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?

It’s apparently beyond these people’s comprehension that some of us actually need to work.

Some women want to work also and there is nothing wrong with that. It's interesting because if a man has a partner who is a higher earner and wouldn't starve without his wages than them no one analyses his motivations for continuing to work.

I'm so happy we live in a country where over 40hrs a week isn't the norm. What an awful work/life/family balance that must be.

@CatsSnore Working 40-50 hours a week is completely normal and if we choose to work less hours as a society we need to make peace with less of everything including access to medical care and education. Personally, I’m not ok with that. Working 50 hours a week still gives you approx 50 hours a week of your own time. How is that not balanced?

It's really not normal in any European country to dedicate half of your life to working hours. Working like a pack horse will not bring you a good life, physically or emotionally. As for services.. well if billionaire corporate firms paid their fair share of tax instead of evading it higher earners wouldn't have to pay more and neither would the increasingly squeezed middle.

Nonsense. The working week is just there to keep most people busy. It’s made up, we could make up a four-day week instead, or make medical and C education jobs more appealing so more staff doing fewer hours each cover whatever amount of time is necessary for each. We didn’t used to have weekends, or eight-hour days; those were introduced and capitalism continued unabated; it will be fine even if people want a better balance. I don’t know anyone stupid enough to work a 50-hour week or support one.

Once you take into account commute time, that lunch breaks are close to your job locale so not hours that can be lumped together into your “50 own hours”, getting ready for work, sleeping, and what the OP is talking about which is all the invisible work and mental load and housework and childcare, no one has 50 hours. It’s disingenuous to suggest it’s the case.

6-9am with the kids doing the “second shift” of life, breakfasts and nursery runs and school runs, thankfully no commute
9-6 job to clock my necessary 8 hours in your dystopia (ooh, with my one hour lunch break own time!)
6-8 dinner, time with kids, bath and bedtimes - the true second shift
8-9 necessary household chores to keep life ticking, eg dishwasher, top-up shop, admin, world book day costume or £1 for mufti or whatever, packing the nursery bag, etc etc
9-10 That sweet hour of my own time
10pm-6am sleep because otherwise I’m a monster

Obviously you’re counting commutes and household drudgery and school runs as part of that sweet 50 hours we’ve all got spare but it’s not much of a life, is it? Wait, I’ve only clocked 40 hours, better give up some sleep or 10 hours of weekend to keep the UK economy from collapsing!

This is pretty silly.

A PP has already done the 50 hours free time bit, so I'll focus on the level of unwarranted faith you're showing in a 40-50 hour standard week as maximising productivity. There's no research to suggest this. For some people, their productivity will be maximised doing much less.

@bussteward 2nd shift is work and much of it is stuff I outsource so I have more time to myself and my children. Imagine if you had help in the morning so you could leave for work at 7am or spend time with your children and leave at 9am to finish work later.

@CatsSnore open your eyes, we aren’t competing against Europe. The competition is from rest of the world and they are all working a lot harder and are smarter on average than the average Brit or European.

Imagine if you had help in the morning so you could leave for work at 7am or spend time with your children and leave at 9am to finish work later.

For people who want this, good luck to them, but to some of us that sounds rather undesirable.

Imagine how many people don’t earn enough to have help in the morning. Imagine that although the mornings are hard work, it’s valuable for us all to eat breakfast together as a family. Imagine not leaving for work at 7am, sounds shit.

I’d love to outsource loads of stuff but not so I can work more, Jesus Christ. If Mary Poppins came to my house at 7am and took care of the house and kids I’d go and have a bath, read a book and potter in the garden.

What is the competition? Being miserable? And what’s the prize? Climate crisis?

So you make your choices but then don’t expect a nice lifestyle. You can’t have it both ways.

The thread isn’t about lovely lifestyles? I wouldn’t in any case agree that working 50 hours is a lovely lifestyle. It’s “how do you balance work and all the stuff”. Your answer appears to be to work even more.

Two parents working 50 hours a week would not constitute a nice lifestyle to DH and I. Quite the opposite, actually. If we had to make financial sacrifices to avoid doing that, we would.

And even if you want to define that as purely something financial, there are still two big holes to be picked in it. The first is that when people have DC, the childcare costs mean they aren't necessarily getting more money by working more. And the second is that plenty of us are able to afford a nice lifestyle in the financial sense without anyone having to do a 50 hour week. We don't do much more than that between us.

open your eyes, we aren’t competing against Europe. The competition is from rest of the world and they are all working a lot harder and are smarter on average than the average Brit or European.

Good grief! You sound like an advert for the UK government!

You can dedicate your life, or at least 50 hours a week of it, to "the cause" if you like. You can be a cog in the wheel, striving to work harder, increase the nations GDP, and have your intelligence judged on the basis of your mathematical prowess for the glory of England if you want.

Fuck that shit!

@StormShadow Two parents working 50 hours a week would not constitute a nice lifestyle to DH and I. Quite the opposite, actually. If we had to make financial sacrifices to avoid doing that, we would.

Agree! It’s barely conducive to a balanced family life when it’s one parent but no way in hell it’s a nice family lifestyle when both parents are working longer weeks.

In Sweden housewives / stay at home mothers are looked on as leaches and drains to the system to the point where they are often excluded. Cheap childcare and extended / flexible maternity leave has resulted in both parents being expected to work.

I do not know anyone who works more than 40 hours a week. It's not necessary in most jobs. No way would I work 50 hours a week. I'd rather have less money than do that.

It is challenging, I don't think anyone makes out it's easy though? For us we just had one child and I work shifts (some nights shifts) and DH works standard office hours and it works well for us. Covering illness is manageable between us both, holidays can be more challenging but thankfully we can afford holiday clubs normally if needed. I don't think there's a magic solution.

Bet they're not all expected to work 50 hours a week as standard though...

@StormShadow At junior and mid level they are expected to work a minimum of 37.5 hours per week and in management 40-50 hours per week is expected.

In Denmark the working day for women was generally, drop child off at bornehave (daycare) at 8am, go to work arriving at 8:30am. Leave work at 2:30pm to pick child up at 3pm. Go home, do evening routine and log back in 8-10pm. Rinse and repeat. That’s an 8 hour day, so 40 hours a week.

Quite a lot less than 50 hours on average then, if accurate. Though I have my doubts about the universality of what you say about Denmark here, given that they can't all work in jobs that can be done remotely.

I lived in Denmark and my ex husband worked there. They are meticulous about number of hours worked. It’s part of the law of Jente and their society uses guilt as very effective tool to ensure equal participation in the workplace of 37.5 hours per week, unless you are managing in which case it’s over 40
hours a week.

My experience was that Danish leadership was not very effective when working less than 45 hours a week. It’s very important to attend the dinners, travel to clients and offices so you can manage effectively. My ex husband left the house at 6am and was back home at 10pm or later. He was paid very well for it. When located in Denmark and working during covid he worked 7am to 10pm Monday through Thursday and 7am to 6pm on Friday. He would take calls after that and he worked 8 hours or so over the weekend.

Most well paid jobs across Europe are over 50 hours a week. The remaining 10 hours are often just cultural or expected. But let me tell you, even in France you can’t expect to earn 100k+ without putting in the hours. People on MN tend to have low level experience in the job market (where they have any experience at all) and so don’t know what it’s like at a more senior level.

So you're actually only talking about a particular segment of society, then. Which makes me think I'm right, they're not all expected to work 50 hours a week as standard in Sweden.

None of which relates to my post about the general working population in Sweden, especially as 'most' and 'well paid' are vague terms.

This sounds similar to many industries in the UK though. In many here the expected hours are much longer than that, especially in the professions.

I think the main difference I have observed is that in many other European countries there is a sense of collective responsibility. There is none of this sense of "claim what you are entitled to and do the minimum hours you can get away with". People would feel shame. It is in the non-professional jobs that the difference is most stark. People don't think they have a right to work 16 hours per week and have everyone else fund the rest of their living costs.