To ask working parents how much do you see your kids each day?

[Kikimush]

Just curious. DH goes off to work at 830am every morning, then I drop the kids to school at 9. Childminder collects them and looks after them til 6pm and then once dh is home at 630pm it's time for dinner, quick bit of reading and bed at 8/830pm. Sometimes I'll also have something urgent hanging over from work that will need to be dealt with in this time.

I know lots of people are in the same/worse boat and I'm not looking for sympathy but just wondering how common this is? We do tend to make the most of family time at the weekend but it still never seems like enough. There are so many things I want to do with the kids that I never get around to :(

When the kids were young exh worked in a resultant. I worked 8-4.

so I got up and went to work before they woke up. Then got in about 4.30pm and he went to work. So he got mornings and straight after school. I got 4pm to bedtime. I had all weekend off and he has Sundays and Mondays off.

We aren’t together anyone and my career has progressed a lot. so I get up around 5am, check my email do anything urgent. Get ready, get ds (dd is 18 so sorts herself) spend sometime with him. He is 11 and walks himself. He doesn’t need much supervision to get ready and I work a big while he does.

Then he gets himself home. If I am in office I am back for 5.30pm at the latest and spend time with dd and dd then. We cook together watch TV, walk the dogs etc until about 8pm. Then they get baths/showers, chill in their rooms and if I need to I will work then.

if I am working from home I finish at 4 to get that extra time with them. I control my own diary so can work when I need to and around our life.

It has varied depending on their age/stage. I had a full year mat leave with DC1 and then 10 months with DC2 as was offered a promotion.

Between DC1&2 I worked 3 days, and so had two full days with DC1, after DC2 I worked across 5 days but had 3 afternoons (from 1300) off each week which worked really well for us.

when DC1 started school I switched again to do all the school pickups and amongst that had about 4 hours a week solo with each child which was lovely.

They were 4&6 the summer of the first lockdown and we saw a lot of each other but it was the usual family struggle that many people experienced.

Since lockdown I work FT (I am studying part time on a degree apprenticeship) but mostly from home. I get most of my work done as a combination of early mornings and school hours without a lunch break. I take the occasional 4pm meeting, they have one day of after school care, and I always stop at 3pm on a Friday.

We eat breakfast and dinner together daily, but they would rather play Minecraft than spend time with me. I potter around doing household jobs and they play together. It feels like a pretty ok balance and I think by pursuing a career, I am setting a good example.

@DiscoBadgers the night wakings sound super tough, is there no way out of them?

She (3.5) usually comes in to me between 6 and 6.30 and I leave for work at 8, getting home about 6pm. Her bedtime is 7, but I’m usually in with stories etc until 7.45ish. I do two p/t jobs at the same place and work Sun-Thursday so do the nursery run on Fridays and Tuesday mornings, late start on Sundays so we get more time together. Saturday is our day to do something fun together. Currently looking to change my second job so I don’t have to work Sundays to give us a proper weekend.

DD is 8. I see her for about an hour in the mornings and about 2 hours in the evening - sometimes a bit more. We are very close, but we don't need to spend every second together. It's right at this age that she starts developing more independence. It was tougher when she was one and I dropped her at nursery at 8.30am and DH picked her up at 5.30pm. We only did that for a year and then basically changed our entire lives to spend more time with her.

I leave at 7.15 so depends on when he wakes up, but then always 4.30/5 til 7.30. Plus 18 weeks a year where I'm not working at all!

The ex and I do a week-on-week off.

My week I drop them off at school, 8-45 am, and pick them up at 3 pm.
They go to bed at 9-10 pm.
Weekends are all ours.
I take time off during the holiday periods.
My business hrs are adjusted to suit the children.

On the other hand, she drops them off at the school club at 8 am and picks them up at 6 pm.
She works weekends too.

This was roughly our schedule when I was working full-time. When they were little, it was a much harder one to keep, because they were always exhausted and hungry at pickup time. My DDs, when they were babies, would often scream in the car and grab an illegal nap just to let out the stimulation from their day. DSD had daily reading and math homework at age 4-5, so we'd be trying to do that with her at a time she was far too tired to process it.

DH and I made the most of the weekends. For a few years, we kept activities to a Saturday, which meant limiting them to two max. We deliberately kept Sundays free of activities or commitments so that we could spend time together as a family and do spontaneous things like a hike or a trip to the soft play.

The pandemic and lockdowns tipped our schedule on its ear, and our local childminders' spaces had gone (rightly) to essential workers' children by the time school and nursery re-opened. So we have a different arrangement now. I work part-time (in theory 🤨) from home. DH has embraced a combo of office and WFH days. We are more physically present for the kids.

However, physical presence isn't the same as emotional presence (and it was really lockdown hell that taught me that). There are times when we're still fobbing them off on screens because work is so busy.

We still really, really treasure the weekends and school holidays.

Yes we are very similar. Good thing about covid is we can now work from home more so we also walk DC to school. Before covid we would need a morning school club and trying to drop the kids of 7.30am….very glad that isn’t the case for us.

DD up at 6:30 - 7, at nursery for 8:30, picked up at 17:30, then sleeping by 20:00, so we see her for something 4.5 hours a day, though an hour of that is commuting in the car which possibly shouldn't count. We do this four days a week, then she's with us all day the other three days.

My child has never been in childcare or wraparound. I chose my role and hours to fit in with my family.

As a lone parent it was incredibly important that we get as much quality time together as possible and that should be daily not just weekends and high days!

Sadly, I think that many don't consider this and struggle to even consider managing with less and reducing costs/their perceived standard of living. For me, being able to afford an amazing 2 weeks holiday abroad, sky TV, new car model etc is not justification for such long hours and a lack of consistent quality family time every day.

Though I get its everyone's choice. Though I wonder if @Kikimush given you're questioning it, if perhaps you neef to look at changing this balance in your family?

I definitely remember wishing we could afford a nanny, who could come to our house. I remember lamenting one of us couldn't be an at-home parent so that we could take the kids to activities at 3:30 in the afternoon. Even a job closer to the house would have cut the time we wasted in traffic, which was especially hard at home time.

But we did what we had to do. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The morning commutes were good for quality conversation. All three of our girls were more with it in the mornings. DH and I got to know DSD really well through those morning school runs in the car. As DSD and DD1 grew older, they started to handle conversation during the evening commutes too.

When we're on the ball about screen time limits, like insisting the TV and tablet games stay off after 7 pm, we can sometimes get quality time in that way. A few minutes of a card game or Legos has done us both good, but the level of stimulation (for child and adult) needs to be lower than daytime for that to be a success.

Whatever you're weighing up, you're not alone with it. If full-time work with a commute is what your circumstances have to be for the foreseeable, you'll still find that time to connect with your children.

7am-8am before nursery and 5.30-7.30pm. I have Fridays off so we do activities then.

It's not ideal but as it's not possible to earn enough to pay our bills without working a full working day, I'm not sure there's a choice in this? I am very lucky that we can afford for me to work 4 days a week instead of 5.

I’m the same as you except I don’t work Fridays. I try to make the time we do have quality time.
I tried working less but I was always so worried about money and we didn’t have the money to actually do anything in the time I didn’t have the kids

Did have

I used to leave at 6.30am every morning. Back around 7pm. So hardly saw them in the week and never before school. Was free at weekends though and DP, their dad, was there.

Oh, one more thing experience taught us:

If you have a little kid, and they're so exhausted at pickup time that homework is impossible, just tell their teacher you can't fit it in during the week. There was not a single weeknight homework assignment that was worth the trouble when DSD was little. She didn't learn anything, and it made us all really impatient and upset.

She was DH's first baby, and my first child to be responsible for, so we didn't know better. But looking back, we should have just confidently said, "We will do our best to try some of these exercises during the day at the weekend".

We found other, more effective ways, to reinforce DSD's early learning with our old FT schedule. Educational TV (Between the Lions), phonics games (Dancing Bears), working in sums into conversation when it was flowing (yakking about fractions while baking something), and lots of reading to her at bedtime. Had we known she'd be ok with that approach, we wouldn't have stressed everyone out trying to squeeze a homework assignment in too.

Mine are still in nursery but the eldest starts school in September. I work Tues-Thurs so they're at nursery for 7:30-7:45 and them I pick them up about 5pm if I'm WFH if I'm in the office my husband picks them up. Quick tea and a bit of playtime then they go to bed at 7pm.

@ChoiceMummy what kind of job do you have that allows part time term time only hours and covers all your bills as a lone parent so that you never need to use any kind of childcare?

I'm a single parent and work FT: Mondays and Fridays (and sometimes Tuesdays) from home. Start work at about 7am but with breaks for breakfast and to prepare her for school. Then work straight through until 5-6pm. On the days I'm at home she walks home from school. On the days I'm in the office same pattern other than that she gets picked up by a childminder at 3.30pm who looks after her until 6-7pm.

Pre-lockdown I used to not see her from 7.45am to 6.30pm.

Not enough tbh. Husband currently working ridiculous hours. I work 4 days and find it quite tough to cram everything in after 6pm when I’ve collected. Once youngest is in school Ill look at my working pattern to see whether it would be better to spread over 5 days or stick with a day off.

I work x3 days per week.

See the kids for a few hours in the morning and same in the evening. On work days they go to my wonderful in-laws after school who give them dinner and drop them back (often bathed!) about 6.30pm.

Amazing people my in-laws.

My DD has two midweek days off, which is nice in the school holidays. She takes the children to school and sees them for two hours in the evening. Some weeks she only really sees them three/four days in the week because their Dad has got them, or other family members. We all keep on top of homework and give the children quality time. I think that it boils down to the quality/type of childcare when you have no choice but to work. I'd say that your set up is quite usual.

Mine are teens now. When they were little they went to a childminder after school, but I'm a teacher so I usually picked them up about 4. Plus I was part time, so I was sometimes able to pick them up at 3:15. Same now. Dh is a teacher too, but senior leadership since they were quite young, so he has some later work times. We have always had all the school holidays with them too though of course.

WFH days
7-8 when i go to my desk to work, come out at 8h30 to 845 to help with hair teeth and stuff (husband does the morning breakfasts) then he takes them to school

i collect at 5h30 and then we are together until bed which is about 9...

Office days
I leave at 7 but they wake up at that time anyway so I see them then to say goodbye
then collect as usual...

they are older primary so are used to this routine