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.

Read moreSchool often starts about 9am and finishes between 3pm and 3:30pm. The traditional full-time work day is 9am to 5pm or 8 hours. Assuming school finishes at 3:30pm, that's 300 hours per year parents need to find across the 40-week school year.

"What becomes immediately obvious for any parent in the first week of their child being at school is that suddenly there is a cliff when you get to 2 something in the afternoon … and kids need to get picked up," Dr Harrison Brennan says.

After-school care is often relied upon to cover the gap, but that's if parents can afford it. It gets expensive if you have multiple children.

And many people don't have access to it at all.

"I'd say you're part of a lucky one in five in Australia," Dr Harrison Brennan says.

"The reality is: places in subsidised after-school-hours care are incredibly concentrated in Australia's major cities."

"The gap between care and work, and school hours and work hours, isn't an inconvenience; it's a structural tax that parents, most often mums, pay every single day," says The Parenthood CEO Georgie Dent.

The average daily commute is 52 minutes, or about 56 minutes in capital cities. On average, Australians spend 3.8 hours commuting to work each week, which is about 182 hours per year.

While many Australians are now able to work from home, or work a hybrid arrangement, most Australian workers still commute to work.

"For those who work at a distance from their workplace and from their school drop-off, the degree of difficulty in completing that task every day, five days a week, for four terms a year is really, really high," Professor Hill says.

The COVID-19 pandemic did make working from home much more common.

It's one of the things that's made the workplace happier for many women, Dr Strazdins says.

"They're finding that time by cutting back on a commute from work, from home and dovetailing tasks a bit better," she says.

"I think the ferocity with which we embrace work from home and protected it when it looked like it was going to be threatened speaks to how desperate families are to find every last minute because they need them."

But when you throw in the difference between the workday and school day, the commute time makes a lot of work completely inaccessible to many Australians.

"Once you factor in things like the time at which children can be dropped at school and what that's like for a young child in early primary years when they are dropped at school leads to whether that's actually even a solution for parents to be able to drop off when the school gates open," Dr Harrison Brennan says.

"Factor in commute times to an office, and increasingly families needing to move further out in our major cities in Australia.

"As soon as you get out into some of the kind of commuter suburbs, it makes actually commuting into a job in the city or somewhere else in a metropolitan city just not even a thing for families."

While distances are much greater in rural or regional areas, most (78 per cent) primary school-aged parents live within 2 kilometres of their school.

That may be a 2-minute drive or a 15-minute walk.

But if we're conservative and allow 10 minutes for each drop-off and pick-up, which realistically, doesn't also account for the time it takes to get everyone out of the house, settle the kids at school and get back, that's roughly 1.7 hours per week.

Professor Hill says for workers who work a "typical" workday of 9am-5pm or 8am-6pm, the school pick-up is a real problem.

"It's a hard stop, and it typically happens when you're kind of reaching peak productivity in your working day."

It's hard to get the exact figures on how many activities children do and how much time parents spend attending them, but increasingly Australian families are feeling the pressure to enrol their kids in sports, arts, swimming and tutoring.

The last Australian Bureau of Statistics survey into children's participation in cultural and leisure activities found 35 per cent of kids aged 5 to 14 did a cultural activity outside of school hours. About 60 per cent did an organised sport and spent about 5 hours a fortnight training or playing outside of school hours.

Let's be conservative and allow 1 hour of the working week for dropping off and attending extracurricular activities, (even though it's likely to be more for most families).

Often this involves working parents coming up with creative solutions like carpooling, working from the sidelines or logging back on when the children are in bed.

Professor Hill says some parents feel penalised for accessing flexibility for this.

"Just because they pick up their kids from daycare or from school or take them to netball practice, or to piano lessons, does not mean that they're any less committed as an employee and any less deserving of access to training opportunities or promotion opportunities."

24 days per year

For school holidays. And that's if parents take all of their annual leave separately.

Read moreThe average Australian worker gets four weeks of annual leave, but there are 12 weeks of school holidays. Then there are at least four pupil-free or curriculum days to cover (in some states there are up to eight).

Even if there are two parents at home who each have four weeks of annual leave and they choose to take all of their leave separately, which means no family holiday time, there's still a gap of more than four weeks.

There are sometimes school holiday program options, but they can be costly.

Dr Harrison Brennan says kids often need this time for downtime at home and with family and friends.

"Many parents, they look to the school holidays and think, 'Oh, finally, this is going to be a chance to regroup.'

"And then the realisation comes in that first year of school, 'Oh no, now we have to look at holiday care options', because even if you have four weeks of annual leave and two parents in a household, that's only going to cover about two-thirds of a child's annual school holidays."

She says it's an outdated set-up we're dealing with.

"It's just such a clear example of our models for the purposes of annual leave for workers and the purpose of school holidays for children being at complete odds with one another.

"It's affecting kids, it's affecting families and extended families as well as grandparents being asked to do more. And sometimes that's possible, sometimes it's simply not."

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.

Read moreThat overlap, when your job and your children need your attention, works out to be about 34 full days every year.

And we know this is being conservative.

Obviously it doesn't take into account the many variables in different family situations.

It doesn't reflect families that have only one parent and/or children with additional needs.

It's not counting the huge amount of unpaid work, cooking, cleaning, washing, planning, maintenance or day-to-day caregiving, that needs to be done for a family to run smoothly.

It also doesn't factor in the assemblies, the medical appointments, the early pick-up days, the school events or homework.

"The numbers are damning but they're not surprising," Georgie Dent says.

"Those additional hours, they're so unseen until you're in the midst of it," Dr Harrison Brennan says.

"Parents are trying to find another 800 hours and they're facing impossible job demands," Dr Strazdins says.

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 c