Something's Gotta Give
It's the 21st century, both parents work full-time, and the kids are still young
I often feel that my family life is like a deck of cards, precariously balanced just so but ready to be taken down by one measley stomach bug. The frenzied full-time working mother is now a common trope in media (think of movies like The Intern, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Barbie), and while we joke about today’s crazybusy culture, I do not see anyone trying to change it.
I acknowledge how many supports I have in place: my husband and I have accommodating, understanding supervisors, so we can miss work when children are sick; my parents live in town; we have financial means to outsource some tasks; we have an amazing team of college-aged babysitters. And yet. Our jobs are challenging, and we need time to work, which is difficult to make happen when illness makes it way through the household and kids are out of school. My parents are living their best retired lives and are often out of town. There are many gaps in childcare—university calendars and city school calendars do not always align, and there are school breaks with no day camp coverage.
My children are getting older, so we are exiting some of the most demanding childcare years, but I do wonder why the pandemic taught us nothing. No one can work and parent effectively at full throttle indefinitely. Our society operates even less with a village mentality now than we used to (although I would argue that we need it more, given how little margin most people have), so everyone is trying to figure it out all alone. I look at how my peers are making it work, and many of them have one parent who works remotely and picks up the slack with childcare. They are home when children or pets get sick and when the bus pulls up at the end of the school day. Many rely on regular help from grandparents for after-school care or shuttling kids to extracurricular activities. Many also put in a couple of hours of work after they put the kids to bed. All of these solutions to me seem to be stopgap answers, Band-aids on larger problems.
I cannot be the only person with these observations and questions.
Why do school days and work days not align? I do not think kids need instruction time for a solid eight or nine hours, but couldn’t we treat teachers more like faculty who come in to provide instruction and allow other portions of the day at school to be covered by childcare workers whose primary role is to supervise play? I recognize that many adults do not work traditional hours, so this would not help everyone, but a large portion of the working population with young children at home work fairly standard hours.
Why do we still have such long summer breaks? This is a relic from farming days, which applies to few families today.
Why are extracurricular activities so intense? Do young children really need to be practicing their sport three times a week? Those practices mean less free play and later bedtimes, which I do not think is a good trade-off.
Why do we not implement more core working hours? Some people have become fully remote since the pandemic, but I have been surprised by how many people have been recalled to the office with expectations as they were prior to the dawn of Covid. Many studies show that workers are happiest and most productive when permitted to blend in-person and remote work (again, obviously this is irrelevant in some career fields that require direct person-to-person interaction). This could look like working in the office for two or three days a week and working from home the other days, or coming into the office from 10 am to 2 pm and using the hours on either end for remote work.
While I love a partial solution, and I recognize the difference small changes can make, this working parent quandary will require more than an optimized morning routine and a really smart meal plan.
Short of hiring a full-time household manager/nanny, there is no way to keep up with the tasks of running a home, parenting, and holding a full-time job without resorting to some level of frenzy and turning weekends into catch-up time (and my children do not play travel sports, so I cannot even imagine those families who are gone all weekend too!). I do not write all of this simply intending to rant—although I suppose that is a little bit of what this has turned into—but to remark: No wonder. No wonder people are so stressed. No wonder people have a hard time volunteering because they are reluctant to add another commitment to already too full plates. No wonder people rarely cook at home.
My husband Dan and I have chosen to go against the grain in many respects. Our children do not play intensive sports. We prioritize family dinners every night it is feasible, and it is more often that we all four eat together than not. We (adults and children alike) have early bedtimes, even if that means saying no to good, fun things because we suffer when we do not have enough sleep. Routines like walking the dogs after dinner and reading books together at night shape our days.
Even still, we somehow ended up with a child involved in something every single weeknight that involves transportation (Cub Scouts, soccer, EYC, music lessons), and those intentions for a less-hectic family rhythm seemed to go out the window. It is easy to become caught up in the rush, to drift away from what we said we wanted.
We continue to revisit and evaluate our priorities, and we have identified tweaks we can make. Nonetheless, individual decisions only go so far; we need structural change. I would love to see workplace policy reforms, kids’ extracurricular culture changes, and a return to simpler schedules and more free time. The American drive to do more and be busier is strong…but is it always a good thing?
Sometimes less really is more.
Community is key! Thanks for your thoughtful and inciteful writing.