March
22, 2002
Lauren
Turner: Parent, Professional, and New MHC Graduate
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Lauren Turner, MHC director
of human resources, with her family at the College's Celebration
of Student Achievement
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When Lauren Cote
and David Turner announced their engagement on the evening of
Lauren's high school prom, the young couple promised Lauren's
parents, Jeanne and Raymond Cote, that she would complete a college
degree. A truck driver who spent long nights at the dining room
table working on course work to earn a high school diploma, Raymond
was eager to see his seven children educated. Lauren Turner, now
MHC's director of human resources, has more than fulfilled her
promise, exceeding her father's hope that she earn an associate's
degree in secretarial studies. Last June, Turner defended "Employer-Sponsored
Work and Family Programs: College and University Campus Initiatives,"
the thesis that completed her MHC master's degree in psychology.
On February 20, she
was honored for her accomplishment at Mount Holyoke's Celebration
of Student Achievement. Daughters Allison and Emily, David, and
his parents were there to applaud Turner's achievement. "I
feel so accomplished when I look at this document," said
Turner, "and it's important to me that my two girls saw me
working so hard to finish it. They have lofty professional aspirations,
and there is no question that they see education as important
to those goals."
Like her father, Turner
completed her degree by working late nights at her dining room
table, often until 2 am. Allison (fourteen) and Emily (twelve)
respected her study time, says Turner, limiting their interruptions
and noise to make it a little easier for Turner to juggle the
duties of professional, student, wife, and mother. "It wasn't
too bad," said Allison of living with her mother's thesis
work. "Just as long as we didn't go in the room when she
was working." "It was a mess," Emily agreed. "Almost
as bad as my room."
Juggling work, school,
and family has been a challenge for Turner, who began her MHC
career as a receptionist in the human resources office in 1980.
In 1984, after being promoted to assistant director in Mount Holyoke's
human resources office, Turner started taking courses part-time
at Holyoke Community College. She progressed steadily and transferred
to the University of Massachusetts to continue toward a bachelor's
degree in business studies. When Allison was born in December
1987, Turner says her "stick-to-itiveness" faltered;
nevertheless, she plowed through all but three credits in the
fall of 1988. "I was a stressball," jokes Turner, but
that didn't stop her from taking a week "off" from work
to complete those final three credits in a one-week intensive
course in January. A second baby in 1989 and another promotion
in 1995 slowed but didn't stop Turner's progress. She completed
course work toward her master's degree in 1994 and started her
thesis research.
In January 1999, Turner
again made time for her studies, now refocusing on her thesis
research on work-family policies at colleges and universities.
She conducted a survey of seventy-nine institutions in southern
New England, documenting their various work-family policies, such
as flexible work schedules, job sharing, parent education seminars,
child-care centers, child-care resources and referral services,
reimbursement for child-care expenses, and pretax payment of child-care
expenses. She also wrote case studies on the evolution, structure,
and management of two types of child facilities at four of those
institutions: child-care centers (facilities that primarily aim
to provide child-care services for employees and students) and
child-development laboratories (facilities that are part of an
institution's academic structure and primarily provide an on-campus
site for research and learning).
Turner was not new
to the subjects of her survey. As a working mother, she had grappled
with her own child-care issues, first taking advantage of Mount
Holyoke's maternity leave policy, then getting child-care help
from her mother- and father- in-law so that she could work half-time,
finally hiring a nanny when she returned to work full-time.
Child care and child
development were also at the center of many of Turner's professional
conversations. In the mid-1990s, as a direct outcome of those
conversations, Mount Holyoke built the Stonybrook Child Care Center,
a 9,000-square-foot facility that is administered independently
from the College but gives admission preference to children of
the MHC community. Turner's passion for family and work issues
was further fueled by courses in child development, books such
as MHC psychology and education professor Francine Deutsch's Halving
it All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works (Harvard University
Press, 1999), and the encouragement of professor of psychology
and education Patricia Ramsey.
"I knew the history
of child care because I lived it," said Turner. "And
because of my research and involvement on so many task forces,
I knew all the challenges of availability, affordability, flexibility,
etcetera of providing child care. What I didn't know much about
was the philosophy behind child care versus the philosophy behind
child development and the reasons why most academic institutions
don't combine their very successful child development labs with
their educational, developmentally appropriate activities (for
example, MHC's lab school is the Gorse Child Study Center, whose
half-day programs for young children provide MHC students opportunities
to observe and analyze child behavior and development) with the
increasingly in-demand services of all-day child care. Patty Ramsey
spent many hours talking with me about the prospects of my research,
which she thought was not only an intriguing and worthwhile scholarly
venture but also a subject that would be of interest to professionals
in the business of child care."
Turner found that
most colleges and universities are motivated by employee pressure
and by policies at similar institutions to offer some programs
to help employees balance work and family. While private institutions
are more likely to sponsor flex time, job sharing, and other programs
that allow employees to spend more time on family responsibilities,
public institutions are more likely to sponsor on-site child care.
The appropriate balance of these two different approaches—offering
"family time" versus offering at-work child care—remains
a question, as does the advisability of expanding child-development
laboratories beyond teaching and research to include child care.
Also unanswered are questions about why employers should help
employees balance work and family responsibilities at all.
Answers to all these
questions, Turner finds, are stalled by a division in philosophy
between child care and child education, a division created by
perceptions that child care is "custodial" or "babysitting,"
and by larger societal questions about whether children should
be cared for outside the home at all. In her epilogue, titled
"The Buck Stops Where?," Turner writes, "At the
core of this debate is an old paradigm of the American family.
Being stuck in this old paradigm is inhibiting us as a society
from advancing this discussion to better, more comprehensive,
consistent, and reliable solutions."
Turner herself does
not feel stuck. She came to her current position in human resources
because she marveled at the problem-solving ability of the former
director Bob Moynihan. "I stood in awe of his ability to
think through and solve problems," said Turner. What keeps
her in human resources, now that she possesses that problem-solving
fluency, is the positive impact she knows she can have. "I
can walk that tightrope between being an administrator who has
to represent the interests of the College and being a very effective,
influential voice for the community," said Turner, "and
because I'm connected with people in the community, I have a good
sense of what's going on and what's important." Course work
and research in psychology have strengthened that conviction,
says Turner, enhancing her ability to listen, communicate, understand,
and help people solve problems. And although she hasn't worked
her way toward final answers about work-family conflicts, Turner
has learned a lot that will influence her thinking about Mount
Holyoke's work-family initiatives.
For one, Turner has
discovered that Mount Holyoke is doing well. "When I stack
Mount Holyoke against these other schools, we are engaged in as
many if not more initiatives than the average school," she
said. More important, Turner has shifted toward a broader perspective
on the issue. "I want to forget family-work balance and frame
it as life-work balance," said Turner. "Then everyone
has a stake in it, rather than special-interest groups. The fact
is that we all bring to the table skills to do our jobs, and we
all bring other pressures also, whether it is children, or ailing
parents, or a host of other family/life challenges. I want to
continue asking, how we can help all our employees have a good
balance in their lives."
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