Since our son’s school day ends at 3:15, that also means that the only options are aftercare or me picking him up and resuming work after she gets home. When there are things like staff meetings that runs even later.
The reason this worked in the past was that women did not work full-time, or at all, and the entire system was set up around the idea that there is a “free” adult available to handle everything except instruction. Unfortunately, since wages for anyone below upper middle-class have been stagnant for roughly half a century most families now depend on both parents working to avoid falling further behind.
If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times. It isn't like you have to drop off or pick up at start/finish time exactly. There is a good half hour window on either end. Those periods were some of the most fun you have at school as a kid IMO.
And yes if you make different choices they have different tradeoffs. Mum and Dad don't both have to work full time. You don't have to live an hour away from work. You don't have to pretend a 10 year old can't get themselves home fine on their own.
It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different. You can buy a 1970s fridge that cost kW more to run for cheap. A new bigger more efficient fridge is a different product so you can't just compare prices then and now. Same with all products: today they're bigger, they last longer, they need less maintenance and they are much more efficient.
Most people live where they can afford housing. Unless you are in the upper 5%, you are “choosing” a longer commute in the same way that you chose to use a time machine to set housing and transit policy after WWII.
Painting this as a choice around stranger danger is similarly ignoring that children need to get to school before they are capable of traveling independently, or that busing and transit have been cut in many areas – I’m all about not driving everywhere, and we don’t use a car personally, but many of the families I know do not have that option because the built environment doesn’t have safe routes even to get to the closest bus stop (which is not close).
There are a lot of things we could do better but the average parent does not have control over their municipal zoning or budget, and certainly can’t turn their neighborhood into Amsterdam on a whim because their boss thinks Zoom calls are more productive in a cubicle.
> If you are married to a teacher, how is that not flexible hours? Half the reason people become teachers is that they can pick up and drop off their kids around school times.
Neither of these claims are true. Teachers, like many other jobs, have set schedules. If they need to be at their worksite before school starts and at or after the time it gets out, that does not leave time to travel somewhere else.
> It is a myth that wages have been stagnant for decades. The basket of goods you compare to then vs now are completely different.
This is well studied and I’d tend to go with the academic consensus over your opinion. For example, this is in constant dollars:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
One key thing to think about is whether paying less for a cheaper TV every decade is saving you as much money as higher housing, healthcare, education, and retirement costs have cost – and especially how the increases in mandatory costs hit most workers harder. Saving $100/year on my electric bill is nice, but for many people that was cancelled out by rate increases and since it was never that big a part of their budget it’s nowhere near recouping how much rent has increased.
How that's supposed to work with just 2 parents that work 8h/day - idk.
