The Challenges Faced By Working Parents

It’s a typical weekday morning, and a single mother of two is awakened by the sound of her youngest child coughing in the next room. 

Her stomach drops. Is he sick? Her mind races through the options. With no sick days left, she can’t afford to take any more days off work. But she knows that daycare won’t take him, and with no one else to watch him, she’ll have no choice. 

Across town, another family is facing a different challenge.

In one room, a mother is packing lunches, while trying to remember the details for her first meeting of the day.

Down the hall, a father is wrestling a toddler into clothes while keeping an eye on the clock, mentally calculating the minutes until he needs to be out the door.

The older children are calling out about missing items and permission slips, adding to the chaos of the morning scramble.

As the clock ticks closer to 7:30am, the pressure mounts. The kids need to be at school by 8am, and work starts at 8:30. Daycare is in the opposite direction, requiring a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy where mom and dad carpool the family separately.

This leaves a narrow window to drop the kids off and battle the morning traffic to get to their offices on time. They'll face the same challenge in the afternoon, as they rush to leave work early enough to pick the kids up before the after-school program closes at 6pm.

These are just snapshots of the challenges working parents face daily. Parents today are involved in a constant balancing act as they try to meet the demands of their family lives while navigating a work culture that is in many ways hostile to family life. But how did we get here?

At its core, this struggle is rooted in the mismatch between work expectations, the school schedule, and the challenges involved in finding (and getting a spot in!) childcare.

But surely it hasn’t always been this way, and surely it doesn’t have to stay this way. Where exactly does this mismatch come from?

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The Daily School Schedule Vs. The Work Schedule

Let’s start with the school schedule. Generally, schools operate between 7am - 3pm, or 8am - 4pm, with some regional variations.

Many parents work an “8-to-5” schedule. Right away, the hours don’t align with the school day, which ends 1 to 2 hours before the parents clock out of work, and begins so near the start time of their own work day that getting kids to school becomes a logistical feat.

This leaves parents scrambling to fill the gap (and usually at a cost), piecing together a patchwork of after-school programs, enrichment activities, and childcare arrangements.

For parents who work in “24/7” industries, or follow nontraditional work schedules, this delicate balance is even more precarious. 

Childcare is extremely hard to plan when your schedule is irregular, changing weekly or monthly. Or when weekends and second shift are your work hours. For these parents, the scramble for viable childcare becomes vastly more complex - and expensive.

School Holidays & Paid Time Off

Parents also have the annual school calendar to contend with.

Assuming a 5 day workweek, the average working parent has up to 260 potential “work days” each year. But the typical school calendar is only 180 days. 

In other words, the typical U.S. parent with school-aged children still needs to secure childcare for about 80 days, or four months each year.

These school holidays are spread throughout the year, sometimes in weeks-long breaks (like summer and winter break), and other times delivered in the form of single days sprinkled throughout the calendar. 

Worse still, some of these days off are entirely unpredictable, like snow days and sick days, which makes planning for them impossible. (And if you happen to be subject to an ‘attendance point system,’ a subject for another post, these unexpected days are a special nightmare).

Well, could parents use PTO to cover these school breaks? 

Not likely.

For working adults in the U.S., the average number of paid vacation days is 11. Employees with 20 or more years of experience have an average of 20 paid vacation days each year. 

But these are averages, which means some get more-  and some get much less. Vacation days are not required at all in the U.S., and up to 28 million Americans have no paid vacation time whatsoever.

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Daycare Woes

For parents of young children (the 5 and under crowd), the childcare puzzle is even more difficult.

The shortage of childcare providers means many families can’t find childcare at all. And when they do, the financial burden often rivals that of housing (full-time childcare costs average between $920 to $1284 per month for one child). This leaves many families with the impossible challenge of figuring out how to afford it. 

Special Days & Inflexible Expectations

These logistical challenges are increased by the special days at school, parent teacher conferences and other functions, and the fundamental incompatibility of work expectations with the norms of family life. 

• When there’s a middle of the day event at school; do you show up for your kid? Or do you miss work and some pay (if  you are even lucky enough to have the option)?
  

• Your boss asks you to work late; do you accept and make yourself late to pick up your child? Or do you turn it down, gaining yourself the office label of “less serious” or “not a team player”?
  

Adding a second or third child to the mix multiplies these challenges, and can make an already fragile game of schedule Tetris fall apart.

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Let’s Make Work Work For Families

So what’s the solution? The current mismatch between work expectations, childcare availability and school schedules is unsustainable for working families. Now what?

Now it’s time for a change. 

Our national conversation around this topic has centered around a few main talking points: increasing the availability of childcare and subsidizing childcare.

Childcare is a big piece of this puzzle, but by focusing most of our efforts on childcare solutions, we are missing the forest for the trees.

It’s time to think outside of the box and look at new strategies. I believe there are people first solutions that put the needs of families and communities before the needs of workplaces. These need to be discussed and considered before we continue to shoehorn families into "work-first" approaches that are more focused on adapting families to the needs of employers and companies.

As we continue this series and examine different aspects of the parent-work-life paradigm more closely, we'll talk about the problems- and new solutions. Follow along, and add your voice to the conversation! Let’s work together to make work work for families.