Maths doesn't add up for Australian parents juggling work and school - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Australian families are living in work, school and care systems designed for another era. And the math ain't mathing.

Morning scramble. Uniform. Lunch box. Breakfast. Hair. Teeth. Socks. Socks! Drop off. Commute to work. Work. Pick-up. After school sport. The assemblies. The parades. The homework. The appointments. The pings of parent WhatsApp groups. The bottomless laundry basket. The shopping. The dinner. The never-ending list of unpaid work. The endless worry and guilt.

When it comes to working and being a modern-day parent, the juggle is real.

If we look back to family life in the 1960s, or even the 1990s, so much has changed. 

In most two-parent families these days, both parents are employed, but the work and school systems are largely set up for a bygone era.

"The maths does not add up," says Kate Harrison Brennan, director of the Sydney Policy Lab at The University of Sydney. 

So with the introductions out of the way, let's do some rough sums.  

Parents can feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. And when you stop to work out just how much overlap there is between the hours that your children need you, and the hours that you're expected to devote to work, it's easy to see why.

We know that every family arrangement is different. 

Let's assume there are two parents at home, and both parents work full-time. 

We're going to look specifically at parents of primary school-aged children and compare the average work year with the average school year. 

Is the gap between the full-time work week and average primary school hours.

School often starts about 9am and finishes between 3pm and 3:30pm. The traditional full-time work day is 9am to 5pm or 8 hours. Assuming school finishes at 3:30pm, that's 300 hours per year parents need to find across the 40-week school year.

"What becomes immediately obvious for any parent in the first week of their child being at school is that suddenly there is a cliff when you get to 2 something in the afternoon … and kids need to get picked up," Dr Harrison Brennan says.

After-school care is often relied upon to cover the gap, but that's if parents can afford it. It gets expensive if you have multiple children. 

And many people don't have access to it at all. 

"I'd say you're part of a lucky one in five in Australia," Dr Harrison Brennan says. 

"The reality is: places in subsidised after-school-hours care are incredibly concentrated in Australia's major cities."  

"The gap between care and work, and school hours and work hours, isn't an inconvenience; it's a structural tax that parents, most often mums, pay every single day," says The Parenthood CEO Georgie Dent.  

The average daily commute is 52 minutes, or about 56 minutes in capital cities. On average, Australians spend 3.8 hours commuting to work each week, which is about 182 hours per year. 

While many Australians are now able to work from home, or work a hybrid arrangement, most Australian workers still commute to work. 

"For those who work at a distance from their workplace and from their school drop-off, the degree of difficulty in completing that task every day, five days a week, for four terms a year is really, really high," Professor Hill says. 

The COVID-19 pandemic did make working from home much more common.

It's one of the things that's made the workplace happier for many women, Dr Strazdins says.

"They're finding that time by cutting back on a commute from work, from home and dovetailing tasks a bit better," she says. 

"I think the ferocity with which we embrace work from home and protected it when it looked like it was going to be threatened speaks to how desperate families are to find every last minute because they need them." 

But when you throw in the difference between the workday and school day, the commute time makes a lot of work completely inaccessible to many Australians.   

"Once you factor in things like the time at which children can be dropped at school and what that's like for a young child in early primary years when they are dropped at school leads to whether that's actually even a solution for parents to be able to drop off when the school gates open," Dr Harrison Brennan says. 

"Factor in commute times to an office, and increasingly families needing to move further out in our major cities in Australia.

"As soon as you get out into some of the kind of commuter suburbs, it makes actually commuting into a job in the city or somewhere else in a metropolitan city just not even a thing for families."

For drop-off and pick-up. And that's being conservative.

While distances are much greater in rural or regional areas, most (78 per cent) primary school-aged parents live within 2 kilometres of their school.

That may be a 2-minute drive or a 15-minute walk.

But if we're conservative and allow 10 minutes for each drop-off and pick-up, which realistically, doesn't also account for the time it takes to get everyone out of the house, settle the kids at school and get back, that's roughly 1.7 hours per week.  

Professor Hill says for workers who work a "typical" workday of 9am-5pm or 8am-6pm, the school pick-up is a real problem.  

"It's a hard stop, and it typically happens when you're kind of reaching peak productivity in your working day." 

It's hard to get the exact figures on how many activities children do and how much time parents spend attending them, but increasingly Australian families are feeling the pressure to enrol their kids in sports, arts, swimming and tutoring.  

The last Australian Bureau of Statistics survey into children's participation in cultural and leisure activities found 35 per cent of kids aged 5 to 14 did a cultural activity outside of school hours. About 60 per cent did an organised sport and spent about 5 hours a fortnight training or playing outside of school hours.

Let's be conservative and allow 1 hour of the working week for dropping off and attending extracurricular activities, (even though it's likely to be more for most families).  

Often this involves working parents coming up with creative solutions like carpooling, working from the sidelines or logging back on when the children are in bed.

Professor Hill says some parents feel penalised for accessing flexibility for this.

"Just because they pick up their kids from daycare or from school or take them to netball practice, or to piano lessons, does not mean that they're any less committed as an employee and any less deserving of access to training opportunities or promotion opportunities."

For school holidays. And that's if parents take all of their annual leave separately.

The average Australian worker gets four weeks of annual leave, but there are 12 weeks of school holidays. Then there are at least four pupil-free or curriculum days to cover (in some states there are up to eight).  

Even if there are two parents at home who each have four weeks of annual leave and they choose to take all of their leave separately, which means no family holiday time, there's still a gap of more than four weeks.  

There are sometimes school holiday program options, but they can be costly.  

Dr Harrison Brennan says kids often need this time for downtime at home and with family and friends. 

"Many parents, they look to the school holidays and think, 'Oh, finally, this is going to be a chance to regroup.'

"And then the realisation comes in that first year of school, 'Oh no, now we have to look at holiday care options', because even if you have four weeks of annual leave and two parents in a household, that's only going to cover about two-thirds of a child's annual school holidays."

She says it's an outdated set-up we're dealing with. 

"It's just such a clear example of our models for the purposes of annual leave for workers and the purpose of school holidays for children being at complete odds with one another.

"It's affecting kids, it's affecting families and extended families as well as grandparents being asked to do more. And sometimes that's possible, sometimes it's simply not." 

That's how much time parents have to find each year if both parents are working full-time and have primary school children.

That overlap, when your job and your children need your attention, works out to be about 34 full days every year. 

And we know this is being conservative.

Obviously it doesn't take into account the many variables in different family situations.

It doesn't reflect families that have only one parent and/or children with additional needs. 

It's not counting the huge amount of unpaid work, cooking, cleaning, washing, planning, maintenance or day-to-day caregiving, that needs to be done for a family to run smoothly.

It also doesn't factor in the assemblies, the medical appointments, the early pick-up days, the school events or homework.  

"The numbers are damning but they're not surprising," Georgie Dent says. 

"Those additional hours, they're so unseen until you're in the midst of it," Dr Harrison Brennan says. 

"Parents are trying to find another 800 hours and they're facing impossible job demands," Dr Strazdins says. 

Dr Strazdins says it's time to talk about the broken system. 

"We've got lots of reasons why we do need to have this conversation," she says. 

There is a lot of evidence to show that time pressure changes how people behave, Dr Strazdins says.

"They're rushing, they're feeling incredibly anxious, they're cutting back on other things that they really need to do. 

"It's really a social problem to put this much pressure on citizens." 

Professor Hill says society needs to recognise that intensive child care does not end when young kids start school.  

"I think it's really good to name it and to shine a light on the quantum of hours that require some form of adult supervision, whether it's parents, whether it's grandparents, whether it's other community members."  

Between 1990 and 2025, the proportion of two-parent families in which both partners worked rose from 55 per cent to 71-73 per cent, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data.  

Over the past 20 years, the hours of paid work has grown for women. 

This chart shows the hours worked when there is a child under 15 in the home, broken down by men and women.  

Median hours of working men haven't changed much.  

Across the past 20 years, they've sat at about 40 hours per week.

For quite some time, working hours of women hovered between 24 and 25 hours a week.

But since about 2016, those hours have been rising.

ABS data shows the median hours for mums is currently about 30 hours. 

And that's the same whether they are in a two-parent or single-parent home.

But the data also shows historically those hours fluctuate a lot and continue to do so.

The dips in hours show that women's work has been more flexible to accommodate the school holidays.

All of the notable downward spikes in this chart appear to align with the four school holiday periods in summer, autumn, winter and spring.

The biggest drop shows a holiday period in 2012/2013 known as the "Angry Summer".

Catastrophic bushfires, extreme heat and devastating floods were simultaneously happening across the country, which may explain the dramatic dip in hours for both men and women employees at this time.

But it hasn't been the norm for both men's and women's hours to change during the holidays. 

If we look at 2014 as an example, we can see that men's hours remained unchanged throughout the year, while women's hours zigzag during the school holiday periods. 

In more recent years, men's hours have been fluctuating during these periods too.

If we fast-forward to 2024, men's hours reduce across the four holiday periods. 

This may indicate that more dads are reducing hours to accommodate the school holiday juggle.

However the size of the dips indicate that women are still having their hours disrupted more dramatically.

Increasing financial pressures mean families often don't have a choice about whether or not both parents should work, or work more.  

In homes where there is a couple and children aged 0-14 years, about 36 per cent have both parents working full-time. 

The way society is built has not kept up with the reality of modern family life, Georgie Dent says.   

And not only that, the economy wants women to work more. 

Australian women work part-time at higher rates than many other advanced economies. 

In an economic roundtable a year ago, economists highlighted that women were an untapped resource for our nation's productivity. 

"We've got women working shorter hours, doing the rest, helping men work the long hours and making the money … but it's not in the country's interests and it's certainly not equal," Dr Strazdins says.

This is reflected in the amount of unpaid work mums do, compared to dads.  

An ABS survey reveals mothers do more than 2 hours of extra unpaid work and have 24 minutes less leisure time each day than fathers.

Georgie Dent says our economy relies on the unpaid work of women.

A flood of comments in a recent ABC social media post highlighted that many mums felt like they weren't juggling, they were struggling."Working hours and school hours do not make sense … this is structural inequality that guarantees failings for all parents, but especially mums. We've lost before we even walk out the front door." - @lauren_affairs_and_tradeAnother commenter said: "We're not juggling, we're sacrificing our own mental, physical and emotional health to meet the structures of a system designed for a different time." - @otto.von.gram

The majority of our workforce are 'worker-carers' — people who have responsibilities at both work and home.

Experts say there is no silver-bullet solution to overhaul the system, but propose a suite of changes to better support modern families.

But it needs to be for both men and women.

This can come in many different forms, says Rowena Ditzell, who specialises in the future of work.

"People are talking about working from home and that's certainly a really common way of flexible working, but there's many other ways, whether it's flexible start and finish times, which can really help parents with school-aged children, whether it's term hours, you know, things like that can make a real difference for working parents." 

A four-day work week is one possible solution to a more flexible work environment, Dr Ditzell says.  

"Certainly in my research I have spoken to women who have told me that because they have been able to do a relatively important role, but been able to do it in four days, they wouldn't have been able to access that role beforehand.  

"Rather than thinking to be successful or to be taking your career seriously, you need to be in the office five days a week, it's about: to be successful you need to be delivering your outcomes." 

Dr Ditzell says while more Australians are able to access workplace flexibility, it needs to come without the worry of being overlooked for pay increases or promotions.

"We still see what we call either flexibility stigma or flexibility bias and that is the situation where people who use flexibility actually feel that they are disadvantaged as a result of that and they feel that they are judged differently."

Experts say for the gender pay gap to shrink and the glass ceiling to break, more men need to take up the flexibility too and employers need to recognise that mums and dads have equal responsibility for children.

Professor Hill says research suggests men can suffer from flexibility stigma in more extreme ways than women. 

"If flexible work arrangements are not taken up by men as well, then they risk becoming just another reason for women to continue doing a disproportionate amount of unpaid care work," she says.

Dr Strazdins says flexibility should no longer be seen as a nice to have under Australian Work Health and Safety laws.  

"There's legislation now, and it's called psychosocial hazards … parents are trying to find another 800 hours and they're facing impossible job demands."

She also argues it's time to crack down on working hours beyond the mandated 38-hour work week.

"While we allow long-hour jobs to be so well incentivised and earned, households have to make a really tough choice: who earns the big bucks and works the long hours and then who does the rest?"

That's affordable and in the same place as the school.

Kate Harrison Brennan says reliable after-school care, ideally in the same location the child goes to school, is the backbone to stable employment.  

"Quality, affordable care is crucial, particularly for workers who aren't able to be flexible with their working hours." 

And not just for parents with babies.

This could look like extra leave for parents of young children, beyond when they're babies, to give families more time together. 

"I think this mismatch between the hours that we are at work and the hours that they are at school really demands that we think in new ways around paid leave away from work in order to provide those supports," Professor Hill says. 

"We've always thought about 'paid parental leave' as being something only relevant to the first year of a child's life, but there are countries where there's an expectation that parents have access to paid leave throughout the early years of a child's schooling as well." 

In Sweden parents get 480 days of paid parental leave per child, shared between the parents. That can be banked and used flexibly throughout their childhood. 

Dr Strazdins says legislating against excessive work hours can level the playing field and reduce the gender pay gap.  

"There's a review of the National Employment Standards right now. I would say there's very few employment standards which are so routinely ignored as the work hours per week.

"I'm trying to get people to see that it's really not right for workplaces to expect people to work these excessive hours – even if they reward them for it."

Men need to step up and do more of the unpaid work, and society needs to make that more possible, Professor Hill says.  

"It's a big task. It's mostly invisible. It's squeezed in around everything else. It creates huge cognitive, emotional and logistical pressure that is primarily borne by mothers and grandmothers, and we need community and workplace supports that recognise that and allow it to be distributed more equally between all caregivers. 

"Importantly, in offering and providing that flexibility, it's really critical that employers don't penalise dads for contributing to the unpaid care load." 

We can’t expect families to keep patching over the gaps, Georgie Dent says.

She says sytems that don't match modern-day realities are not only leaving parents scrambling, but they're failing children.

And perhaps, one of the biggest changes required is an attitude one.

“Supporting parents isn’t a concession to adult convenience: it’s one of the most powerful things we can do for the next generation," Ms Dent says.

“When we invest in parents, we invest in children."