Like millions of other parents, Emily Hobey drops her son at day care before she heads to work every morning. But what makes her mornings different from other parents’ mornings, is that she gets to leave her one- and half-year old in a day care center run by her employer, Whirlpool.

The day care, called the Eddy, is located at the company’s global headquarters in Benton Harbor, Mich. — a five minute drive away from her office at the company’s North America Headquarters building. “Every day there is a safe environment waiting for him with great teachers.” said Hobey. “And we can really depend on that.”

A small but growing number of workplaces are offering on-site day care for their employees, according to data from network The Best Place for Working Parents, which covers over 600 businesses of varying sizes and services.

The organization has tracked how many businesses within its network offer on site child care since right before the pandemic (疫情). In 2020, the Best Place for Working Parents found that 8.5 percent of those companies offered on-site child care. That number grew to 11.9 percent in 2021. fell slightly to 11.4 percent in 2022 and climbed to 13.9 percent this year, a network spokesperson said.

A 2022 survey from McKinsey & Company found that 45 percent of mothers with children aged 5 or younger who left the workforce during the COVID-19 cited child care as a major reason for their departure. And 24 percent of mothers with children 5 years old or younger said they considered reducing their work hours or switching to part time work because of child care. Only 14 percent of fathers said the same.

Like Whirlpool, many workplaces offer on-site day care to help make their companies more attractive to employees. Research also shows that when companies offer on site child care, workers are happier at their job and are less likely to leave. This has been the case at clothing company Patagonia, which has offered on-site child care since 1983. Hilary Dessouky, general counsel at Patagonia, said that the on-site child care has resulted in almost 100 percent of mother’s returning to work after maternity leave (产假).

Whenever something looks interesting or beautiful, there is a natural desire of us to capture (捕捉) and preserve it — which means, in this day and age, that we are likely to reach for our phones to take a picture.

Though this would seem to be an ideal solution, there are two big problems associated with taking pictures. Firstly, we are likely to be so busy taking pictures that we forget to look at the world whose beauty and interest encourage us to take a photograph in the first place. And secondly, because we feel the pictures are safely stored on our phones, we never get around to looking at them, so sure are we that we’ll get around to them one day.

The first person to notice the problems was the English art critic (评论家), John Ruskin. He was a keen traveler who realized that most tourists make a poor job of noticing or remembering the beautiful things they see. He argued that humans have a natural tendency to respond to beauty and desire to have it, but there are better and worse expressions of this desire. At worse, we get into buying souvenirs or taking photographs. But, in Ruskin’s eyes, there’s just one thing we should do — attempting to draw the interesting things we see, regardless of whether we happen to have any talent for doing so.

Ruskin said, “Drawing can teach us to see: to notice properly rather than gaze absent-mindedly. In the process of recreating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we naturally move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its parts.”

Ruskin deplored the blindness and hurry of modern tourists, especially those who prided themselves on travelling around the whole Europe in a week by train, “No changing of places at a hundred miles an hour will make us stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, if they ever walked slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thoughts and sights, not pace.”

We are not who we think we are.

The American self-image is spread with the golden glow of opportunity. We think of the United States as a land of unlimited possibility, not so much a classless society but as a place where class is mutable—a place where brains, energy and ambition are what count, not the circumstances of one’s birth.

The Economic Mobility Project, an ambitious research led by Pew Charitable Trusts, looked at the economic fortunes of a large group of families over time, comparing the income of parents in the late 1960s with the income of their children in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here is the finding: The “rags to riches” story is much more common in Hollywood than on Main Street. Only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income at the very bottom move to the top.

That is right, just 6 percent of children born to parents who ranked in the bottom of the study sample, in terms of income, were able to bootstrap their way into the top. Meanwhile, an incredible 42 percent of children born into that lowest are still stuck at the bottom, having been unable to climb a single rung of the income ladder.

It is noted that even in Britain—a nation we think of as burdened with a hidebound (守旧的) class system—children who are born poor have a better chance of moving up. When the studies were released, most reporters focused on the finding that African-Americans born to middle-class or upper middle-class families are earning slightly less, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than did their parents.

One of the studies indicates, in fact, that most of the financial gains white families have made in the past three decades can be attributed to the entry of white women into the labor force. This is much less true for African-Americans.

The picture that emerges from all the correlations and percentages is of a nation in which, over all, “the current generation of adults is better off than the previous one”, as one of the studies notes.

The median income of the families in the sample group was $55,600 in the late 1960s; their children’s median family income was measured at $71,900. However, this rising ride has not lifted all boats equally. The rich have seen far greater income gains than the poor.

Even more troubling is that our nation of America as the land of opportunity gets little supper: from the data. Americans move fairly easily up and down the middle rungs of the ladder, but there is “stickiness at the end”—four out of ten children who are born poor will remain poor, and four out of ten who are born rich will stay rich.