To think we don’t realise what modern life is doing to families?

[MrsGrindah]

I’ll own up here.. not a mother myself but a stepmother.
But I spend a lot of time travelling on trains for work and see so many parents on the phone to their kids ( in the mornings and before bedtime). Yes it’s great that technology allows this, but I just feel sorry for people missing out on being with their families. Last week there was a man talking to his little boy, apologising that he had gone before the boy had woken up and wouldn’t be back by the time he went to bed. I felt so sorry for everyone
Not blaming the parents and of course we all have to work. My point is as a society we are becoming used to this and almost expect people to be prepared to sacrifice a significant chunk of family life. Just makes me feel sad to see it and I wonder whether we’ll regret it in years to come.

"Work should be seen as the norm. It's what responsible adults do"

Your definition of what makes an adult is not exactly future proof, YellowMakesMeSmile. When artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning converge and all jobs can be done by machines does that mean all of us would cease to be adults just because we no longer work?

I don't know when was the golden age when the average person spent a lot of time with their child. Possibly when their child was working alongside them? I wouldn't want that for my child.

My mum had to give up work when she married - it was the law for her job. I loved having her around when I was younger, but she would have loved having a job that mattered and that impacted people and she was well capable of having one.

She certainly never said to my sister and me "make sure you spend all the time you can with your children". Instead she said "make sure you have a job/career you can fall back on even if you give it up for a while"

People have different regrets on their deathbeds. I find it hard to believe that everyone says "I wish I had spent more time with family". Most women spent loads of time with family - what do they say? "I wish I had been a doctor I think could have made a difference" That's what my mum would have said.

People work because they need to feed and mind their families and because it gives an enormous sense of self worth to do a good job well - no matter what that job is. I can remember a binman back in the 80s telling me how he loved his job so much - he was with his buddies, they did a job that needed doing and did it well. He hurt his back and couldn't do it anymore and it devastated him.

Life isn't so black and white/simplistic.

My parents are 70. My paternal granparents both worked all through my dad's childhood. Really not new.

I’m a 70’s child

Dad got up at 4am for work so had left well before we were awake.

Mum was at home during the day but worked evenings ( she also did Avon and other similar things while we were at school )

Dad got home at 4pm and Mum would do dinner at 5pm before going out to work the evening shift in a pub.

Dad took a second job on a Saturday to help make ends meet.

I think this was a pretty typical arrangement where we lived.

Sashkin how patronising , I live in a rural area and plenty of older children are around the farm helping. In fact with the decline in the availability of farm labour not to mention that many farmers can't afford to employ as many workers as their fathers do and rely on family to help out with stock , harvesting etc.

But I would count all that as modern. Working long hours away from our families is not the natural state of being human. I believe we are just animals the same as any other. Other animals keep their babies close until they are independent. They don't put them to sleep in another room and leave them for most of their waking hours every day. I do it, most people I know do it. Many of your parents did it. But that doesn't mean it's how it should be. I'm not offering any solutions. I just wish it wasn't like this. And most jobs are rubbish. How many jobs make any bit of difference to anyone.

Really helloooooooo you think people are going out to work so they can buy iPhones and fancy trainers

If I didn’t work we would have no food, no home.

I also wouldn’t want to homeschool my children, I enjoy letting them out into the world to learn from people with different skills and knowledge from me. My daughter goes to a theatre school, she’s turning into quite an accomplished performer. I can’t act, or sing in tune, or dance. I love seeing my children blossom in ways I couldn’t have accomplished on my own. (It goes with out saying that I also treasure all the time we do have together)

That's not our life at all, albeit we're not in the UK.

We leave after we've all had breakfast together, and we all eat dinner around the table together.

Our commute is small (walkable), and our hours are reasonable. And we're both comfortably off.

We take it for granted - this is another thing that I need to be a bit more thankful for.

I agree with whoever upthread said that lots more pressure needs to be put on employers to allow flexible working and working from home. For vast numbers of jobs this should be workable.

I drop the kids at school, do 5 hours in the office, collect kids from school and then do a few more hours when the children are in bed. It feels like the dream set up for me. I get to have a very satisfying and high flying career while also getting time with my children. I don’t get much “me” time but that’s a small price to pay. Plenty of jobs could be done this way I am sure.

fia191 you're in the wrong firm. My (top 10) firm has a much better flexible work policy than this.

YANBU
We have no choice but to both work full time as DH's job is temporary and could go at any time in the next six months.
As the eldest of 5, we got by on my dad's builder's wage plus my mum doing the odd bit of cleaning / dinnerladying. No way I'd be able to do that.
I always think it's pretty miserable the amount of traffic on the roads at 7am.... We should be in bed/ having breakfast then!

It was regularly like this in The Past - you just didn't have the technology opportunities to keep in contact. My dh's Dad was a postie and there were days when they didn't really see each other. My dad was in the Navy and away for months on end- we exchanged letters. He called us basically once or twice a trip. His brother, in the US, would call us when he could to "check in" with us.
All in the 70s.
I would have loved FaceTime/Skype/emails.
At the risk of sounding all Monty Python, that would have been a luxury.

It was regularly like this in The Past - you just didn't have the technology opportunities to keep in contact. My dh's Dad was a postie and there were days when they didn't really see each other. My dad was in the Navy and away for months on end- we exchanged letters. He called us basically once or twice a trip. His brother, in the US, would call us when he could to "check in" with us.
All in the 70s.
I would have loved FaceTime/Skype/emails.
At the risk of sounding all Monty Python, that would have been a luxury.

So good, I said it twice

On the flip side we want the holiday abroad, kids going to several activity clubs, the "need" to have the latest gadgets, eating out and visiting various play centres.... To name a few of the things we spend more and more money on.
Everything has a price!

Throughout my childhood my father was made redundant numerous times. My mother who had sacrificed her career to be a SAHM had little social contact with other adults and over the years became a chain-smoking alcoholic.

I had plenty of 'family time' as a child, loads of wholesome camping holidays and playing games with my parents. But I don't see it with rose-tinted spectacles at all. They now both live beneath the poverty line, my mother never resurrected a career and my father was in and out of work until retirement.

I'm just making plans to go from 3 to 5 days a week in my job as a lawyer - husband works on the board of a big company. Both my kids think it's absolutely normal for both parents to work hard and work late. We love our kids and give them a great life. We're also modelling excellent work ethic, and given they're both female, the understanding that no-one keeps you, you earn for yourself. I'm perfectly happy with this and don't wish I could emulate the hours of time my parents spent at home with me rather than earning money.

You saw a snap shot on a train that by it’s very definition is going to be full of early commuters. The fact that that man was saying sorry would suggest him leaving early was unusual. I’ve had to make calls like that but then at other times I pick him up from school and we do something fun.

I don’t think you’re being unreasonable as it’s always going to be a worry if the kids get enough attention but I don’t think extrapolating from those circumstances paints the best picture of the actual situation.

We are certainly commuting longer than we ever have before, that's not a matter for debate. Our average working hours are higher than they were a few decades ago too, so of course these factors in combination have an impact on family life. That's not to say children necessarily saw a lot of their parents in the past, but we're worse off in that respect now than we were in eg the 80s. I'm dubious as to the utility of comparisons from eg the pre-industrial period, or indeed the period of rapid industrialisation. Our comparisons should be with what was most recent.

After spending 10 years as a SAHM, my sister went back to her career in an industry she discovered really only existed in a city about 500miles from where they had settled 9 years previously. So for 2 years she commuted home at the weekends and her dh down shifted his job so that he worked school hours only. Every night she was away she chatted to her boys and read Harry Potter to them via skype - they all really looked forward to that part of their day. The weekends she spent with them were more precious than ever, they made use of every minute - right from the pick up at the airport on a Friday. Technology made a difficult situation more bearable but she missed her family and they missed her. They now have all moved to the city she works in. Boys all have new schools and the adventure continues. There are many ways to organise family life, flexibility is important and technology can help.

Well, when I was growing up my dad left the house at 5am for work, a manual job, and got home around 6pm and also did overtime on weekends. So I rarely saw him. My mum worked part-time most of the time in a low paid job to fit around us that she could have done in her sleep and hated it. And we still were pretty poor.
My kids have two full-time working parents with flexible hours. We have enough money, and some to spare. There are days when I'm speaking to DC's from a train early in the morning or saying good night to them by Facetime, but 3 days a week I am there to take them and collect them from school and make them their dinner. DP also has days working at home. One of us is always around. We never have to miss an assembly, or a concert, or a teacher meet, a play date.
I don't think you can judge, you have no idea what kind of schedule the parents that you see have. Quite possibly a much more flexible one that in the 'good old days.' when one parent ( usually the father) was almost entirely absent from their kids day to day life.

Blame the first agricultural revolution. When we were hunter gatherers I expect children saw quite a bit more of their parents, although if they were weak or poorly they also risked being abandoned outside to die.

Just for balance - there was a whole discussion on here yesterday about how people are already dreading the summer holidays - yes, six months in advance, they are already dreading spending six weeks with their kids.

Is this not a “grass is greener” thing?!

When we were growing up my mum was a sahm in the main, we went to private school and had the accompanying long holidays. My dad worked an unusual job doing 12 days on call, 8 days off. So lots of time with them both. My dad doesn't quite get that DH can't quite manage the same amount of large jobs on the house as he doesn't get these regular blocks of time off.

We have made similar choices in that DH has chosen a job within his profession that allows him to be home by 1730 most nights, only about 20 mins down the road by bike. We home ed so have the kids around permanently.

This wouldn't work for everyone.

I think in the main a big difference is commute time as much as anything else. A lot more people have to commute a hefty distance with all the time involved in that.

Nobody ever said on their deathbed that they wished they'd spent more time at work

Funnily enough I have known several people who did say that on their deathbeds. And when I had a cancer scare a few years ago, it was the first thought that occurred to me.

Anyway, plenty of people in the past had long commute or had to travel away from the family for work (not only fishermen and the navy/army, but also rural labourers, and labourers in general).

What strikes me as truly modern in the picture summoned up by the OP is the man on the train who is not thinking about the nice pint he will have before he heads home, but trying to be part of his child's bedtime as best he can.

YellowPrimula I also grew up in a village in Sussex, which I why I didn’t think it was common for kids to still help out in the fields!

Labourers’ kids obviously didn’t go to work with their parents (because it wasn’t their farm) and most farmers’ kids were kept well away from the machinery - we were all well aware of how dangerous some of it was and were shooed away when we went around to play with them.

Maybe older kids are out helping drive the combine harvester, but I was thinking of primary school children, who certainly weren’t in my experience. These were all big industrial farms though, I expect smaller ones are a bit different.