In our house this week, the juggle gets real. 

After a year’s maternity leave, my wife is heading back to work. With a nearly-one-year-old and a nearly-nine-year-old, we’re balancing the two kids with two working parents. Every day is logistical jiu jitsu.  

My wife has been making this point for ages, but as we’ve counted down the days to the new normal, I’ve come to appreciate its salience more than ever. Even though young people are the key to our future, economic and otherwise, somehow we’ve created a society that makes things incredible tricky for many young families. 

First of all, to have a reasonable middle-class, home-owning life, most households need two working parents. There are exceptions of course, but I reckon most need two working parents. It’s my sense that this didn’t use to be the case. In the post-war years it was quite normal to have households with one working parent. It wasn’t that families were flush with cash! It’s just that relative to incomes, housing and the cost of living was more affordable. 

So, two working parents for most middle-class households. Many jobs, if not most, will require staff to work an eight-hour day – 9am-5pm. But school, oh no, that’s a six-hour day – 9am-3pm, which means if you’re on pickup duties, you probably need to be checking out of work at about 2.30. 

Consider the holidays. Standard leave provisions for a fulltime worker in New Zealand are four weeks annual leave plus the public holidays. That means that in a two-parent house, if the parents never have more than a long weekend off together, they can cover eight weeks a year. 

But kids? They get at least twelve weeks of school holidays. Hmm. 

I’m convinced school holidays programmes and after school care were not nearly as common or necessary when I was a kid, let alone in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.   

For younger children, it’s just as challenging. Sure, the Government has increased its maternity provisions (my Mum got nothing, back in the day!), but while they provide 20 hours free childcare for children over the age of three, maternity payments are only for the first six months of a baby’s life. Even though supposedly a child’s first 1000 days are the most important, there’s a two-and-a-half-year gap in support.   

So what is a family to do if their grandparents aren’t around or available every day to help? One parent can choose to stay home with the child, or a parent can go back to work and effectively redirect all of their income into childcare. Neither option is amazing.  

New Zealand’s birth rate has massively dropped off in the last few decades. Same with our fertility rate. We don’t yet face the same kind of population crisis that afflicts the likes of Italy and South Korea, but as the eldest of four, something tells me the sale of Mitsubishi Chariots has dropped off in recent years. You don’t see anywhere near as many bigger families as you were the norm a few decades ago. 

And I want to be clear: we are very, very fortunate. I’m lucky to be pretty well-paid. We have support. We make it work. But it’s still a real hustle. And what for the working families who don’t have the same income, support close by, or flexible employers, or more help with childcare? 

For so many families it must be more than a juggle. It’s a real struggle.   

And I’m not sure that’s in anyone’s interest.