SPOTLIGHT: How back-to-school season impacts working parents
Early release days, four day weeks, and a summer break that stretches for months all sound normal until you try to hold a full time job around them. Parents describe piecing together coverage for a schedule that assumes someone is home.
Some school districts hold weekly early release days, and other towns have 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.
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. Reville calls the calendar a "legacy artifact that was set up in another era."
Read more via The Boston Globe
New Pew survey data confirms what most working parents already feel. Work follows kids home, and kids follow parents to work, and it's wearing people down.
70% 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.
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."
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. 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
School start dates vary more than people realize, and where you live shapes the calendar more than any national norm.
In Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, nearly nine in ten students are in class by the second week of August.
Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas cluster even tighter, with 94% of students starting within an eleven-day window in early to mid-August.
New England sits at the opposite extreme, where the school year barely gets going before late August.
New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania push later still, with roughly three in four students waiting until after Labor Day.
Minnesota law requires most schools to start after Labor Day, putting it out of step with its regional neighbors, where most students are back between Aug. 14 and Aug. 25.
Read more via Pew Research Center
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%. 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, check 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. Those states are California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Rhode Island sets a specific bar. Employers with fifty or more workers owe eligible employees ten unpaid hours a year for school related meetings.
A new Indiana law requires even employers with a single employee to provide unpaid leave for school conferences, without setting a specific number of hours.
Employees can use FMLA leave to attend a meeting about their child's individualized education program, commonly called an IEP.
For a remote employee, it's the law where they're sitting at their desk that governs, not where the company is headquartered.
Employers using geofenced apps or biometric attendance trackers could be liable if those systems penalize workers for taking legally protected leave, so a manual override for HR is worth having in place.
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.
48% of parents with a child age 5 or younger say it's hard to find childcare that fits their budget.
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
