How Back to School Puts Working Moms in an Impossible Bind
The mismatch of days off between schools and workplaces is an annual puzzle. It’s moms who bear the brunt.
Back to school season is in full swing. But the most basic math problem for K-12 is a head scratcher for adults, not kids. That’s because this year, like every year, millions of working parents in the U.S. are trying to figure out the impossible—how to cover for the numerous days their children will be off from school—which usually amounts to around 50 days (not including summer)—in an average 180-day school year.
Ugh.It’s a conundrum faced by the majority of the 84 million U.S. families with children under the age of 18, given that in 66% of two-parent families, both parents work outside the home and 77% of single parents are employed. But wait, there’s more: for one thing, the average full-time employee in the U.S. gets only 11 to 20 paid vacation days for the entire year and 10 days or fewer of paid sick time. Worse, the typical school day leaves several hours unaccounted for, morning and afternoon, for parents who work a 9 to 5 schedule.
Something has to give. Unfortunately, that something is usually women’s careers. After all, women in the U.S. spend double the amount of time on childcare as men, according to a report from The Gender Equity Policy Institute.
As terrible as the pandemic was for so many, the work-from-home policies that became the norm in its aftermath were particularly beneficial for child-care-stretched women. From 2022 to 2024, mothers’ workforce participation increased as flexible work policies helped moms work and be available to care for their kids during the days and hours that schools were closed. (Of course, it’s also true that many women who had even less help than they’d had pre-pandemic also ended up dropping out of the workforce altogether.)
Yet increasingly, employees in both the public and private sectors have had their remote and flexible work arrangements ripped out from under them. In a 2024 survey of employees’ resumes at Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX, nearly two-thirds of C-suite executives said that return-to-work mandates had caused a “disproportionate number” of women to quit.
Incidentally, studies have also shown that remote work also benefits companies’ bottom line: Remote workers are 40% more productive, make 40% fewer mistakes than when working in the office, and companies with flexible work arrangements, including part-time remote schedules, are 21% more profitable than fully in-person companies. But nobody seems to want to pay attention to all that.
In January 2025, President Trump ordered federal employees back to the office five days a week, though many had been working remotely for years. Meanwhile, many high-profile companies, including Amazon, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Ford, have this year switched to four or five days in-office, a decision which directly emboldens other companies to make that switch, too. No wonder data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that while 44,000 men entered the workforce in 2025, a shocking 212,000 women have left the workforce since January.
Misty Lee Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, says for these changes we have to thank “some old white male person with what I call care privilege”—essentially a person who can rely on someone else to “cook their meals, iron their clothes, or pick their kids up from daycare,” she told Time.
Francesca Donner
The Days of Longer School Years
The impossible calculation between the school calendar and work schedules is a relic designed for a society and economy that hasn’t existed for generations, namely one in which most mothers weren’t doing paid work outside the home.
In 1860, women made up only 16% of the workforce. By 1950, that number had risen to 33%, and now, women comprise 47% of the workforce.Yet even as far back as the 1600s, some schools had year-round classes and many schools across the country were open for nearly 100 more days a year than they are now.
Even by the beginning of the 19th Century, many large cities in the U.S. had school years that ranged in length from 251 to 260 days, often for 11 months of the year. But while some schools may have operated for more than 200 days, attendance wasn’t required and many kids rarely did attend because they were working on farms or in factories. In 1890, for example, the average child went to school for only about 86 days a year. Then along came the proponent of education reform, Horace Mann who, in the late 1800s, pushed for compulsory school attendance laws. By 1918, the average school attendance was up to 120 days nationwide.
Finally, in 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor and Standards Act, setting the minimum working age at 16 and requiring kids to go to school. By 1974, average school attendance was up to 160 days compared with the 170-to-185-day standard now. Good intentions, perhaps, but as women’s workforce participation increased over the last half century, parents have had to contend with a public school calendar organized with little thought given to their caregiving needs.
Emma Haslett
How Working Parents Are Coping—Or Not
Covering these gaps can be an expensive scramble that shines a light on the broken childcare system in the U.S. When the executive coach Liz Wright posed the question of how working parents cover this care gap on LinkedIn recently, the answers demonstrated the range of solutions that working parents haphazardly cobble together.
Carly Buxton, the co-founder and CEO of Parentswarm, teamed up with other parents to form a childcare co-op during an unexpected week of snow days. “If it was your day, you were in charge of covering the kids while they played outside, providing lunch, and turning on a movie in the afternoon. [It] felt like the old days of a village coming together!” she commented.
Others commented that flexible working hours, remote work, and understanding bosses and co-workers helped them cope.
For me, the parent of two school-aged kids (age 9 and 5), flexible hours and remote work is exactly what has gotten me through. I work from home and my kids’ school is a five minute walk from my house. But before I worked remotely, I spent an hour each way on the subway commuting into the office and paid more than $2,000 a month for full-time daycare for one child in New York City.
Costly though it was, I was lucky to even have that childcare.
When my family moved to Michigan, my children’s school didn’t even offer after-school care.That’s not an anomaly. As of 2018, a staggering 51% of Americans live in a childcare desert (a place with so few options that there are more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots) according to research from the Center for American Progress. Not surprisingly, the places with the least amount of childcare have fewer mothers in the workforce.
Luba Kassova
Is Relief Possible?
Though changing how school is structured is a huge, complicated undertaking, there have been many pushes over the last several decades to accommodate parents’ schedules in real life.
Schools outside the U.S. approach summer vacation in a variety of ways to avoid the “summer slide” of learning loss that’s experienced by students at every grade level over America’s roughly 10 weeks of summer break. Countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea often have year-round school with a few shorter, more frequent breaks. Many European countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany also have shorter summer breaks. In Germany for example, there is only about a month of time parents have to fill over the summer and many get enough vacation to enjoy it.
Yet extending or restructuring the school year would be especially costly in the U.S., where budgets are trending down every year. According to the Education Law Center, public school students lost nearly $600 billion from 2008-2018 and Trump has proposed further cuts that would see another $6.2 billion cut from education. Extending the school day to better mirror parents’ working hours is a thorny issue for teachers, as changing their hours or responsibilities would mean renegotiation of union contracts, never mind taxing already over-stretched professionals and possibly exacerbating the national teacher shortage. And of course, many teachers, too, have families.Wide-spread affordable quality childcare would be the next best solution. But that’s easier said than done, especially on a national level. Federal funds for after-school care were part of a funding freeze fight in Congress earlier this year. And while 2025 funds were eventually released, the future of federal funding for after-school care remains uncertain.
“The solutions here need to come from both sides,” says Elliot Haspel, a child and family policy expert, and the author of the new book Raising a Nation. “We need more employers offering robust leave banks—and, ideally, dependent-care leave banks that don't require workers to burn through their own personal sick leave. But we also need better publicly-funded care and learning options for the hours and days that school is out.”
Haspel points to a few cities and states in the U.S. that have invested public funding into after-school and school holiday programming. “Richmond, Virginia, has put a lot of money and energy into creating coherent 'out-of-school time' systems. Denver Public Schools offers a series of school holiday 'camps' at centralized school sites that are available at fairly affordable rates. California has spent billions of dollars on expanding summer and school holiday programming,” he told me. “We've seen that when public money is available, the child care burden on parents eases.”
Beyond crossing our fingers that state and federal funding will hold, we might also have to change how we think about work. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by 2030, technological progress would see most of us working just 15 hours a week.
OK, so we’re not there yet, but some forward-thinking companies are serious about implementing the 4-day work week. In 2023, 70 companies and 3,300 workers in the U.K. participated in a four-day work week pilot program. The success of that experiment, coupled with the growing drumbeat from workers and some companies in the U.S., led California Representative Mark Takano to reintroduce a bill in Congress in March 2023 that would make the 32-hour work week a national standard and lower the threshold triggering overtime compensation for most employees.
Alas, the proposed bill did not pass, despite the fact that Americans are already working an average of 200 hours more each year than employees in most of the rest of the world.
Clearly, there are lots of opportunities for creative thinking as the new school year gets underway. Company leaders can retain valuable employees by returning to remote work and restructuring the workday, male partners can take a more equal share of childcare, and state and national legislators can propose and vote for budgets that pay for care to cover the gaps.
Until these things happen, the difficult math and the scrambling will continue. And as usual, moms will bear the brunt.
