Anyone else in office until 6 with long commute and young kids ? How do you do it ?

@OP to give you some perspective and a different take on "your children can't possibly not see you 3 nights a week!"

I moved to France recently and family routines here are quite different. It is common for families with 2 parents working in corporate roles to not be able to be back from the office until 7pm or even later - while WFH may have helped in the past, there are now many companies that require employees to be back in the office 3 or even 5 days a week. That's also increasingly the case in the UK.

These families hire a babysitter who can pick up school aged children and mind them at home until their parents are back, and that's anything from 1 to 5 evenings a week. This help is subsidised and after tax credits, it's usually about 5-8€ an hour.

In turn, women tend to be in full time employment a lot more frequently than in the UK, for better or for worse.

But at least, there's a lot less guilt involved for women (because frankly most dads do not ask themselves the same questions ime): the fact is, a lot of families need / want both parents to work full time, which is incompatible with children school hours. It doesn't mean, from what I can see, that French children are traumatised by their parents absence in the week.

So in your case, it does seem like yes you will need a nanny a few evenings a week if you want to make this job work. And that's ok.

Dh is self employed and he does the morning drop offs.

My DD does wraparound - now at school but she did long hours at nursery. DP is self employed and makes sure he leaves for work at 7am so he can be home by 6pm.

It is pretty standard.

nearly every woman I work with has the same issue. Some dads too but it is rare as women are the ones supposed to do pick up and drop off while the men just stay at work as long as they want. They just pay someone. Or arrange to work 9-4.30 and then work after bed time. I do that. I do all the drop off and pick up as no family here, I have before school club at 7.45, get to work at 8.30, after school club till 6, so I leave at 5.10-15, dinner homework bath reading, I am back on line at around 8.30 till 11-11.30. A few nights till midnight. Don’t work Friday night or weekends. If I need to travel I always come back at night, even if it means get the last train from Manchester and be home at midnight. I get a nanny then. I push back on any travel where I can’t go back home at night as I don’t have anyone else staying with my kids and paying an overnight nanny would be too much. I try to work from home 2 days a week. I am very good at my job and produce double than any other kid less person, so no one ever complained. But I am exhausted and once I got a nanny to pick up just to be able to go out for drinks and the possibility to be able to stay in the office without the stress of pick up, it was just amazing… be able to mingle around with colleagues not have to rush and actually go for a drink.. it was so great! 10 years till uni!!! And hopefully they can be autonomous earlier!!!

As a manager in the public sector, my feelings are “Lord save us from self employed husbands!”

Or from managing their wives.

There seem to be a whole slew of families who thing that a husband’s self employed earnings have to be maximised at all costs - and him kept free to maximise them - at the cost of the wife’s employer. And in many cases, that employer being the public purse - obviously the wife can just knockoff early, wfh with sick kids etc, because her wage is assumed to stay the same and it doesn’t matter if she’s actually working.

The requests I’ve had for team meetings or whatever to be moved around because “oh my husband has got x that day, my husband is doing y, my husband can’t pick up today because he has to z, so I need to finish early/ wfh an extra day”.

Your husband is not my problem!

I had to make sure the job i started had flexibility. I leave at 4.45 to get back just before 6 for my daughters after school club.

glide time? My office is 9.30-5.30 but I do 8.30-4.30. 6 is really not a family friendly time to finish at all and I would not take a job with this requirement tbh.

Ask to take your lunch break around 2pm and collect them from school then WFH until you have done your hours. That is what I do at mo x

I appreciate this doesn't help currently, but when I was interviewing r before i accepted a job offer, I discussed office culture, I would explain that I had kids and would need flexibility, but also discussed how I currently work (e.g. no lunch break, working in the evenings to catch up, scheduling any meetings before 4pm but happy taking calls in the car). Did it probably put some employers off, sure, but then it wouldn't have worked or suited me to be there. The interviewer who goes "of course, I've got kids too, we are flexible, whatever you need" are the ones your accept an offer from. This should all have been ironed out before starting.
I think you either - ask and look for another job if they can't flex OR suck it up and pay the nanny/find a cheaper childminder/childcare options. Honestly, this culture just doesn't really work for working parents unfortunately. It's an old school approach, and theyll lose/not attract some great people but that's their choice and their culture. It's almost impossible to change it as a single employee, and it's why it should always be part of your discussion at interview/pre job acceptance. It's vital to get a work culture that understands you and works for you.

I would see if you can negotiate an earlier finish by starting earlier and / or reducing your lunch break.
if you can get set up breakfast club places you should hopefully still be able to get to work and then get away earlier at the end of the day. Working hrs and arrangements would be a crucial part of the contract negotiation though.

Sorry not helpful but it seems like you had the golden ticket (working parent wise) with the level of flexibility in your previous job. Hopefully it ended organically rather than you choosing to leave!

I’m a lone parent to 5-year old twins and work a senior, professional role. I work long hours - sometimes calls with Asia in the morning and always with west coast US in the evening. I work 100% from home, otherwise it would be impossible.

I do 100% of drop offs to school. If I have a call with Asia, I make it about 6:30/7am my time, so I’ve time to get my kids up and ready for school after.

I do 90% of pickups, but I have a nanny every day too who also does pickups and looks after the kids for the afternoon. She stays till 7/7:30pm, depending on my meetings. I normally prepare the kids dinner during the day and my nanny will feed them.

I can work to my own schedule, so can go to all school plays/parent teacher meetings, school events.

It’s expensive, but the only way I can do my job.

Both me and my DH work full time so we use a nanny. She drops the kids off and picks them up at 3.20 and stays with them until we are home at 7pm. They play, go to activities, do homework, dinner and bath. So when we get home we get to have an hour of quality time with them. It costs sooo much but how I see it is that I am paying for my sanity and my peace of mind.

I am now 2 years in my current job, have achieved all my KPIs and exceeded expectations, all that from my latest review. So I just submitted a flexible work request to work 9-3 and make up the hours at night. That way I will be able to pick up the kids, and my DH will be doing the drop offs on the days I am in the office. On those days the kids will stay at an after school club until 4.30. My commute is 45mins. So if it gets accepted (it has in principle, just waiting for paperwork to come through) we won’t need the nanny anymore, although I am gutted because she is amazing and she does all the “dull” work for me, but the kids are now more manageable (6&7) so I can save the money for their future instead.

My contract doesn't have my working hours in it, only my working days. OP might be the same.

What my DH and I do (he works full-time and I work 0.8) is each do 2-3 longer days and 2 school hour days (obviously on different days to each other!) so that one of us can always do the school run.

We do both have flexible employers (HEIs), but probably lower salaries!

Yes I work these hours with a long commute and don’t get home until 7.30, 3 times a week.

DH covers pickup on those days as he can WFH more often and can usually finish work earlier than me (civil service).
if DH is unavailable (he also works away a lot), then I will:

• option 1 - WFH
• option 2 (if WFH is not possible that day), leave at 4.15pm and then catch up from home later on once the kids are alseep.

I just want to say I feel sorry for you and all parents out there. It really is super difficult to arrange it all, not everyone has their mum living next door (I think most people don't) and it's just hard. Your husband's work hours do not really help the situation, but still. You asked what people do? Well I stopped working for quite a number of years. That was our solution. It was ok financially, luckily, but it harmed my career and it will never completely recover from it. In your case, I would speak to my new employer. Your idea to start earlier sounds good. I completely understand it is difficult to do, especially as you say that it wasn't so easy to find a job in the first place, so you must be careful not to upset anyone ... I wish you lots of good luck OP. I hope you can change things around. For now use the nanny, try not to feel guilty, and try to change things step by step. Once children are in primary school things usually become easier (and a bit harder again when they are teenagers, but that's light years away!) Don't let all the haters get you down, your situation is hard and all you did was come here for some advice. I hope you'll find better solutions soon!

One of you needs to sort your hours so that you can be available and present for your children.

If it’s only 3 days per week, then your Dh adjusts his hours accordingly as he’s self employed. Then he works longer hours the other days. Or you stagger your hours, one goes in early and finishes to collect from after school club. One does morning school run and works late that day.

I used to be out of the house 6am-7/8pm 3 days a week when mine were nursery age. On those days, Dh worked 9:30-4:30 and did all the school runs, homework, cooking and started bathtime and I took over when I got home and then he tidied up and finished work emails while I did bedtime.

Realistically, you can’t both have jobs where you don’t get home til 7:30-9pm. Someone needs to be parenting. Yes, of course, you can hire a nanny if you earn enough, but really what’s the point of only seeing your children at the weekends? They need one present parent each day. It can be your Dh. It doesn’t have to be you. But they need one of you.

No, but OP may not live in London! And with so much WFH these days, a short commute job is easier to find than ever before.

Plus, in order to have that short commute in central London we stayed in a flat a lot longer than friends that didn’t live in London who had bought houses.

yes of course there are jobs like this but the OP didn’t bother to find out if her new role was one!

No idea why you didn’t discuss all this before accepting the job
All you can do now is submit a flexible working request
Cannot believe you left your previous job 40 minutes early each day, bet you were popular!

I don’t think most people have that “fortune” to spend on a house (with space for a live in nanny!) nearer central London, unfortunately, so are stuck with longer commutes. Feel like that advice is not really realistic at all.

This isn’t going to help you now I don’t imagine, but when I had my kids I had a mentor in work who told me to make sure I never have a commute that’s longer than half an hour. It meant spending a fortune on a house as I worked in central London but she was right. Those with very long commutes ended up leaving when they have kids as it was just too hard to juggle everything.

I also had a live in nanny and then once they were school age, an au pair, so that I didn’t ever need to worry about being home by a certain time. But that was a decade ago and I think post Brexit it’s really hard to find au pairs now.

It's going to seem like a dickhead response, but frankly, both me and my husband thought carefully about the realities of any job before we even spent time applying.

My job is mostly WFH, and his job requires 2 office days, occasionally in London. We didn't apply for jobs that wouldn't allow us enough flexibility to look after our kids.

Why on earth didn't you read your contract? And bring it up before you started?