There's a big difference between parents there from 4, and parents there from 7 - and there's also a difference between a parent who has to rush around doing all the domestic chores as soon as you get in, instead of being able to spend time with you. I speak as a child whose mum had to work fulltime, as a single parent, and who therefore had to stay with a childminder before and after school. I knew the sound of my mum's car engine, from endless afternoons and evenings listening out for it. It wasn't fun, tbh. I so, so envied my peers, whose days ended when school did, and could relax in their own homes, with their own mums. But you know what would have been even less fun? Living on benefits, in Thatcher's London. She made the right choice for all of us, in that individual situation. Unquestionably. And the weekends were great, too. She made sure they were. She was a good parent in the confines of the rather awful position in which she found herself.
There are choices. Which a family makes depends on their circumstances.
I agree with the PP who pointed out that what we need are changed working hours, so both parents can spend more time with their kids, whilst also ensuring that they can provide well for them and offer a double buffer against job loss. It's a structural solution we need, not one afforded by pressuring all women to shoulder a double workload. And almost all studies show precisely that; that once children arrive, even the most egalitarian of families slowly yet inexorably slide into a situation where the women do the overwhelming bulk of domestic chores and child-related, as well as overt child, care. It's so entrenched into our cultural understanding that men and women somehow end up in that pattern, despite being quite certain at an earlier life stage that they wouldn't. Study after study demonstrates this. It's a knotty and difficult issue, and one that will need a siesmic shift in thinking, IMO - and it will need to start with mandatory split parental leave, and shorter working hours for everyone, and a greater investment in top quality, affordable childcare. The Scandinavian approach, in short. Because right now, as we are doing it in this country, capitalism has co-opted feminism and created a world in which you mostly find two parents working flat out, while the woman is also doing all the drudge work of running a home, and yet another woman is paid what are usually extremely low wages for the childcare thus out-sourced. And all that labour doesn't provide a standard of living any better than that our parents had, with one paid worker.
It's also worth pointing out that this is, and always was, to some extent a class issue. Poor women have always had to work outside the home. At least the modern ubiquity of that has forced standards up - my own primary years childminder wouldn't be allowed to practice at all now.
It's not feminist to attack women trying to balance their family lives with working. Whatever direction you do it from. The fact it's such a hard juggle for almost all of us comes, again, from structural sexism. From the way in which domestic labour is deemed valueless, and as such, no adjustments need be made. It's invisible, that labour, which is why men so blithely opt out, seemingly without noticing. That puts so many women's backs against the wall - either they sacrifice a working life, or they jump onto a treadmill of domestic labour, squeezed in around the margins of their working lives. Neither is ideal.