As a 20-something, I worked a number of large corporate branding gigs. Unmarried, no children; I was paid for 40 hours each week while routinely working 50 to 60. Many professionals have this experience as part of their career story. It’s not unusual.
Among my older colleagues, and broadly speaking, men tended to arrive first at work and stay late, often phone-tucking their kids to bed from the office desk. Off-hour calls with women took place during their commute or from home. Pans clattered in the background, children cried, apologies were offered for the distracting chaos of non-corporate noise. The majority of my female bosses were divorced, or didn’t have children, or both. I had one female boss who really seemed to have it all: a spouse, a house, two nearly-grown children. Then she committed suicide.
Consider the Options
Childcare has been an economic and societal issue since women began joining the workforce. Putting aside couples who are both high-earning, and therefore may be able to afford in-home childcare or a nanny, one parent, of any gender, has to take on the role of primary parent. Among other things, childcare is complicated to arrange and expensive to maintain.

Let’s look at some typical options for childcare in the US.
To legally hire a nanny, a family must cover wages, healthcare, and taxes, which might be why, for many families, in-home care is not an option.
Barring “live-in” nannies, most in-home childcare workers have set schedules or set hours of the day. This is not necessarily 24-hour or even waking coverage.
Home daycares, where childcare is offered at the provider’s home, are regulated differently from state to state. Typically a single individual provides the overall service, meaning emergency back up, space availability and philosophy are all factors to consider in choosing this option.
Daycare centers such as the Y, JCC, Bright Horizons, may be well run and safe, but if a child is sick, a parent must take the day off. Additionally, most are only open during traditional working hours (6:00 am to 6:00 pm), Monday to Friday. Payment options are part-time or full-time, with very little flexibility. Once you sign up, the hours are more or less fixed.
We Need to Talk About the Parent
Now let’s look at an average work day for a modern parent.
The work day starts at 9.00 am; typical commute time is 30 to 45 minutes, which means the child or children need to be left at a childcare facility around 8.00. A full-time job ostensibly ends at 5:30 pm, assuming 30-minute lunch and an eight hour day.

Never mind that a typical workday rarely ends at exactly 5.30. We won’t complicate things; in this scenario the work day ends at 5:30. The parent drives 30 to 45 minutes to collect the child/ren at their daycare facility, arriving around 6.00, 6:15. That’s +10 hours—a long day for a child. But it’s typical. It is what the families of many full-time working parents do every day.
Now what happens if there’s an accident and traffic is backed up? A commuter train is delayed? A meeting has to be scheduled on the later side because of client’s time zones? When parents arrive after 6.00, the childcare center charges for staying open past closing time. The parent’s tardiness impacts resources and the lives of daycare staff.
Full-time workdays and childcare facility hours don’t always match, especially if one parent is the primary parent.
What Is a Primary Parent?
My spouse is a physician. His “normal” schedule, consisting of yearly physicals and scheduled appointments, is set months in advance. He sees his first patient at 8:30 am and his last patient…. can vary. Patient emergencies and sick visits get added to his schedule. Sometimes he is at the office until after 6:00 pm. Then he commutes home. If one of our children is unwell or needs to be picked up at daycare, I can’t rely on my spouse for coverage.
As a freelance consultant, I can somewhat manage my own hours. But I cannot manage my colleagues’ or clients’ hours. Team-based projects require “buy-in” from all stakeholders, which means juggling many schedules. Meetings are rarely set far in advance, and frequently subject to last-minute change.
How do you coordinate care when meetings are all over the calendar and your spouse or partner’s schedule is not flexible or predictable?
The solution for our family was our neighborhood Y. It offered care from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. I paid for full-time care even though I often only used four to six hours. If I had a morning meeting, I could drop my kid off and pick him up after his afternoon nap, or vice versa.
Not every family has the resources to pay for unused full-time care. And many parents do not work between the hours of 6.00 am to 6.00 pm.
Essential workers, gig workers, part-time employees, artists and so forth don’t fit neatly into the 9.00 to 6.00, Monday through Friday, model. In fact they may have no consistency whatsoever in their scheduling.
Flexible Childcare Facilities
What if childcare facilities became more flexible, families could buy into hours, and those hours wouldn’t need to be at a set time?
Drawing on the flexible model of the health and fitness club industry, we could reinvent the childcare offer.
A parent buys a Childcare Pass, and then schedules the facility at times most convenient.
Initially this could seem complicated because childcare facilities require a certain teacher-to-child ratio per room. Again looking to fitness clubs, fast-food restaurants and other businesses that have to manage traffic patterns, scheduling and staff rotation could be based on anticipated up- and down-times.
But what if the center becomes too crowded and there simply is no option to take in more kids during a set time or day?
If multiple childcare facilities allowed for this kind of flexibility, the parent could buy a system pass and toggle between more than one area facility based on availability.
For example, I could sign up for 30 hours a week across four facilities; one facility in my neighborhood, one in a nearby neighborhood, one near my gym or commuter station, and one near my work. A sophisticated scheduling software would allow me to sign-up a few days in advance or notify me if there is a cancellation. If the time slot isn’t available at the first choice facility, I can try for one of the other three facilities. The alternative may not be ideal, but at least it is childcare coverage.
The hours of the facility could also be flexible; open as early as 5.00 or 6.00 am through until 11.00 pm. This would help the non-trad workers as well as the parent who has an occasional early or late scheduled event or meeting. Parents could find time to work out or even plan a date!

Finally, the parent could use the center for as many or as few hours needed each day. If a gig worker has two shifts separated by hours in between, she could use the facility for one half of a day, and then return later that day to drop off her kid, while she goes to her second shift. Even short-term needs could be accommodated. A parent could use the center during her work shift, and then later that evening, drop off her kid again for an hour, while she attends an evening community meeting.
Even with a 16 to 20-hour window, parents may arrive after hours. But generally the facility’s evening “rush hour” (5.00-7.00 pm) would cease to be an issue of keeping staff overtime — evening staff would be simply working their scheduled shift.
Timekeeping should be in hour increments; parents would be charged for one hour regardless of whether they used 1 minute, 59 minutes or anything in between. A limit on daily usage could be set to ensure that kids are not in childcare for a set amount of hours straight.
Billy Versus Bills
During Covid-19, a large number of parents in the US left the workforce. In May of this year, the New York Times reported that “5.1 million American women stopped working for pay. Today 1.3 million remain out of [paid] work.”
It’s not only women, but according to early research “four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force by September 2020, roughly 865,000 women compared with 216,000 men.”
Those numbers reflect complexity no doubt, but if employers want their pick of the best and the brightest, then it’s essential that primary parents are an option within the hiring workforce. With a system in place that better matches the reality of how we live, parents can manage their vocational requirements in harmony with raising their kids.
So who is going to pay for all this? If the primary parent is able to manage a full-time paid job, that salary might help. But having flexible childcare also helps employers. So perhaps they could be encouraged to offer discounts or memberships, similar to corporate supplements for gym memberships or commute vouchers.
Businesses could also participate at the service end by building or supporting facilities within or near their buildings. The hosting business or landlord could offer a reduced rate lease or receive a federal tax cut for participation in a program that benefits society at large.
If We Build It, They Will Come
If a gym can manage to serve a local community flexibly, there is no reason why children and parents cannot be similarly served. We should work toward building communities where parents are engaged, relaxed and supported, and where children are cared for in human-sized time increments.
With so much extra time on her hands, a freelance brand specialist would be free to brainstorm clever names for this future childcare facility. Even with no extra time (because the future has yet to arrive), we offer these starter names:
Kindr
Petite Pass
Hangr
Press Pause
Intr’acte
Sources worth citing
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Evelyn Hafferty