Working Parents & Childcare

three weeks of split hours. i start at 7, my partner works 11 to 8, and we mostly meet in the corridor

teal_badminton_5175

it was meant to fix the evening calls, and it does. i do daycare pickup and dinner, my partner does breakfast and drop, and both of us get our cross-timezone meetings without a child climbing onto a lap. what it's doing to the two of us is another matter. by the time my partner logs off at 8 i'm putting the little one down and half asleep myself. weekends have turned into catch-up for everything. has anyone kept a staggered setup going for a year or more? did it get easier, or did you go back?

6 comments

  • breezy_spoon_4967

    Our son and daughter-in-law did this for two years when my granddaughter was small. It worked because they kept Sunday mornings for each other, whatever else happened. The rest was just tiredness, and that passed.

  • olive_marigold_7729

    we're doing a version of this with a 4 month old. my calls are unpredictable so it's less a split and more a scramble. no answers yet

    • citrus_kite_8599

      When I was on call and my children were small, a fixed split never held for long. What helped us was a written week on the fridge, even when it changed every Sunday. At least the change was on paper and not in someone's head.

    • mellow_fern_3184

      scramble is the right word. ours settled once we stopped trying to make it fair every single day and looked at the week as a whole

  • maple_chai_5354

    We tried this when our son was in primary school. Each of us got more work done and saw less of the other. After about a year we went back to overlapping hours and paid for more help instead. It cost more and we were happier. I'm not sure there's a right answer, only which cost you'd rather carry.

  • mango_badminton_4288

    From experience rather than anything I've read: what wore us down was not the split but the handover. We started a two-minute call at noon every day, only about the children. It sounds trivial, but it removed a lot of evening friction.

  • amber_spoon_412

    We did 7 to 4 and 10 to 7 for a while. Kids loved it, a different parent at each end of the day. We didn't. Lasted about 8 months.

  • rose_diary_1020

    Do the girls notice? When we tried it, our 7 year old started asking each morning which parent she'd get that evening, like a timetable.

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