Early release days, four-day school weeks and a summer break that stretches for months all sound normal until parents try to hold a full-time job around them. Some school districts hold weekly early release days, and other towns layer their own patchwork of monthly time off on top of that. A typical school-age kid ends up with two to three times as much time off as the working parent raising them, and more districts are moving to four-day school weeks, a shift now used by hundreds of schools across more than two dozen states. Paul Reville, former Massachusetts secretary of education, argues the traditional school calendar was never designed with working families in mind, calling it "a legacy artifact that was set up in another era."
Read more via The Boston Globe
New Pew Research Center survey data confirms what most working parents already feel: work follows kids home, and kids follow parents to work. Seventy percent of full-time working parents say they handle parenting tasks while they're working, and 59% say they handle work tasks while they're with their kids. More than half of full-time working parents say the balancing act itself is a struggle, and roughly eight in ten full-time working moms end up handling some parenting tasks during the workday, more than double the share of dads who say they do this extremely or very often. "I feel like that tug of war is constantly on my mind of where I need to be, if I am missing out as a mom, or if I am disappointing somebody at work. There's just no way to be two things at once and give 100% at both," said Amber Petersen, a legal assistant. Nearly half of parents say the job has pulled them away from a school event at least once, and moms are far more likely than dads to say that stings. Working from home doesn't solve the overlap, either: parents who work remotely all the time are just as likely as anyone else to say balancing work and family is difficult.
Read more via Pew Research Center, NPR
Even in households where both parents work full time, the data shows the balancing act isn't split evenly. In dual full-time working couples, 52% say the mom does more of the day-to-day parenting, and 43% say the mom does more of the household chores. Moms are noticeably more likely than dads to say they can't find time to work out, 65% versus 52%, and a similar gap shows up for time to relax. When a kid gets sick or care falls through, parents overwhelmingly expect it will be mom who leaves work, not dad. Roughly half a million women exited the workforce last year, and childcare was the reason most of them gave. Catherine Brown, coauthor of a 2016 report on how school schedules affect working parents, says the unpredictability takes a toll on women's careers specifically, because women "know they don't have the time to put into the 60-hour-a-week jobs ... they feel like maybe they don't deserve to be in the C-suite."
Read more via Pew Research Center, Boston Globe, Brookings
Before assuming a request for time off to attend a teacher conference is a favor, it's worth checking the map: in a growing number of states, it's the law. Eleven states plus D.C. have put school activity leave into law, not just company policy: California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Vermont. Rhode Island sets a specific bar, requiring employers with fifty or more workers to provide eligible employees ten unpaid hours a year for school-related meetings, while a new Indiana law requires even single-employee businesses to provide unpaid leave for school conferences, without setting a specific number of hours. Employees can also use FMLA leave to attend a meeting about their child's individualized education program, commonly called an IEP. For remote employees, it's the law where they're sitting at their desk that governs, not where the company is headquartered, and employers using geofenced apps or biometric attendance trackers could be liable if those systems penalize workers for taking legally protected leave, making a manual override worth having in place for HR.
Read more via JD Supra
Back to school doesn't mean the childcare bill goes away. Before- and after-care, sick days and school breaks all still need coverage, and the cost keeps climbing. Having one child adds roughly $20,000 a year to a family's basic cost of living, and childcare alone accounts for about half of that jump. Forty-eight percent of parents with a child age 5 or younger say it's hard to find childcare that fits their budget, and among parents of school-age kids, sizable shares say it's hard to find care before school, after school or during the summer. Just 6% to 7% of parents say onsite childcare is available at their workplace, even though most say it would help.
Read more via Brookings, Pew Research Center
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