That two parents working doesn’t work

[Itsmyshadow]

We have 3 DCs aged 8, 4 and 1. DH works full time. I have recently returned from mat leave doing 4 days per week. On my day off I have DC4 and DC1 at home and a large part of that is taken up with swimming lessons.

I feel like I’m failing at everything to be honest. House is a state, am not on top of my work, kids in nursery and after school club for long hours, and don’t even get me started on the amount of after school sporting activities DC1 does which don’t really fit with going to work.

DH is a great dad, does his fair share with the kids, does 50% of the school / nursery runs, and most of DC1’s after school sporting stuff (whilst I have the younger two). He could pull his weight a bit more with the housework but gets off his bottom when I huff and puff / nag, and does all of the DIY and garden. Like most women I carry the mental load, doing all the school, nursery, medical admin etc.

I feel like I need to do a real half arsed job of my work on my wfh days to keep on top of the washing / house / kid admin / kid homework (saw a thread on here the other day about that), but workload / conscience won’t let me do that, and that doesn’t solve for the fact that DC1 has football at 5:30 on a Tuesday or hockey at 6pm on a Wednesday and if I finish at 5pm and I’m in the office, those timings don’t work.

We have a cleaner and a robot vacuum, but I still can’t keep on top of all the crap all around the house (paintings from nursery, party bag loot, paper admin that needs addressing, magazines etc), and feel like the kids get given toys / grow out of clothes much faster than I can get sort through the old ones. Result is a massive mess of a playroom that I keep getting half through sorting before the kids mess it up again and there’s nowhere for everything to go.

Don’t talk to me about TOMM or similar. I’m not lacking motivation or direction. I spend hours per week washing and putting away clothes, batch cooking, sorting through piles of stuff, firefighting cleaning tasks (usually when something mouldy is discovered or someone has spilt something somewhere), but no sooner is something done it’s a complete mess again.

So those of you who work a lot of hours and have young kids. How are you managing? Do you spend hours every evening cooking and cleaning (how do you find the energy if so?), and how to you manage the demands of kids after school activities / social lives?

WTF is the point of having children, if you're just going to palm them on on various 'caregivers?'

It's of course great that you homeschooled but that isn't for everyone.

I think it’s incredibly rude to refer to a childminder as being faceless. Personally I want my children in their own home so my choice is a nanny. I’m fortunate I’m able to afford my choice.

As someone divorced from a very high earner, it’s liberating that I just took my children back to the UK for 3 weeks and took my children back to Denmark to see my ex husbands parents and sister. My
children don’t deserve to lose their relationship with his family because he has decided to be a martyr and not pay child support. It’s a good thing im also a high earner and budget carefully to afford these things.

I went back to work FT when my kids were 4 and 6, so school age. I got a new job nearer to home but much less money. Negotiated a late start so I could drop the kids off every morning, Husband negotiated 3 days WFH so he could collect them 3 days a week and they went to after school twice a week. Activities such as swimming, football etc were all done on a Saturday or Sunday. Usually one of us each taking a child. We had a cleaner and definitely wouldn’t give that up. Also an occasional ironer if that built up too. Over the years I rebuilt my career and now earn more than my husband so it is possible but I had to start again after kids to do it. I put them first and sacrificed pay for 5-10 years but I kept climbing back up the career ladder and am now in the best position with a great paid job and teenagers who are never in the house!

Insane how we have now been conditioned to deny/reject/ridicule the most natural thing in the world. Raising children is what we’ve done for millennia but suddenly oh no, you have to deny your instincts for the sake of your supposed partnership. Stuff that.

and the majority of people are able to both work and raise their children.

It isn't insane at all that both people in a marriage need to agree to have a SAHP. Of course the person who will be funding it has a say and needs to agree.

But we haven’t been raising children in isolation for millennia. It’s only in very recent history that families have been so scattered and mothers (not parents, mothers) have been expected to do so much, with so little support. Expectations of what parenting entails have been raised, too. It takes a village and few of us have one. It’s silly to compare what mothers did millennia ago to what they’re doing now, and claim some kind of mythical maternal instinct – and I hate talking about “instinct” the way you’ve used it, because it’s a stick to beat women with. If you don’t want to be a SAHM and want to do something else instead, are you lacking a natural maternal quality? This ineffable instinct? Are you not as womanly as a SAHM? Nah. Fuck that noise.

Have a read of this, The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting, from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/upshot/the-relentlessness-of-modern-parenting.html

@bussteward 👏
Fuck that indeed. I am not a lesser mum because I needed and wanted to work.

I think as well it’s important to look at not just try financial aspect but the whole picture.

Currently, if I went back to work, we’d be worse off financially, because of high childcare costs. My job is not one which I particularly need to stay in to progress- ie taking a few years out now is not a huge issue. I also am not a ‘career’ woman, I like my job and I definitely want to return to work in some capacity at point, but I’d rather be at home with my kids right now.

We (DH and I) were discussing the mental load the other day, and I do every single bit. DH does his share of some household jobs, but the organisation of daily life and 3 kids and their admin is ALL me. Now, of course I could pass some of this over to DH if I went back to FT work, but the hassle and time to do this is just not worth it for me. I did it all when I worked PT too, pre our third child. I actually don’t mind it. Sure I get a bit overwhelmed and stressed sometimes, but the thought of going to work, paying more than I earn for childcare AND doing the mental load stuff means staying off is a no brainier for our family dynamic right now.

I think what’s key is that both DH and I are happy with that choice and balance and that I do get a break at weekends because DH is very good at parenting his kids. What wouldn’t be so fun is what I see often on here, SAHM who does everything and DH does absolutely zilch at the weekends because he’s ‘tired’ from working all week. Luckily DH understands that my ‘work’ is just as hard, if not harder than his job!

FT working parents don’t necessarily spend half their child’s waking time away from them. DH and I work full time compressed and have grandparent help so DD spends 16 hours a week in paid childcare, around 3 hours of which she is asleep, spends a day with me, a day with DH, weekends with both of us and a day with grandparents plus some time before and after nursery on 2 days with grandparents. DH has 10 weeks paid annual leave, I have 8 but can accrue more days with flexi time by having shorter lunches. So the vast vast majority of time DD is with one or both of us.

Saying that if someone does have to put their kids into 50 hours of nursery a week I don’t judge them, but I do hope the 4 day working week becomes standard so that both dads and mums can spend more time with their kids.

Please stop saying using childcare is “farming out” or “palming off”. Most people don’t have the option to work as few hours as you and your husband – you have adult children, I’m going to assume you bought your home prior to the current house price shitshow and you’re clearly less affected by the cost of living crisis.

This. Do people seriously lack the intelligence to realise that millions of people use childcare and that most of them have to use childcare?

The lack of real world experience and sheer offensiveness on this thread is just breathtaking. Post after post on here of people insulting mothers for taking the only option available to them to support their children or balancing the very real need to make money with the impetus to make this work around your family life and suggesting that wanting to work makes you a flawed human being.

Leaving aside the questions of whether it benefits children or not to have working mothers (and I happen to believe firmly that it does but that's a point for another post), this thread is astonishing in its sheer snobbery and lack of self-awareness. It's as if people consider themselves morally superior because they don't have to work to support your children. Do you people who look down on working mothers also consider all people on benefits beneath you? Do you think people who can't afford private school are beneath you? Or is it just women who have to work which bothers you? And if so do believe yourselves to be intrinsically superior because you have a husband who earns enough to support all of you?

Those of you who are lucky enough never to have faced the difficult choices about balancing work with life (and believe me you are in a minority) should have the decency at minimum to not insult those of us who don't have this luxury. It's so grotesquely rude: it's the MN equivalent of rich people walking through a poor area of town and holding their noses in disgust.

I'm pretty hardened to these debates, I've been on dozens of these threads and I've seen working mums give as good as they get on some threads (and sometimes they can be unpleasant about SAHMs) but some of the posts on here about "farming out" and so forth are genuinely disgusting.

How is this conducive or helpful?
So rude!

How is this conducive or helpful?
How rude and demeaning!

It's neither rude nor demeaning. It's a genuine question. Having experienced raising a single child in a household where both parents work FT and have to juggle everything with no family support, I've found it hard work but very much doable. I can equally imagine that if I had 3x as many children, it would be infinitely less so. When planning the size of your family, it's something you really need to consider.

But OP’s third child is one year old, and her question is “how are people managing the balance, does she have to quit work or are there life hacks to help”. Not “help me build a Time Machine and unmake this human being in my house”.

It doesn’t really matter what she thought before adding a third child, her theories of how it would work, the threads she read on here saying everything after the first child is easy, new ones just slot in, whatever, because none of that changes the reality of it actually now.

Honestly all this "I couldn't have possibly worked full time with kids" nonsense. You realise people up and down the country don't have a choice?? And just get on with it.

(Not a dig at the OP. I knows it's not always easy! But for most people the answer isn't simply to quit your job)

Well on mumsnet you are a loser if you don’t earn 100k a year plus each. So I’m wearing the loser 🧢

I also want to add that those who are fortunate to have family childcare it massively tips the balance of what seems manageable. I was at a class the other day and saw two grannies looking after the babies, I got chatting to them and it turns out they are doing all the childcare while their daughters work. Where I live in London the financial difference this would make is thousands of pounds and I’m sure similar for other areas of the country.

There is no magic solution and of course millions of parents ‘just get on with it’ but it is hard.

10 weeks of annual leave... Wow!!! What does your partner do? I think I might need to change career!! That would make balancing it all so much easier!
I got totally screwed over with annual leave since going part time as bank holiday allowance gets pro rata'd but I work Mondays and we have 100000 Monday bank holidays this year so been forced to use 1/3 of my annual leave allowance to take pointless random Mondays off!

It's not great in Scandinavia countries. It's actually shite. One year olds are dropped very early in nurseries and picked up very late. In winter, it's obviously dark when they're dropped off and dark when they are picked up. This is not societal 'progress' in my view - kids practically growing up in institutions. In Norway, there are only 5 million people so they need mothers working, but who are the losers in the push for increasing GDP? Time will tell. We now know about 'boarding school syndrome' for those packed off at age 7 in past generations. I wonder if we'll think similarly about full-time childcare in years to come? I don't know?

Boarding school and full time childcare are nothing alike. Why would it be thought about similarly?

I wonder if we'll think similarly about full-time childcare in years to come? I don't know?

current parents of young children in Scandinavia have all grown up in full time childcare themselves. They seem to be quite fine and not that traumatised.

Yeah, nursery teacher in Scandinavia here. I can assure you it’s pretty great and many kids rarely even want to go home when they are picked up. Not even me sometimes. Lovely job, very outdoorsy. Yes it is obviously dark day and night during winter as the sun doesn’t really rise. The snow makes it quite light and we even eat our lunch outside some days.. These kids have such an advantage in many ways.

Time has told, again and again though? Among the happiest people on earth. Happy with what we have, don’t need more. Just fresh air. Don’t need to convince anyone either tbh, it’s certainly a good life for adults and children especially.

And I did live in England for a few years, working in s nursery. It’s not to compare, and I can safely say I would not swap. There is a reason nurseries an universities educating nursery teachers (3,5 years) in Scandinavia are frequently visited by Btitish teachers.

(sorry for spelling mistakes, no editing button!)