Adding my support, too. One possibility is that we drift on like this indefinitely with schools and nurseries shut and no clear plan for a date of reopening. (Clarity alone would make things easier for parents. See the French example.)
Eventually there'll be a spectacular front-page headline and the government will wake up to the fact that it needs to support working parents for the health of our children and to support the rights of women. Or, to put it another way, to avoid discriminating against children and women with children. The headline will be tragic. (Children dying in an accident in the kitchen while parents worked. Neonatal deaths. Suicides. Domestic violence.) But WHY should we have to wait for that when the pressure on working parents is so fucking obvious it's INEVITABLY going to have some catastrophic outcomes and many more small bad ones. (Childhood mental health problems, marriages pushed to collapse, illiterate 7 year olds, a thirty year rollback in gender relations.)
There's too much pressure. Pressure from work to produce EXACTLY the same amount of high quality work as Mr A (he's 55 with grown-up children) or Mr B (he's our age but his wife has never worked) or Ms C (the bright 20-something who could probably just about manage our job). Pressure from school to homeschool very young children. All of the old structure (cleaners, meals cooked by someone else, online shopping orders, mum at weekends) that we had painstakingly built up to deal with the still NOVEL situation of being working mothers -- gone.
Pressure of loneliness. No sympathetic natters with female colleagues, no lunches with friends, no calming weekly swim, no time with DH alone. Pressure of redundancy, salary cuts. Shame at not being a good enough mother. Shame at finding our children frittering a way yet another day on YouTube watching middle-aged men unpacking toy cars (not the programme we picked of course) when we stagger in from a Zoom call, phone pinging, to ask what everyone wants for lunch. Creeping sense that maybe it's all too hard. Pressure for elderly parents who now need us to collect medicines, deliver shopping, phone every day. Guilt about parents. Worse still if parents become ill.
Forget having it all. It's as if working mothers have been told we can't have any of it. I was on verge of being underweight before lockdown, now I've lost half a stone, I work till after midnight every night, get up before 7 with the kids, and have no leisure other than typing messages on my phone while watching my children watch TV. I'd much rather play with them. But I'm too tired. I look ten years older than I am. My GP has doubled my antidepressants (without seeing me, to a dose that the internet tells me is unusually high). I'm slightly worried about that, especially because I now drink too much (not too much at a time but a couple of glasses of wine every day). Many of my friends are in the same situation. I think. The Zoom drinks (!) have sort of dried up now because everyone is too tired and too down.
The life I am giving my children is shit and yet I can't do better.
Children are the most vulnerable people in our society and they represent its future. It's easy to fuck them over because they have no representation and (especially now schools are closed) often no-one to talk to.
A friend who's a contact supervisor told me how painful she found it at the beginning of lockdown to go and stand outside houses socially distancing/ checking in where there is a known history of abuse. She couldn't take it any more and asked for leave, with a huge amount of guilt.
This virus rarely affects children. Why should they pay for it?