I Would Still Work Full-Time
A confession about care, labor, and why the math doesn’t work
I want to say something that feels almost taboo to admit as a mother: I would still work forty hours a week.
I love my kids deeply. I enjoy being with them. I care about their emotional lives, their safety, their development, and their sense of being wanted in the world. None of that is in question.
And also: if I were paid a wage that could reliably cover childcare, and if I could spend my working hours doing work that used the skills I’ve spent decades developing, I would not hesitate to put them in after-school care, classes, camps, or with trusted help.
Not because I want less time with them — but because I want a life that isn’t organized entirely around scarcity.
This feels dangerous to say out loud, because motherhood in America is framed as a moral performance. You are either devoted or deficient; present or failing; exhausted but grateful; grateful but quiet.
But the truth is simpler and harder: the reason I am not working more hours right now is not laziness, lack of ambition, or lack of commitment. It’s math.
The Childcare Equation No One Wants to Acknowledge
Right now, the cost of a babysitter is about eight dollars an hour more than my hourly wage — not my take-home pay, my gross wage. That means that every hour I work while my kids are sick, or school is out, or childcare falls through, I lose money. Real money. Money my family needs for food, rent, and stability.
My coworkers know this. They know that when my kids are sick, it’s not “worth it” for me to come in. They know I’m not choosing to be unreliable. I’m responding rationally to a system that penalizes caregivers for participating at all.
So I do the only thing that makes sense: I save my labor hours for the domestic work at home while my kids are young. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to work. It means the system has decided my work isn’t worth accommodating.
I Like Work. That’s the Part That Surprises People.
Another thing we’re not supposed to admit: some of us actually enjoy working. I like being useful. I like contributing to something larger than my household. I like solving problems, thinking strategically, helping teams function better, and translating complexity into action.
If there were a job that paid a living wage, accommodated caregiving realities, and made use of my higher-order skills, I would take it in a heartbeat. Those jobs either don’t seem to exist anymore — or I am no longer competitive for them. That’s a hard thing to reckon with after being told, for decades, that if you just got the degree, just built the skills, just worked hard enough, there would be a place for you.
A lot of millennials believed that. We organized our lives around it. We internalized work as identity, worth, and proof of responsibility. And now we are discovering that the ladder we were climbing was never designed to support people with bodies, families, or limits.
Hours, Resentment, and the Illusion of Fairness
A friend recently told me about a team dynamic where one person works thirty-five hours a week while others routinely work fifty-five. Resentment simmers. Questions about commitment arise. But I don’t think the problem is the person working thirty-five hours.
I think the problem is a system where:
some people are over-investing because work is their main/only source of security or meaning
others are under-investing because the math of care makes deeper participation impossible
and everyone is quietly angry at each other instead of at the structure that made this inevitable
What if we could free work from dependency?
What if care were accounted for publicly, so hours weren’t a proxy for moral worth?
Then the people working fifty-five hours could do so because they want to — because they’re building something they believe in and have a real stake in — not because they’re subsidizing a broken system with their bodies, and the people working fewer hours wouldn’t be treated as freeloaders for refusing to burn out.
Care Is Work. The System Just Refuses to Pay for It.
Right now, the system depends on unpaid or underpaid care — mostly done by women — while pretending it’s a personal choice.
It isn’t.
Care is infrastructure. It’s what allows everything else to function. And when it’s not supported, it collapses back onto families, who then absorb the cost in lost income, stalled careers, and chronic exhaustion. I don’t need a lecture about sacrifice. I need a society that understands arithmetic.
What I’m Actually Asking For
I’m not asking to work less.
I’m asking for:
wages that reflect the real cost of living
childcare that makes participation possible instead of punitive
a labor market that values human limits instead of denying them
and a culture that stops confusing scarcity with virtue
If I could work full-time and know my kids were cared for without risking our financial stability, I would. If I could do work that used my skills and didn’t require pretending I don’t have a family, I would. If care weren’t treated as a private inconvenience instead of a public necessity, many more people would participate — willingly, creatively, and without resentment.
The problem is not that parents don’t want to work. The problem is that the system has decided caring for children should cost us everything — and then wonders why so many people opt out.
