The buzz today is about the Obama administration’s Workplace Flexibility Forum this afternoon, and one of the key things to watch is what comes out of this meeting to expand the availability of quality child care. 

Why? Work-family flex often begins with finding high quality child care. If working parents cannot find good child care, they often struggle to strike a balance in their lives.

Today, there are hopeful signs it may get easier for working moms and dads. In the last few years the increase of women in the workforce, the shifting gender roles in parenting and the rise of Generation Y and its comfort working from home, office and anywhere else there is a wifi connection fueled the work-flex debate.

Once you add President Barack Obama’s commitment to the issue – he has tapped work-flex experts as top advisors and has his own challenges raising two daughters - you begin to see ingredients that could make the daily juggle of work and family easier.

“It doesn’t have to be hard," First Lady Michelle Obama said in opening remarks. “Flexibility policies actually make employees more not less productive.”

As the forum began, Michelle Obama highlighted the federal government’s own commitment to expand telework, access to emergency child care and more affordable day care.

It can be done. Pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. broke ground on a new child care center in this recession. While not every company and industry can build its own child care, a range of businesses supported and added flex benefits in recent years.

But, there are plenty of high obstacles to any change, such as a weak economy and little spending flexibility in Congress.

What do parents of babies, toddlers and pre-kindergarteners want to see come out of this forum? Do you think we will see anything?

Whatever you think the Obama administration will keep working on the issue with future forums around the country in the coming months.

Check out an archive of the forum here or the live feed, which runs until 1:15 p.m. PST today, here.

Further reading:

• White House Announces Forum on Workplace Flexibility.
• “Making History: The White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility,” Huffington Post, 3/30/10.
• “First Lady to Speak at White House Workplace Flexibility Forum,” The Juggle, Wall Street Journal, 3/31/10.
• “White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility,” Motherlode, The New York Times, 3/31/10. 
• “Workplace Flexibility Jumps to the Top of the Agenda (Kinda),” RebelDad, 3/30/10.