car.
Ivana: Yeah, and I feel like it’s fair — they are really doing work. I’m not saying that all families have to do this, but yes. I want you to vacuum because you’re part of the family. If you’re going to spend a couple hours doing something for me, I usually feel like, yes, it’s fair for me to give you something for that.
Hiring & Relationships in the Home
Nicole: Asking partially for myself: how did you find a mother’s helper specifically? I loved being a mother’s helper so much when I was a teenager, so I’m excited to find someone. How do you think about finding and hiring people you have a longer relationship with?
Ivana: Our cleaning lady was a recommendation from a friend and she’s been with us for 11 years, through all four babies. She came anywhere from once a week to once a month depending on the season. Even postpartum, when it’s hard to have somebody in the house, I knew she would just shove the junk into a corner and vacuum. She’s really been very important.
Babysitters are a different story — they’re not static. I’ve hired neighborhood teens, posted on the local Facebook babysitting page, and gotten recommendations from friends. One of our best babysitters was the wife of a colleague of my husband’s. The challenge is that babysitters often can’t stay long-term: teens go to college, and what works for older women one year doesn’t the next. A full-time nanny can stretch years, but babysitters and mother’s helpers usually don’t.
Nicole: That rings very true. I had the realization a few weeks ago that all of our babysitters were all simultaneously moving out of a season of being able to help as much. I suddenly realized it would be a real functional constraint to our household and that I needed to bring in more people..
Homeschooling
What does homeschooling look like for you right now? What has that journey been like?
Homeschooling is the big thing keeping me at home, and it’s turned out to be really wonderful and important for our family, although also somewhat unexpected.
We moved to the neighborhood we’re in because they have an excellent public school, and we thought that we would put our kids in that school and that would be the end of it. But my oldest son started kindergarten during COVID and kindergarten was remote so that wasn’t a particularly positive experience.
He didn’t really seem very happy in school. When he was going into second grade, we decided we should try and see if he would like to be homeschooled. That was right after I had quit my job at a law firm. It just went really well. He was really happy, and we just saw him blossom outwards after that. We decided to bring my second son home and try it out and see if that went well too, and it did.
Like many homeschooling families, it’s always a year-by-year, child-by-child decision. We didn’t go into it thinking homeschooling is the only way to go: it was a more organic process.
Community Building
Nicole: What does your broader community look like?
I’m wondering if you have examples for both young families and even single people of how to build an active, broader community around them. And thoughts on how you and your family invest in your broader community today and how they support you.
So we live in a small house for a family of six. We live in 1,300 square feet — this is not a large house. The reason why we stay here is that we have many wonderful neighbors and we live in a neighborhood with sidewalks and there’s a lot of young kids around. And one of the nice things for me as a homeschooler is that once the public school kids are out of school, my older sons are not in the house much — they’re out in the neighborhood playing with their friends.
It’s very important to them and it’s very important to me also that they have a chance to go out, be independent, and have all these friendships. It sounds so trite, but the main thing is we just didn’t move. We bought this house in 2015 and we just stayed.
And we are close with many of our neighbors. We’ve been with them through their life circumstances, they’ve been with us through ours. And I think this is where time and openness makes things happen.
The neighborhood kids are always in my house and my opinion is, my door’s always open to you. Come in and play with my kids, eat the many kids snacks that I have in the house (I go to the grocery store and buy granola bars and snack packs of chips), and I think that’s the kind of way to do it. It’s not more complex than having a door that’s open and staying put in the same place for us.
Nicole: Do you have recommendations for people who don’t have kids? What are the first steps that you could take to get to know those neighbors?
Being outside is the big one. Our neighborhood comes alive in spring and summer. The neighbors I know who don’t have kids are the ones who put chairs on their front lawn, or who are out watering their gardens. I stop and chat, or they ask how I’m doing as I walk by.
Nicole: How do you and your husband balance work and career? Have you turned down specific roles or locations or projects because you knew they’d be less conducive to family or marital flourishing, or negotiated differently because of that?
One thing that I’ve been observing is that in our newer job economy, there are more and more micro career decisions that are being made all the time and there’s a lot of advice online about how to maximize work scope, title, pay, and status, and a lot less advice on how to maintain ambition or corporate learnings and growth and competitiveness, but still prioritize relationships like family outside of the workplace during this career and during a deep investment you’re making in your marriage and your children.
I’ve been really grateful that I had 10 years of work experience before I left full-time, paid work to be with my kids.
Because that opened up different doors for me that wouldn’t otherwise have been available. I’m really glad that we both saved as much as we could into our retirement accounts while we were both working full time. We were never going to be rich, but that has made retirement look a lot less scary because we put all that money away when we were young and now we have compound interest working for us.
Where I am now is not where I was envisioning when I was 19, but in many ways it’s better than I could have envisioned for myself when I was 19.
Nicole: I feel very similarly. I’m not as far along as you, but yeah, life feels better than I could have ever envisioned for myself. God is very gracious.
Life in the Third Oikos
Technology in the household is another area I appreciate your measured opinions on. This series is predicated on the belief that we’re entering into a new era for the household: post-COVID, post-remote work, post-LLM — the third oikos.
Are there modern technologies that enable your way of living or that you take a particularly novel approach to?
Ivana: Absolutely. There’s no way that I could do everything I do without a cell phone, the internet, and the computer. The revolution in remote technologies has just been incredible to witness, and I think that is just going to grow in scope as we get more technologically advanced. I don’t know when the Star Trek type holographic projection devices are coming, but I’m very optimistic about the power of technology to make it easier for people to meld family life and work life.
For homeschooling, there’s now so much available online, especially for older kids. If you are a student who wants to study zoology, you can find a really excellent remote class that will let you do that. It’s an area that just has tons of promise.
Of course there are no upsides without downsides. I worry sometimes about younger people being alone in their apartment and not leaving because they can do everything over the internet. But I think that if you already have a strong community and if you have a family and those things are in place for you, I think the internet and technology can just be an incredible force for good. And I look forward to seeing how that will continue to develop.
Nicole: Star Trek with my parents growing up was also a formative sci-fi reference for my life.
LLMs for the Household Operations
Nicole: Do you have any interesting LLM (ChatGPT, Claude) use cases for homemaking or household operations?
Ivana: Yes, all the time. Often I’ll have a leftover night in the meals rotation. You can plug in your leftover ingredients into ChatGPT and ask it to come up with a meal for you and it will do very well.
I use it to make maintenance lists. We live in an old home so it can be a helpful jumping-off point for lots of seasonal maintenance you forget.
It can be really good at setting you up well to talk to your kids’ pediatrician. Both about what questions to ask generally or you can give it different symptoms and it can give you different options.
And I have not found that it is a good idea to say, ‘ChatGPT told me this,” …. most doctors really don’t like that. Rather you can sort of prompt ChatGPT to help you to ask the different relevant questions to your child’s condition in a way that I’ve found really helpful.
Nicole: ChatGPT was very helpful for us when our toddler had a really bad skin infection. We had called in twice to our pediatrician’s weekend help line and they said, ‘We think it’s fine, just keep monitoring him.’ But it was really escalating and ChatGPT suggested we take him to the hospital because of the possibility it was cellulitis after we prompted it with timestamped photos of the rash progression on his face. Sure enough, it was a very severe cellulitis infection, close to his eye, with potential to also progress to his brain, and it progressed pretty intensely over a week until the doctors found antibiotics that worked.
So I was very glad that we had a ChatGPT second opinion when I believe our pediatrician was not as present as they probably should have been.
On another note, if you had to pick one under-discussed policy change that would most materially improve family formation in the next decade, what would it be?
Ivana: Workplace flexibility, and there are two sides to that. There’s the flexibility of the employer, and then the way the government relates to the employer through regulations and encouragement. A lot of policy in this country isn’t a statute being passed, but general pressure put on employers to change how they do things.
When I talk to families, one of the biggest things they want is more flexibility in a very broad way. For example, if you work part-time, you usually can’t get healthcare benefits or matching retirement contributions from an employer.
I think it’s actually in employers’ best interests to move toward more flexible options. Having a good employee who you keep through all the different stages of their life is often more valuable than employers recognize, and our regulations aren’t well designed to support that either. That’s the place I think would have the biggest impact in the United States.
Nicole: That makes a lot of sense.
Be Really Ambitious about Love
My last question is: What advice would you give to people who are trying to square ambition in their career with considerations of family?
Ivana: Be really ambitious about love, which is the single most powerful force in the universe. There are so many things that distract us from that. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts, that’s what really matters. And so you need to have your priorities straight.
Work is great. Work is really important, but that is not the primary motivating force in our lives, and I would encourage people to just think really hard about whether they’re putting first things first. That certainly doesn’t mean you have to get married. It doesn’t mean you have to have kids. Those are very individual, very personal decisions, but I think if you orient your life around what really should be your priority - being ambitious about love–everything kind of falls into place behind that.
This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.
This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.
In related news, I had my second baby, Lucía - since I last wrote. We feel incredibly blessed. I remain convinced that we all need to Log Some More Hours Holding Babies and am overjoyed I have a new one to lend out <3
