Galinsky, Ellen 1942-

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GALINSKY, Ellen 1942-

PERSONAL: Born April 24, 1942, in Pittsburgh, PA; daughter of Melvin H. (in business) and Leora (in business; maiden name, Osgood) May; married Norman Galinsky (an artist), August 15, 1965; children: Philip Andrew, Lara Elizabeth. Education: Vassar College, A.B., 1964; Bank Street College of Education, M.S.Ed., 1970.

ADDRESSES: Home—Lawrence Lane, Palisades, NY 10964. office—Families and Work Institute, 267 Fifth Ave., Floor 2, New York, NY 10016. Agent—Virginia Barber, 353 West 21st St., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Bank Street College of Education, New York, NY, teacher, researcher, and project director, 1964-89; Families and Work Institute, New York, founder and director, 1989—. Speaker at national conferences, including 1997 White House Conference on Child Care and 2000 White House Conference on Teenagers; keynote speaker, Working Mother magazine Work-Life Conference, 2001. Commentator on parenting issues on television.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Work-Life Leadership Council, The Employer Group, National Association for the Education of Young Children.

AWARDS, HONORS: Wall Street Journal citation as one of the best work-life books of 1999, for Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think about Working Parents.

WRITINGS:

(And photographer) Catbird (juvenile), Coward (New York, NY), 1971.

(And photographer) The Baby Cardinal (juvenile), Putnam (New York, NY), 1976.

Beginnings: A Young Mother's Personal Account of Two Premature Births, (nonfiction), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1976.

(With William H. Hooks) The New Extended Family: Day Care That Works, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1977.

Between Generations: The Six Stages of Parenthood, Times Books (New York, NY), 1981, published as The Six Stages of Parenthood, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1987.

(With Judy David) The Preschool Years: Family Strategies That Work—from Experts and Parents, Times Books (New York, NY), 1988.

(With James T. Bond and Dana E. Friedman) The Changing Workforce: Highlights of the National Study, Families and Work Institute (New York, NY), 1993.

Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think about Working Parents, William Morrow (New York, NY), 1999.

(Coauthor) Feeling Overworked: When Work Becomes Too Much, Families and Work Institute (New York, NY), 2002.

Coauthor of The National Study of the Changing Workforce, published every five years, and The 1998 Business Work-Life Study. Columnist, Information Week. Contributor of articles to magazines and scholarly journals, including Parents and Redbook.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A study of patterns of success and how to facilitate it based on interviews with high-level male and female executives.

SIDELIGHTS: Educator and researcher Ellen Galinsky once told CA: "I am interested in nature, in how natural forces wear away at and shape each other; I am interested in how the natural world relates to the human one; I am interested in people and how they change; I am interested in how institutions affect people; and I am interested in myths and realities. I write and photograph to probe the dualities that lie at the end of every search."

In Between Generations: The Six Stages of Parenthood, Galinsky, an early-childhood specialist, focuses on the relationship between parent and child. "The result," wrote Anthony Astrachan in the New York Times Book Review, "is a book that is useful and important but not truly innovative, a hybrid of Benjamin Spock/Jean Piaget/Berry Brazelton on the one hand and Daniel Levinson/Roger Gould/Gail Sheehy on the other." Nonetheless, Between Generations, which contains anecdotes and interviews, should be helpful to "both parents needing guidelines and the general reader interested in . . . human development," a Library Journal reviewer concluded.

In 1989 Galinsky founded the Manhattan-based Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches work-life issues and the changing patterns of employment in America. From her base at the institute, Galinsky has become a nationally recognized expert on the relationship between working parents and their children. Her books, magazine articles, and scientific surveys all seek to bridge communication gaps between employers and their child-rearing employees, between parents and children, and between families and the community. One of Galinsky's most important studies was published as Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think about Working Parents, a survey of more than 1,000 children and 650 adults on various aspects of working parenthood.

Galinsky's findings in Ask the Children were surprising to some. She found that children did not mind if their parents worked outside the home, but that children wanted their parents to be less stressed at the end of the working day. Galinsky also discovered that children worried about their parents' health and sometimes misunderstood or misinterpreted their parents' bad moods. The conclusions Galinsky drew from her data include the suggestions that parents talk frankly about their working challenges, that they find positive things to say about work, and that they find some down time to put aside work stresses and prepare for the challenges of the home environment. In an interview with Fortune, Galinsky said of children: "They're telling us that there is a problem, but its not that we work, its how we work."

Ask the Children was widely reviewed, and Galinsky was interviewed about the book when it was released in 1999. Many critics felt that the study answers important questions about work-life issues and could help quell parental guilt over working outside the home. Library Journal correspondent Paula Dempsey praised the book for its "succinct, vivid writing" as well as for its conclusions, which she found "original, compassionate, and realistic."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Better Homes and Gardens, September, 2001, Betsy Rubiner, "Work Lessons," p. 116.

Fortune, November 8, 1999, "The Child's View of Working Parents (It's Not So Bad)," p. 318.

Library Journal, December 15, 1980; October 15, 1999, Paula Depsey, review of Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think about Working Parents, p. 90.

Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1981.

New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1978; June 28, 1981.

People, December 6, 1999, "Hey Mom, Its Okay to Work: Family Expert Ellen Galinsky Says Kids Don't Mind Their Parents Jobs, Just the Stress," p. 105.

Working Mother, November, 1999, Sarah Hutter, "Kids Speak Out," p. 12.