Last year my older son fell off the monkey bars at aftercare and broke his arm. Not a hairline thing. It was twisted. They were calling an ambulance when they called me.
I closed my laptop in the middle of a meeting and got in the car. My husband did the same from a different room in the house. We were both standing next to him in five minutes.
He's fine. I think about those five minutes a lot.
A couple of weeks ago we were in a car accident with both kids in the back. Nobody went to the hospital, the car didn't make it, and I've been skittish ever since. I'm holding them a little closer. I'm aware, in a way I wasn't before, that I'm five minutes from their school all day. If something happens, I can be there. That's the thing I'm most grateful for right now, and it's what I want to write about, because it's being taken away from a lot of people.
Six days ago I posted that I'd been up at night doing the math on how a family in 2026 balances work and kids, and I couldn't make it add up. Over 100 people answered. I'm writing this on a Sunday afternoon while my younger son asks for Spirit music videos on YouTube and my older son wants ChatGPT to make him a picture with a thousand animals in it. Both on my phone. I don't want either of them on a screen right now. So, no. I'm not writing this from a place of having it figured out.
What I actually meant
Reading the post back, "it doesn't add up" wasn't quite right. It adds up. Barely, and only because of one thing.
Here's our day. Both of us work from home. We pick the kids up at 5, they're home by 5:30, and if there's daylight left and nobody has to work late we get maybe an hour outside. Then dinner, then bedtime, which runs late because they like to go to bed late and they want me to sit with them. On my best behavior I'm up at 5:30 and working out by 6. On a normal day I'm up at 7 and the whole morning is getting them out the door by 8. No weekday activities. Soccer on Saturdays. That's it. I still can't find the time to do homework with my 6-year-old, and that bugs me.
And I want to say this clearly, because the comments went there fast: I want to work. I've always wanted to work. I like having a career, it's interesting to me, and I'm independent in a way that would make staying home a bad fit for everyone in this house. This isn't a post about whether I should.
The reason the day works at all is that nobody commutes. If you take that away, I don't know where we'd be. I've thought about it a lot and I don't have an answer.
My parents could do it on one income
My mom was home when I was little. That wasn't unusual. In 1975, the most common arrangement in a two-parent house with kids was dad working full time and mom not employed. That was 42% of families. Today it's 23%. Both parents working full time went from 31% to 52%.
So the generation ahead of us had an option most of us don't. I'm not saying they didn't struggle. The Gen X parents in my comments were very clear that they did, and they're right that at some point you just do it. But a lot of them did it with one of two things my generation mostly can't get: a second parent at home, or a house they could afford near the job.
The house part is the one people skip over. Harvard's housing center puts the ratio of home prices to household income at 5.6 as of 2022, the highest on record going back to the early 1970s. Under 3 used to be normal for most of the country. In 2000, two-thirds of the 100 biggest metros had home prices under 3 times income. By 2022, only one of the 100 did. Syracuse. Between 2019 and 2022, home prices rose 43% and incomes rose 7%. We bought in the middle of that, bidding over asking like everyone else, and we got in. A lot of people a few years behind us didn't.
Then childcare. The national average price is $13,184 a year, and center-based care for two kids costs more than median rent in every state with data. You pay for it whether you're remote or not. With a commute you pay for more hours of it.
I wrote a whole piece in August on what happened to the marketing job market. In 2022 a remote marketing director had about 1,200 open roles with around 290 applicants each. Today it's 389 roles with about 1,100 applicants each. It's all in here: Gaslit by the Jobs Report. The two numbers from it that matter for this conversation: remote roles went from 27% of listings in 2022 to about 9% now, and 46% of all applications are chasing that 9%. Over 400,000 women left the workforce in the first half of 2025, the steepest exit for mothers of young children in four decades. Those two numbers are the same story.
So that's the floor. One income was the default, then it wasn't. Houses cost twice what they did relative to what we make. Childcare costs more than rent. And the one thing that made two careers plus two kids an hour from a city survivable showed up in 2020 and is being taken back.
What 100 people said
I asked how everyone is fitting it in, and then I totally got lost and couldn't keep up with the conversation. I'm glad so many conversations came out of it, which is why I'm writing about it in this much detail. Nobody said balance. A few people said there's no such thing, only choices.
The most-liked comment on the post was from Mel Goodman, a former sales leader at Salesforce who now works with moms in leadership: "We're the first generation doing this with both parents working full time, devices on us at all times, and less family nearby to help. Our parents' model doesn't fit, and there isn't a new one yet." There's no model. Everyone's improvising.
Six themes came out of the comments on how people are improvising, and what it actually looks like.
⏰ Staggered shifts. One parent works 6 to 2:30, the other 9 to 5, and each of them solo parents half the day. Several people run this exact schedule, down to the minute. It works. It also means the two adults in the house barely see each other awake.
🌙 The third shift. You log back on after bedtime. More than one person said it's the only way they've made it work. I can't. By 8:30 I'm done.
👵 The village. Family nearby, or help that comes to you. One person's in-laws rent the apartment downstairs and pinch-hit. Another's mother-in-law meets the bus twice a week. One mom of four has the piano teacher come to the house so nobody has to drive. Almost everyone with family close by used the word lucky.
🏠 One parent out. Three dads described sitting down with the daycare numbers and deciding one income with a parent home was the better deal. One of them has been doing it for 18 years. It's the 1975 model, chosen on purpose, because the alternative was paying more to work.
💼 Fractional. This was the biggest group, and it's the one I keep thinking about. At least eight people said some version of "I went freelance because it was the only way to pick up my kids." Writers, content leads, a CPA. Marielys Rosado, a tax attorney in Miami with two kids born in 2020 and 2021, left her firm after her billable hours got compared to people without kids. She asked an interesting question: "People tell me I am so brave for going on my own. Am I? Or was I pushed towards the only realistic alternative if I wanted to stay in the workforce?"
💻 Remote. The default, for most of the people whose day works at all. Katia Toumayan said it plainly: you have to have one parent working from home or not working at all. From what I can see, she's right.
The commute I already did
I know what the other version looks like because I lived it, before kids. Two years commuting from Stamford into the city. Three hours a day on Metro North, wedged between two strangers. I hated it. It was such a waste of life. I took a job at CVS in Rhode Island partly so I'd never do it again. My commute there was 20 minutes. Then 2020 happened. Everything changed for the world, and for me, because my first son was born that April. I have never once been a working mother with a commute. I'm not saying that as a flex. I'm saying I have no idea how to do it.
When we moved to Connecticut in 2021 we did it because I was remote, my husband was remote, the town had great schools, and we'd be near family. There was a local office I could get to if things changed. I don't know what I'd have done differently. We could have moved closer to New York, but it was more expensive and still a ridiculous commute. On a map we're not that far from the city. In rush hour it's two and a half to three hours each way, and Boston isn't any better. There wasn't a better answer. There still isn't.
The last two times I looked for work, maybe 5% of the marketing roles I found were within a reasonable drive. So I ran a poll for marketers who live more than an hour from a major metro. 72 people voted. 69% are fully remote. 11% are super commuting. 12% found something hybrid close to home. 6% switched fields or are still looking.
It's not a scientific poll. It's skewed by who follows me and who cared enough to vote. But it's something, and here's what I see in it. Seven in ten of us only have a marketing career right now because remote exists, and that's the group most exposed to listings going from 27% remote to 9%. The 11% super commuting is small, and it's the group I was about to join. The 12% who found something hybrid close to home is the thing everyone tells you to go get, and it's one in eight. Add the people who left the field or are still looking, and more than 80% of us either don't commute at all, spend hours a day doing it, or aren't in marketing anymore. Local isn't the answer for most of us. It doesn't exist.
The part I got wrong
In the original post I said that if I had to go into an office in New York or Boston a couple of days a week, my husband would basically be a single father on those days. A CMO named Jamie Kohn pushed back, and she was right to. Being alone with your kids for a stretch while your spouse is at work isn't the same as being a single parent. The single parents in the thread said the same thing in fewer words. One wrote that remote is the only reason she survives at all, and by survive she meant constantly rushing, missing things, and falling into bed exhausted. Another said employers in Seattle want her back in the office most of the week. Another said self-employment was the only way.
What I meant was that my husband would be doing it alone a lot more than either of us ever intended. What they're describing is the version with no second adult and no option. If two remote parents can barely make the day add up, one parent with a commute is the clearest proof that none of this was designed for how we live now.
Where I actually am
Tired. I'm really tired all the time, and I'm not going to dress that up.
Also: this is what I wanted. I have more time with my kids than I ever expected to have alongside a career, because I always assumed the career came with an office and a commute. I live in the suburbs instead of a city I love. If I didn't have kids I'd be in New York. My life has a lot more meaning than it did then. Both of those are true at the same time and I've stopped trying to make them resolve.
The clutch is remote work. It's the thing that lets a family like mine have two careers and two kids an hour from a city, in a housing market that priced us out of anything closer and a childcare market that charges rent. It showed up because of a pandemic, and it's going away because a lot of companies decided they'd rather have people in the building. I'm thankful for it every day, more since the accident, and I'd like to keep it.
If you're doing a version of this with a commute on top: you're not crazy. It's a lot. And if you've found the model Mel says doesn't exist yet, I want to hear it.