Parenting Math: How Much Time Should You Spend with Your Children?

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:08
Speaker 3: And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:32
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: This episode is airing in early mid October of twenty twenty three. We're going to be talking about the math of childcare hours, which came about because we got a letter from a listener who wanted to know about how much time her children spend in childcare versus spending with her and our general thoughts on that. But before we get to that, we have a little confer fashion to make, which is perhaps we will be more polished than usual in this episode because we were actually recording it for the second time. Sarah, could you speak to what happened?

00:01:11
Speaker 3: Well, I don't exactly know what happened. But the truth is we are much more prone to recording mishaps when we are in person, because when we are recording virtually, if there's some kind of sound problem, the other person is not going to be able to hear, like we're not able to hear each other, and so there's a tip off. However, if we are recording in front of a laptop, there's no indication that the laptop cannot hear us. So I think some sort of button was pushed or not pushed, and I ended up with a blank file, which I even submitted to our sound processing team in.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: Case they worked magic or something. It's not really blank.

00:01:45
Speaker 3: Well, no, I didn't realize it was blank because I just see the link. I don't always like test it.

00:01:49
Speaker 1: You know.

00:01:49
Speaker 3: My process is I thought quite fool proof, but obviously not. So they emailed me back, Uh.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: You're just gonna be thirty minutes of day and this podcast.

00:02:01
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, what if I was like, just run it anyway, just run it anyway, really bored? So anyway, Laura and I plan ahead enough so that this kind of thing is not a true catastrophe, so we have the time to do it again and it will be even better.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, although it wouldn't be a true catastrophe anyway, because this is a podcast, which is you know, we're not saving anyone's life here.

00:02:22
Speaker 1: It would be all right.

00:02:23
Speaker 2: But yeah, we had recorded in person in Boston in late September, and the Mailbag episode that you all were treated to last week was one of the live episodes. This was going to be another because we didn't have the sound file we are now re recording, but should be great. So yeah, it's funny because, like so much work, it's like half virtual half face to face now, and sometimes there's this idea that everything is smoother when it's done face to face, and I think for us that is not actually the case because our processes were developed virtually. Obviously, it's so much fun to be face to face for other things, like I think we brainstorm better face to face.

00:03:02
Speaker 3: Definitely, We're able to come up with like idealists, much quicker when we're in the same room, and kind of more relaxed and away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life as well.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So, I mean sort of segueing into the topic of childcare and how much kids are with their various forms of childcare for us to be in Boston together when we were recording. This required some reasonable logistics on both of our part. In my case, it coincided with some days that our nanny had requested off a couple months before to so we had backup care that my husband was then also dealing with because we have a lot of activities that people have to drive to, so he didn't have to do anything between nine and six thirty. But on the other hand, a lot of our lives happened outside of nine to six thirty. So getting kids to the school in the morning we have to do a different process when there's only one driver.

00:03:59
Speaker 1: The evening activities we.

00:04:01
Speaker 2: Have to shuttle around what people could do based on only having one driver. I got to say, Sam was not too sad about missing one particular one, but that's okay, Maybe that's something to keep in mind for the future. But he has to do something physical. We all have to do some sort of support or athletic activity. But yeah, so it was a lot of logistics to get there. I mean, I think yours were a little bit. Well, partly I was gone for longer because I had business before this trip somewhere else. That I had to do, but you had some logistics not quite as many I think that you had to deal with ahead of it.

00:04:30
Speaker 3: For me, the biggest thing is I can't add something like this to the calendar with like a month of I mean I could, but it would be very difficult just because the way our clinic schedules are designed, and so I think we planned this way back, like in the spring or even before that, as I was kind of crafting the twenty twenty three schedule and asking for my various days off, so that really needed to be blocked out in advance. Our nanny generally is open to working later because she starts later most days, so that's not too much of an issue. But then my husband then needs to drive the kids to school, which he usually only does like once a week, so I kind of had to give him a heads up about that. And then there was one like slightly complicated driving issue where a dance class was starting at the same time soccer ended, and it was at a time that I didn't think Josh would be done with surgeries. So I actually went ahead and proactively contacted a mom from the soccer team to see if she could drive Cameron home if no one was able to make it. So I did try to kind of make the runway fairly clear. And the truth is I do travel solo more than he does, so I want to make it not be too stressful for him.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got to say, I mean, I'll be real with people here. I was a little frustrated that I created this entire, like two page document of where everyone needed to be at various points.

00:05:54
Speaker 1: I'm like, what, this doesn't really.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: Feel fair that I need to create this because I can tell you my husband traveled the week before where I was gone, and then he traveled the week after I was gone, and there were no multipage documents explaining where everyone needed to be at various points.

00:06:07
Speaker 1: It's just like, you.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: Know, so this is something we are working on because I don't like to be in a situation where it feels like it's the bar for me to go is a lot higher. I mean, especially since I do have to go, like I'm traveling to a speech next week when we're recording this. It just like it can't work like that. So that's you know, sometimes we wind up taking on a bit more of the logistics than we probably should.

00:06:30
Speaker 3: And that document definitely prevented you from getting texts and questions while you were gone, right.

00:06:38
Speaker 1: If only Sarah. No, it was not too bad.

00:06:41
Speaker 2: There were not that many questions and texts, and that's partly because it was so spelled out. There were copies printed up, so the older children had access to them as well, so there were multiple people to consult and to remind everyone of who needed to be where when, so there weren't as many texts as there may have been in the past. I have gotten texts like from children being like, come pick me up at school, and it's I'm like, hello, kid, I'm in California.

00:07:10
Speaker 1: But did you miss that?

00:07:12
Speaker 2: I don't know if I know, we're all in our own little world, but no, I cannot come pick you up at school at three o'clock.

00:07:18
Speaker 3: So I decided to do a little deep dive into how much I was traveling this year lest any thoughts of I don't know, guilt or whatever come up, which they really didn't actually, but I just kind of thought it would be useful to quantify, and so I came up with about sixteen or seventeen days of solo travel, which was from two podcasts recording trips. One work conference, best laid plans live, so all of those are work related. And then one three or four day trip to see my college friends, so one totally recreational trip, and then three trips usually with just Josh, so I think they're going to only amount to like seven or eight days because they're all really short. And then one trip with just Annabelle that I took earlier in the year, So I think the total was about four point six percent of the days traveling by myself, and then an additional two point one percent traveling with my husband. So I mean, yes, that sounds like a lot when I listed out, but those are not super high percentages, and so really thinking about that, the value for me of having them on the calendar was huge, and the loss and value of my family for losing me for that four percent or six percent time, I think is fairly negligible. So that made me feel good.

00:08:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we see this sometimes with people share their schedules with me. Who do have, you know, reasonably intense work schedules, But still when you look at it, it's not as many nights away from home as you might imagine. You know, somebody who has gone like Monday to Thursday one week, and then like Wednesday to Thursday the third week of the month. I mean they could be gone four or five nights a month, but if you like five nights times twelve, so sixty nights, like you're still home more than three hundred of them nights of the year. Right, Like we said, I'm home three hundred nights a year. I say, wow, that sounds pretty good, right. You know, it's just when you take it in the broader context, it's often less than people think it is, even if it appears very heavy at the moment. But anyway, this leads us into our listener question that sparked this episode on what we're calling the math of childcare hours, because we did not actually want to call this episode is daycare raising your kid, which would have gotten a lot more clicks, but we do not wish to do that, so anyway, listener says, longtime listener of best laid plans and best of both worlds here, thank you for your.

00:09:36
Speaker 1: Work on these.

00:09:38
Speaker 2: She says, I am optimizing my time management and wanted to test my high thought pothesis that I spend a lot of time with my kids, who one is two and a half one is five months old. She thinks that she needs additional childcare for a couple things she wants to do. So, she says, she put her Laura vandercamp hat on and tracked her time. She found that the five month old spends thirty hours a week awake at his day care or her daycare I don't know the gender here versus twenty five hours and thirty minutes awake at home. And the two and a half year old spends thirty six hours per week awake at daycare versus twenty nine awake at home. The initial hypothesis, thus that the kids had more waking hours at home with her was incorrect. She said they spend more waking hours at daycare than at home. So cue the mom guilt, and she says, questions for you guys, have you ever tracked this for your kids? And do you mind sharing the results? Second, is it bad that the kids spend more waking hours at daycare? As her partner dramatically asked, are the caregivers at daycare are kiddo's true family? Which, by the way, sir, not a very helpful question to ask. Just a little bit of advice here for you know, I'm not a marriage counselor, but that was not a good one. Next one, Am I a bad mom for wanting to set up additional childcare around daycare to decrease my childcare load, which would use my time with them further?

00:11:01
Speaker 1: For the purposes of this episode.

00:11:02
Speaker 2: We're viewing this as like she's asking, can she get a sitter for two or three hours on Tuesday night after daycare so she can join a pickleball league? All right, that's the example we're gonna use, just so when we keep talking about it, we were using the same thing. And then does quality time equal quantity time? Am I overthinking this?

00:11:20
Speaker 1: What do we think? So, Sarah?

00:11:23
Speaker 2: Why don't we take a stab at the beginning that the actual math of kids being awake at daycare versus awake at home.

00:11:30
Speaker 3: Yeah. I've never actually tracked this because we all know how excellent I am at quantifying time. However, I can assuredly say that there have been periods of my life where my children spent more awake hours, either at daycare or with our nanny than with me. I think one example where it was pretty clear was when I was finishing my fellowship, certainly during clinical months I worked pretty much eight to five, and there was a Duke on campus daycare that a lot of the attendings and residents and employees used, and it opened really early, like six or six thirty something like that, and I would drop her off around probably seven, seven thirty and not get to pick her up till I was done after five. And she was really young, so she was sleeping a lot. So the age actually matters because the sleep is going to change as they get older. So without even doing any fancy math, I'm pretty confident that during that period of life, yeah, she spent more time there. I never really was bothered by it because it just felt like something that was necessary in order for life to go on, for me to meet my career goals. And she was happy and she was a baby and still bonded to me, So I never did the math.

00:12:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Jasper was in daycare for the first few years of his life, and I did look into this at one point, and part of the problem was he didn't really sleep that much, so you know, if i'd pick him up at five thirty, he could be awake till nine thirty easy. And so you know, if you couple that with the time he was a week in the morning, and then the weekend times. And then here is the key thing. This listener is calculating these hours, which by the way, are pretty close. I mean we're talking like twenty nine versus thirty five or whatever.

00:13:12
Speaker 1: It was.

00:13:13
Speaker 2: Like, you know, it's not like there, it's not like she's seeing them two hours and they're at daycare for sixty. But that's a perfect week where she's at work five days a week, which I can tell you from my own experience of sending a child to daycare. You're not there five days a week a lot of weeks, particularly during the winter as kid gets six, So all you have to do is every two weeks take one of those days off because the kid is home with a tummy bug or a slight fever or something like that, and the math has completely switched. So I would just throw that out there as something to consider in your childcare hour math. But of course, you know, the math itself is not the actual question I think they're asking here. I mean, because what we're getting at is is it bad that the kids spend more time at daycare? Or, as her partner dramatically asks, are the caregivers at daycare are kiddo's true family?

00:14:12
Speaker 3: Well, let's answer I guess my first question. Let's answer that after the break. Let's leave some suspense from that one. Are the caregivers at daycare it is true family? Yeah, we will be back with the answer after the break. Okay, we are back, Laura. What do you think?

00:14:38
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:14:39
Speaker 2: Talking childcare hours in math? So, I mean the first question for me, like, is your partner bothered by this? Like is he switching his hours at work and taking on a part time role instead because he's so concerned that the caregivers at daycare are your kiddo's true family. Has he decided, well, you know, I'm going to take every Friday off because I want to spend more time with them, Like I'm gonna you know, it looks like if I push things, I could come into work at nine point thirty instead of nine and you know, maybe there'll be some career consequences. But like, it's so important to me that the caregivers not be there with them more hours than that, so I better do that. Like is he doing that or is he just asking you questions like this? Because if he's just asking questions he's just being mean.

00:15:25
Speaker 3: But maybe he is doing that. I mean, I'll give him a little bit of credit, Like maybe in the best case scenario, he asked that question equally to both of them. But I think it's very useful to do that thought experiment that we assume and truthfully, in many cases, he was mostly asking to question her involvement in the workplace and her need for childcare rather than their need for it their need.

00:15:45
Speaker 2: And if the point is he's asking this because he wants her to cut back, then that is a very different question of him asking this because he is going to cut back, And so let's put that out there first.

00:15:57
Speaker 1: But the question, are they your true family? No, they are not.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: They are family adjacent people who are helping you raise awesome children. I think both Sarah and I have had the experience that you know, no matter how many hours our kids are spending with other people, which again, like we're talking the twenty nine verse thirty five here, are not very different. Adding in the sick days, it's probably more with you. You still wind up being the kid's favorite, and sometimes this can be suffocating when it feels like nobody else can put your child to bed except you because you are their absolute favorite. Nobody else can take the kids to the bathroom, no one else can get them dressed, because it's got to be you. But it often is the case. So no, someone else is not raising your kids, they are helping you do it well.

00:16:46
Speaker 3: And it's interesting because this is referring to daycare and yet like what about school. I guess we get that in a later point, but there doesn't seem to be a huge difference. In a daycare. You have a group of people helping your child, They're probably doing different activity. The caregivers may switch out, so there's probably not even going to necessarily be the opportunity for a very long term relationship to form. I mean, maybe they'll have the same teacher for a couple of years, but it's not going to be forever. If you do, you might argue, well, what about a Nanny's that going to be like a parental replacement? And I will just say, in my experience, that has not been anything that has. It just hasn't happened. It hasn't come close to happening. Ur nanny does have some special relationships with at least some of my kids, but that feels additional like an extra in their life rather than any kind of subtraction from their relationship they have with me or Josh. And honestly, I don't think I can even think of a time they've expressed a preference to spend time versus with her versus me. They always want me to drive them if I'm there, or like I don't know, help with homework or whatever it is. And sometimes that can be a struggle if it's during work hours and I'm trying to get something done. But kids are not going to be shy about their preferences.

00:17:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, that school point is good, and I think we should raise that because I mean, there's not a whole lot of difference between a four year old at day care and a five year old at kindergarten.

00:18:03
Speaker 1: And yet I think only the most like.

00:18:05
Speaker 2: Militant of folks would claim that school is raising your kids. Once you send your kids to school, like that that's somehow culturally that's more of a freebie, Like, oh, yeah, of course I send my kid to kindergarten. It's not that I'm a horrible parent who doesn't want to be with my kid and that's why my kid is going to kindergarten. Even though it's like optional in a lot of states, you know, or even sending your four year old to preschool, like somehow sending your four year old to nine to three preschool is fine, but putting them an extra hour on either side in day care is, you know, a different matter.

00:18:38
Speaker 3: I don't know.

00:18:40
Speaker 2: It's just because we don't like the idea of mothers working, that these stories are out there. And I keep coming back to this, like, even very very progressive people still have that often as their backstory, that they don't think mothers of young children should be working. And so anything you can do to raise issues of it being bad or telling stories about you know, somebody else's your kids and you know, it just it's it's a fascinating thing that we have, and of course what we try to do in this podcast is pushback about that. So to answer your other question, are you a bad mother for wanting to set up additional childcare the two hours on a Tuesday night so you can go to your pickleball league? No, you are not a bad mother. Would you like to elaborate on that, Sarah.

00:19:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the Tuesday night pickleball example is pretty obvious. I guess I will say like taken to far extremes, this could be problematic or maybe just emblematic of some sort of underlying illness, either mental or physical, that was making childcare very difficult. But there's a huge difference between having an extra hour to fit in your pickleball or maybe even take an uninterrupted shower versus never seeing your three year old. And honestly, I don't think many of the male halves of male female couples are really like appreciate eating it with someone other than them, spend some time with the kid outside of there's strict work hours sometimes like they're not having this inner dilemma about all the kids with mom and I'm at the gym and so I must be a bad dad.

00:20:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's when we flip it. We sort of see that. And to give an example of this, you know, it's not a man writing in this question to us, like it's the woman writing in this question, because I don't think many men feel like a lot of men have this story though, like whatever hours I can spend with my kid is awesome and it makes me the father of the year if I do it right. And whereas for women, it's like we're subtracting from one hundred and sixty eight, and you have to pay for every hour that you subtract from that in terms of mom guilt or something like that. So, I mean, I was thinking of this when I saw a social media post the other day from a mother talking about how her husband was never home in the evening. She was lonely caring for all her kids, but she knew he was such a hard worker, And I got to say, my first thought is like, okay, Like again, you know, we in our previous version of this, we were talking, Okay, if somebody had like three jobs cobble together trying to like make ends meet, that was one thing. But we're talking professional class people here. This gentleman could find another job if he wished to. Right, he has not shackled to his job. He has skills that are transferable. There are many companies in the world, some of which allow you to see your families in the evening. Right, So it's like, if he wanted to be home, if he was feeling that level of social guilt that women are given, if they were gone every evening, he would be trying to find a different job. The fact that he isn't is because he assumes it's not his problem, right. It's like, oh, well, that's for my wife to take care of, right, Like, And I get to be looked at as a hard worker because my wife is taking care of the kids every evening while I'm out working doing whatever it is I'm doing. And you know, if I happen to get out of all the messiness of actually raising my children, then I guess that's a bonus. So I don't know, I was personally very repulsed by this idea.

00:22:04
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's super super useful to envision opening up your TikTok and seeing a man holding a toddler up in the air saying, I'm so lonely and mom hasn't been home for the last three weeks, but it's okay because she is such a hard worker. And see, if there are certain feelings of judgment maybe that watch over you that aren't in place when you watch them, well maybe Laura had them when she watched the initial video, but most.

00:22:30
Speaker 1: People don't, which is why they didn't. That was the funny thing.

00:22:32
Speaker 2: And she assumed that her followers would not have that, right, That's why she did it.

00:22:36
Speaker 1: That's why she posted it.

00:22:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, why she posted it as opposed to everyone thinking her husband's a total jerk, right, Like, I mean, that's that's why she posted.

00:22:43
Speaker 3: It, right exactly. So it's fascinating that we're probably very unlikely to see the opposite gender example and to ask ourselves why and you're write it all comes down to the idea that mom outside of the home, bad, dad outside of the home, hero him spending some time with kids. Amazing extra bonus. Yeah, and I'm not talking, you know, my husband's going to listen to say, Hey, I'm not talking personally here, I'm talking in general.

00:23:10
Speaker 1: In general.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so interestingly where this then you get like a little freebie a bye from some of the guilt is if you have close family living nearby to you. Now I find this this is another fascinating cultural story here, because let's say your sister lives next door and you guys swap childhoir or whatever your mother is around or your mother in law and comes and watches the kid. Like if your mother in law came over to watch the kids every Tuesday night so you could go play in the pickleball league, most people would not be like, oh gosh, terrible mother, mom guilt. You should feel bad about that. Somehow It's like when it's family care, it's a freebie. And so it's like the class of humanity that has that gets this bye from this story of mom guilt. Whereas if you don't have family nearby who are either not nearby or if they are nearby, they're not available to do this, and you have to pay for the care, then somehow that's the problem, you know, that's it's just an interesting it's super interesting.

00:24:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, And there's some cultures where it's essentially the norm, and living in South Florida, it's really common among various like Latin communities or Cuban families where I almost feel like I'm looked down upon because like I have to pay people to help me out, not in a negative way, but more of them like, ah, poor you, you have to have a nanny. I'm so lucky my parents help me. As if that's like that's the ideal, that's better.

00:24:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So it's just an interesting thing like this. Now, obviously, if this couple, you know, if she does need some extra leisure time, the most straightforward way to do this without paying for child care, if she doesn't wish to pay for more childcare, is for her and her partner to trade off. So anyone who's read Tranquility by Tuesday knows that one of my rules is to take one night for you and to go do something like play in the pickleball league. And if your partner also has something I don't know, he's in the pickleball league, or he or she sings an a choir or whatever it is, that you can trade off. So your partner goes to play in their band on Thursday night, you go play in the pickleball league on Tuesday night. You trade off for each other. Each of you gets one night off, and that can be a great way for people to really feel like they have something in their life that is not work, that is not caring for family members. It is uniquely for them. And you know, it feels like you're kind of part of a team, like you're both covering for each other.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: So you get that.

00:25:35
Speaker 2: So a lot of people have experienced that as a very positive thing. So that's something this listener could suggest to her partner, being like, listen, I need a little bit more leisure time. You are asking not nice questions about childcare. Being our kiddo's main family. If we need to solve these two problems together, here is what I would propose and see if that goes on. Well, But obviously if that can't work for whatever reason, I don't know, maybe her partner is a guy who's gone every night or then yeah, if you're hiring a sitter for Tuesday night because your partner cannot cover it, then you are not outsourcing you. You are outsourcing what should be your partner's responsibility to trade off for each other.

00:26:16
Speaker 3: Why do I feel like this listener is not going to be playing this episode for their partner.

00:26:22
Speaker 2: What I mean, do you you could just listen in to it yourself that we're giving you permission here to go play at your pickleballia on Tuesday night, Like it's totally fine. It's totally fine, even if your kids are in daycare. That is, you are allowed to have your own life, and we encourage you to have your own life. Because this is another story, Sarah. I mean you go on about this occasionally that you know why the trade off of mom happiness versus kid happiness is describe the way it is.

00:26:48
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I mean I can save that soapbox for later, but whatever I'll bring, i'll more go in to. No. So sometimes I feel like how moms live their lives, it's only acceptable for them to make choices based on what is the optimal happiness level for their kids on a moment to moment basis, and zero value placed on what actually mom wants to do or what would make the mom happy. So like people will send their kids to quote preschool because the preschool has enrichment activities that are making the kids smarter and are better for the kids, But you shouldn't send them to daycare because that's for you to like do what you want or something like that. And so I think at some point our society did forget that moms are also people and they get to enjoy things, and they have every right to do things that are mostly for them sometimes. Obviously it's a balance. I'm not advocating like go to the spot every day and like do nothing for anyone ever, but also the complete opposite of that isn't really helpful either. And if you need me to get all circular and still bring it back to the kids, a mom who is entirely burned out and depressed because they never get any time to themselves, probably isn't going to be the best mom. But at the same time, I hate that argument because again that's only value does about kids.

00:28:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: One other thing, because we started this with the discussion of the math and how many hours you are with your kid versus the kid being in other childcare, and again encourage you to look at this over a longer term horizon, like and you're taking into account the sick days you cover with daycare, the holidays, the vacations, everything like that. But this is one of the interesting things with time day studies that it was first fascinated by when I started writing one hundred and sixty eight Hours Low these many years ago, is that the difference between the amount of time that stay at home mothers of small kids we're talking under six years old and working mothers of children under age six, the difference in the amount of child care hours they spend per week is not as many as you think, like, it's not forty hours a week, right, And so I was looking into that, like, well, why is that right? Why is it not forty hours a week? And there's couple reasons. I mean, first most mothers don't actually work that much. There's obviously a lot of people in part time roles, but even people in full time rules, often time diaries are somewhere in the thirties. And partly that's because of the nature of sick days and holidays and other things that come into life that you then wind up covering that make it actually often really challenging to log a full forty hours at your workplace. So anyway, it's under forty hours for many people even in full time roles. Second, kids just aren't as available to spend time with as we might think they are. You know, obviously there's the issue of them napping when they're really little. But then even in these days, a lot of three and four year olds are at least in part time care even if their parents are not in the workforce. I mean, that's just something that's seen as acceptable, and that's you know, in many cases great like I think, you know, kids have a lot to learn before they are five or six years old, so they're not as available with that. There's the reality of family care, right like, in many cases people who are home with their kids may also have times they are trading off with other parents and other caregivers and other family members just because of you know, obviously, being alone with your kids all day, every day can get very challenging, and if you have other things you need to do in your life, for instance, the kid winds up with grandma for a day while you go do something else, whether that's leisure or whether it's going to visit your mother in law in the hospital. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons people need their children to be in someone else's care for some amount of time, even if they are not in the workforce and having full time care. But anyway, between all of these things that naps the activities that the preschool shared care with other people, there just aren't as many hours available for people to be with their mothers then you might assume. And that's why the differences are not forty hours a week. And obviously as kids get older than the window of time like narrow is even more.

00:30:57
Speaker 3: And I will say the window of time the kids spend with other caregivers narrows like crazy as they get older. Because you know, when my kids were babies, they spend hours and hours of time with our nanny. I usually had them in some kind of quote preschool program, because I just felt like it was kind of good for them, and in my case, it was in addition to having the nanny, so there was me looking for their kind of social act, something to do. Basically. Anyway, back then, back in twenty fourteen, hours and hours of time were spent with our nanny. And now, I mean there are days when it's reduced to a mere sliver because I often dropped them off at school. They're not even done with school until close to four o'clock, and then they might be home for like forty minutes, most of which is consisting of like taking a shower and putting on their dance outfit, and then they go to dance, and then I pick them up from dance at like six or six thirty. So I mean, that's just an example of a random day. But what used to be a very long, unstructured swath of time is reduced to very very little. So things also change. So much of the parenting discussions are based on what people do with babies and toddlers because I think it's I guess maybe more standardized or people are really excited to look for resources in that age group. But my kids are still kids, and we still have outside caregivers, but it just looks very different from a math perspective.

00:32:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I think, is that our question? Sarah?

00:32:24
Speaker 2: I forgot did we do we have another question in this episode? Or we did disappear to have another question?

00:32:30
Speaker 3: And thankfully I did leave my love of the week on this page because I wasn't remembering what I had said the last time we recorded it.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess my love of the week would be a portable charger. I don't remember what I said in the first recording, but we'll go with the portable charger because I have an old car and it like does not work for charging anything. Like you know, it was not a thing that you would be charging your iPhone in the car constantly, and so I couldn't even get the like plug into the cigarette lighter thing to work anymore. So I had to buy a portable charger.

00:33:03
Speaker 1: But it worked quite well.

00:33:04
Speaker 2: You know.

00:33:05
Speaker 1: I charged it up.

00:33:06
Speaker 2: Before I drove to Portland, Maine in the first part of my week in which I met Sarah, and it took me, you know, nine hours on the road to get there for a variety of reasons between being behind an accident on the tappan Zee Bridge, and then my stops here and there to get lunch, go to the bathroom, get gas, whatever else. And so I needed something to charge my phone, especially since I had the map thing going for a while. And this worked well, you know, I ran it down to you know, forty percent on the regular charge, then I charged it in and it was charging the whole rest of the time. I mean, I got to Portland with pretty much a full charge on my phone, which was good because I was slightly worried about that being a problem and something that could go wrong in taking a long road trip by myself.

00:33:50
Speaker 3: Yay, and your road trip went pretty smoothly, except for maybe a rainstorm on the way home.

00:33:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's true. I'm driving home. There was a pretty gigantic rainstorm. Was I slid a little bit on the Jersey Turnpike and I was next to a truck and that was not fun. So I actually took a little break after that and went to one of the turnpike rest stops for a while and hung out in the car, answered some texts, and eventually got back on the road. That's always smart.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: Well, my love of the week is just short getaways where I get to see friends and escape Florida weather. I love building, as you heard in the beginning of this episode, like a few of those into the year, I feel like they benefit me so much from a mental health perspective. I always come back refreshed, I always get so many great ideas, and this one had a huge benefit because not only did I get to hang out with Laura, but I get to hang out with one of my college BFFs as well for like half a day, and we all had dinner together, which was amazing. So yeah, that is my love of the week.

00:34:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, world's colliding exactly. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking about the math of childcare hours and whether you should feel guilty about hiring a setter so you can go to your pick ball league on Tuesday, with the general takeaway being that no, unless you are the rare parent listening to this who truly never sees their children, you are probably doing all right. And for this listener who was writing in about it, like the fact that she cares enough to be concerned about it, I think suggests she's probably doing pretty well. So anyway, this has been best of both worlds. We'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:35:26
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can.

00:35:34
Speaker 2: Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.