Maths doesn't add up for Australian parents juggling work and school
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.
To help us put the numbers in context and talk about real solutions, alongside Dr Harrison Brennan we've enlisted these experts:
- Elizabeth Hill from The University of Sydney Department of Political Economy
- Georgie Dent, CEO of advocacy organisation The Parenthood
- Lyndall Strazdins from the ANU National Centre of Epidemiology and Population Health
- Rowena Ditzell, lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney
So with the introductions out of the way, let's do some rough sums.
The maths
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.
7.5 hours per week
Is the gap between the full-time work week and average primary school hours.
3.8 hours per week
For the average commute to work.
20 minutes per day
For drop-off and pick-up. And that's being conservative.
1 hour per week
For extracurricular activities.
24 days per year
For school holidays. And that's if parents take all of their annual leave separately.
At least 814 hours
That's how much time parents have to find each year if both parents are working full-time and have primary school children.
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.
"If you're trying to find an extra 800 hours a year, well, what are you actually doing to do that? I mean, what actually are people trying to do if they're trying to find those extra hours?"
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."
Mums are in paid work more, but still carry larger portion of unpaid workload
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.
However, that is changing.
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.
"There are more parents than ever in paid work, not as a lifestyle choice, but out of necessity, yet so many of our systems, from schools to workplaces to paid parental leave and child care, still reflect an outdated assumption that there's a parent at home to readily absorb the care and domestic load of raising a family."
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.
"We've built an economy and society that runs on the invisible labour of parents, particularly mums, and called it a 'work-life balance problem' instead of a policy failure."
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_trade
Another 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
What society needs to do to keep up
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.
Flexible workplaces
But it needs to be for both men and women.
Better after-school care
That's affordable and in the same place as the school.
Extra parental leave
And not just for parents with babies.
Capped hours
To stop incentivising one parent.
More men taking on mental load
To balance the unpaid workload.
We can’t expect families to keep patching over the gaps, Georgie Dent says.
"We're effectively asking parents to run a marathon in shoes designed for someone else and then wondering why they're not keeping up."
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.
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