Work Hours
Interesting article in USA Today about Gen X and Y opting to spend more time with family than at work. This article is about 10 years after Scott Hess was made famous by a Fortune magazine article on the same subject.

Work is fine — in its place. But hard-charging baby boomers have placed too high a priority on it, their kids seem to think.

Generation X and Generation Y workers, who are younger than 40, are more likely than boomers to say they put family before jobs. And that's not just because their children are younger, says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in New York. "There has been a real generational shift," she says.

She's comparing the institute's new survey of 2,800 employed adults with comparable surveys it did in 1992 and 1997. A 1977 Department of Labor survey fills out a picture that shows:

• Both sexes are more accepting than ever of working mothers.

• Among younger workers, "job success at any cost" has become less appealing.

• In two-parent homes, children get more time with their parents than they did 25 years ago; mothers do about as much child care as they used to, but fathers are doing more.

Nobody knows why the change is happening, but there are several possible causes, Galinsky says. "What I hear all the time from young men is that they want to be different than their fathers, who often worked long hours. They want to be more involved in their children's lives."

Via Virginia Postrel, who attributes this more to economics than to the fact that Generation X is just plain better than everyone else.