There are times in parenting where you just feel kind of useless.
You can’t carry the baby, take a late-night breastfeeding shift, or absorb any of the pain and discomfort of childbirth.
Sometimes the best you can do is to try to take care of your partner.
That’s what brought user u/DietyBeta to the AskParents subreddit with a well-meaning question.
“My wife watches our 1yo, works, and is 12 week pregnant. How can I make her daily life easier while I’m away at work?”
He says that when he gets home from work, he takes over all parenting and homemaking duties.
But yeesh! That’s still… a lot to handle. No wonder his wife is stressed out.
A few folks chimed in to pat the OP on the back. After all, it’s great to see a dad who realizes how much is falling on mom’s shoulders and actively looking for ways to lighten the load!
Some helpful suggestions rolled in, like taking over meal prep and making her easy lunches to heat up, hiring cleaners, or paying someone to walk the dogs.
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
But then even more people came in to the comments asking the same question over and over: If mom is working, why isn’t the 1-year-old in daycare?
u/young-mommy wrote: “Is the one year old in daycare? If not, I would start there. Working from home with a child gets harder and harder as they enter toddlerhood”
u/min2themax said: “It’s nice of you to be asking how to help her but she really is getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop here. It sounds like she is literally always working or parenting. Sometimes both at the same time. Walking the dogs and making her lunches and prepping meals and doing laundry is all well and good but this is not at all sustainable.”
u/alternative-box3260 said: “Have the one year old in daycare. I was in a similar situation and it’s impossible. I was able to breath after that, not before.”
And u/sillychihuahua26 wrote: “She’s caring for your 1.year old while working? That’s a horrible plan. You guys need childcare like yesterday.”
We have a legitimate childcare crisis in our country, and stories like this one really bring it to life.
Childcare in the United States isn’t nearly accessible or affordable enough for most families. Period.
ChildCare Aware found that that average cost of childcare in 2022 was $10,853 per year, or roughly 10% of a median family income (in 2024, it’s likely even more than that — yet the actual workers at childcare centers are somehow severely underpaid).
But even that eye-popping number is conservative. Anyone who lives anywhere close to a city (or in California or New York) knows the number will be way higher. It’s just not feasible for most families to put their child, let alone multiple children, in full-time care while they’re young.
And yet! The percentage of households with two parents working full-time has been rising for decades. Life is more expensive than ever, and the extra income from two working parents really helps, even if it’s offset by those child care costs.
More and more families are trying to scrape by — by trying to do it all
Photo by Keren Fedida on Unsplash
Now we don’t know whether the OP’s family can afford childcare for their 1-year-old or not, although in a later update to the post he wrote:
“As far as daycare, she doesn’t want to because she feels like she would be missing out on the time”
So even if you can afford childcare, there’s the still the crushing guilt of shipping your child off to be raised by strangers to deal with! Classic.
(Take one guess who shoulders most of the daycare guilt — dads or moms?)
The work-from-home revolution has been a Godsend for parents in certain ways — flexibility, balance, less commuting time — but its also saddled many of them with double duty.
‘Hey how about you work full-time because we need the money AND keep an eye on the kids, since you’re home anyway!’
But it doesn’t work like that, and trying to do both is crushing modern parents.
In fact, the Surgeon General of the United States just put out an official advisory based on the plummeting mental state of today’s parents.
We know parents are having a hard time and that it’s getting picked up in the national conversation. But hearing about a mom working full-time with a 1-year-old on her hip while pregnant, and a dad stuck working out of the house who’s at a total loss for how to make things better really paints a pretty bleak picture.
No one should have to work full-time and parent full-time, at the same time.
A fridge full of microwavable lunches and a fleet of dog walkers isn’t going to make it any better until things start changing from the very top.