[bart_spoon]

I think you bring up an important point that may be an uncomfortable truth about modern society. I personally have been weathering the pandemic/WFH situation well, in no small part because my spouse is a stay-at-home parent anyways. I don't need to juggle work and monitoring children much because they are available to do so. If anything, its been a boon to be able to "tag-team" occasionally, to give my wife a break/back her up, and also be a presence in my kids life more than just after work hours and on weekends.

For many friends and colleagues with children, however, its been a disaster, and it seems the largest culprit is that they both work, and therefore they struggle to do their jobs while also watch their children all day. I don't blame them for their situation. Society has made it so that having a stay at home parent is a luxury that many families simply can't afford, and it has also devalued the idea so much that even the families that can afford it are almost embarrassed to do so (my wife personally likes being a stay at home mom, but feels judgement from friends and former colleagues for quitting her job as a chemist to do so). Its good that we moved beyond expecting women to exclusively be the homemakers, as that is needlessly sexist, but it would have been far more healthy to replace that with normalizing one parent, gender-agnostic, devoted to child-care, rather than normalizing both parents working and relying on daycare/schooling to watch kids for most of the day.