Annie Tsai

The first full week of summer for my kids this year revealed just how fragile our schedule – and really, the whole precarious choreography of modern parenting – actually is. And I’m tired. 

Before I go on, I want to first acknowledge a few things. I do work that I love and feels meaningful. My partner is employed, engaged, a wonderful father, and supportive in ways that matter every single day. These things alone put me in an echelon of #lifegoals that I fully understand many aren’t afforded. 

But that’s also what makes this so striking. Even with all of that, the structure of parenting in today’s society feels like it’s constantly threatening to collapse under its own weight. 

The conundrum of modern parenting is this: regardless of your baseline, privilege, or precarity, modern parenting is incredibly hard in very similar ways. The hallmarks include an unrelenting mental load, working hours that don’t align with school, camp, or childcare schedules, and a cultural expectation to be simultaneously available, informed, emotionally present, and oftentimes family cruise director.

And summer. Well, summer amplifies all of it. 

Camps that run from 8:15 am to 12:10 pm or 9 am to 2 pm? Who exactly are those for? Not full-time working parents. Not even part-time working ones, really. The number of shared spreadsheets I’ve seen just to coordinate childcare, camp drop-offs, enrichment activities, and coverage is something straight out of a Fortune 100 logistics war room. Except this is your life. And the return is mainly whether or not your child’s week resembles the right mix of meaning and boredom-induced creativity and not screen-induced chaos. 

Most of the planning and coordination typically falls to one parent in the family, the “COO of Family Operations.” The spreadsheet champion, finder of backup babysitters, coordinator of play dates and social calendars because your kids aren’t old enough to have access to a device to text and hardly anyone has a landline anymore. The one with the invisible to-do list running silently in the background 24/7. 

It didn’t used to be this way. Or at least, not this specific version of “this way.” The second half of the 20th century gave rise to the social acceptance and possibility of dual-income families, leading to more financially thriving family units and a generation of latchkey kids who roamed the streets and had no access to the internet because it didn’t exist yet. But now, in the first half of the 21st century, the institutionalization of dual-income (and often multi-income) households as a requirement to survive is firmly cemented in the ethos of modern parenting. The problem is that none of the systems that make thriving possible have been institutionalized along with it.

School schedules still reflect an era of single-income families and stay-at-home parents. Quality childcare remains prohibitively expensive. Parental leave is limited, if available at all. Summer programs assume a parent or trusted guardian is floating nearby with a flexible schedule and an open wallet. None of the scaffolding was redesigned for a world in which both parents are working full-time and often still can’t afford to live within a reasonable commute to work.

There’s also the myth of flexibility. Yes, some work remotely or have hybrid schedules. But “remote” doesn’t mean “available to be childcare.” You can’t be mentally present for your job and physically present for your child and emotionally present for yourself at the same time. Something always gives. Usually that’s sleep. Sometimes, it’s sanity.

We like to say parenting is a full-time job, but let’s be honest. Modern parenting is full-time plus with the reward of raising people who are hopefully prepared to navigate an increasingly complex, uncertain world where more than half of the jobs that exist today won’t exist by the time they graduate college, and nobody knows what the new ones will look like. Moore’s Law has accelerated not just our technology, it’s collapsed the half-life of parenting strategies. 

And instead of support from those who have navigated these waters before with their own era-appropriate struggles, we simply hear, “This is what you signed up for.” To be honest, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I signed up to love my kids and help them grow into good people. I did not sign up to explain active shooter drills in kindergarten or to be on call year-round as family cruise director while working full-time.

The fragility of modern parenting that so jarringly exploded for me last week is not a singular event. It’s part of an ongoing, accelerating unraveling of a system that hasn’t evolved with the times. But fragility isn’t failure, it’s a signal. Maybe, if enough of us do this important work out loud instead of silently, we can move beyond acknowledging the brokenness and toward the messy but necessary work of continuously evolving to something better, together.