Why don't more U.S. parents work part-time?

Paid work vs. stay-at-home parenting is not a binary choice - many parents want something in the middle. Other countries have figured out how to make it work.

In 1990, Newsweek published a story called “Mommy Vs. Mommy.” The cover image showed a businesswoman with a briefcase facing off against a stay-at-home mom with kids. The opening lines: “Tension between mothers is building as they increasingly choose divergent paths: going to work, or staying home to care for their kids. These are the Mommy Wars.”

“Mommy wars” framing continues to dominate the conversation about work-family choices. One recent meme shows a women in a gingham apron, holding a baby, stirring what appears to be sourdough starter while passionately kissing her husband. The tag line: “Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince an entire generation of women that this is oppressive.” In other words: blame careerist feminists for shortchanging women of a delightful life of sourdough bread and adoring husbands.

This is definitely a real picture and not staged at all

But by presenting paid work vs. family as a binary choice, not only does “mommy wars” discourse pit women against each other, but it ignores what mothers actually prefer. Survey after survey reveals that women with children don’t want the briefcase lifestyle or the gingham apron lifestyle: they want both! About half of mothers say that their ideal work arrangement would be to work part-time, a larger number than women who prefer to work either full-time (32%) or not work outside the home (20%). (These numbers shift when you look specifically at mothers of very young children, aged 0-4: about half of mothers still say they’d prefer to work part-time, but only 16% want to work full-time and 36% would prefer to stay home).

My kids are teenagers now and busy with their own lives, but when they were younger, I longed for half a job. I liked working and I also liked being home with them, but it was near-impossible to merge both roles together. I constantly felt like I was failing at both. A scaled-down work schedule would have let me keep one foot in each world, made the balancing act more sustainable, and our family lives much less stressful.

But a part-time work schedule seemed impossible to achieve without torpedoing my career. And an economy that allows most parents to work part-time is a fantasy, right?

In 2019, I spent a semester in Europe on a Fulbright to try and understand emerging research on how parenthood changes the brain. I learned a lot that semester, but some of the most memorable lessons weren’t about research at all, but rather the lives of the parents I met.

During a trip to Amsterdam, I had coffee with Elseline Hoekzema, who has published groundbreaking research on how motherhood remodels the brain. I was blown away when, over milky cappuccinos, she told me that she worked part-time because she had young children. In fact, she said, not only was it very common for parents in the Netherlands to work part-time, but the Dutch government actually encouraged this practice, because they believed it was valuable for young kids to have more days at home with their parents.

Why are these women pointing at each other and not at, say, the economy?

Indeed, about 65-75% of Dutch mothers of young children work part-time. These mothers include doctors, lawyers, and business executives, as well as nurses, teachers, and grocery store clerks, and many other occupations in between. Part-time work is not only for mothers, either: about 30% of working fathers also have part-time schedules. It’s very common for fathers of young children to work four days a week and take the day they aren’t working (usually Wednesday) as a weekly “daddy day,” or “papadag.” Across the board, it’s normative and even expected that parents will scale back their work hours when their children are young. Overall, the Netherlands has the highest rate of part-time employment in the developed world.

There is an actual Dutch TV show called “Papadag,” about dads spending their day off together

These shorter work hours are coupled with flexible childcare that is heavily subsidized by the Dutch government. In the U.S., many childcare centers have long waitlists and require a full-time commitment to hold onto a spot. In contrast, Dutch parents get “proportional subsidies” that allow them to afford prorated childcare scaled for the hours they need. This makes it easy to balance days at work with days at home.

Part-time schedules also come with job security. Since 2000, Dutch workers have benefited from “right to request” laws: that is, full time workers can request a reduction in work hours without losing their job.

You might be wondering how the Netherlands manages its economy with so many part-time workers. In fact, per capita GDP is quite high in the Netherlands, on par with Germany, France, and Denmark, and Dutch labor productivity is near the top among peer OECD nations. This is because Dutch workers tend to work efficiently, and labor force participation is quite high. In the U.S., many women leave the workforce entirely when their kids are young because work-family balance is an impossibility; in contrast, 75% of mothers work in the Netherlands, one of the highest rates of female labor participation in the world. Having more moms overall in the work force helps to offset the fact that many of them are working fewer hours.

In her Family Stuff newsletter last week,

Stephanie H. Murray

reported on research that found a negative association between having children and being employed in “Anglosphere” countries including the U.S., but a slightly positive association between children and employment in Western European countries including the Netherlands. The prevalence of part-time work may help explain these patterns.

There are some drawbacks to a culture of part-time work for parents. There is an assumption that “good parents,” especially mothers, will want to scale back, which can leave more career-minded women feeling shamed. Women aren’t as likely to get fast-tracked into top positions. Still, you could argue that a slower career ramp-up is better than being forced out of the workforce entirely, a more common outcome in the U.S. The Netherlands has higher levels of gender egalitarianism than the U.S., and Dutch fathers are hands-on. The Netherlands consistently rank as one of the top countries for happiness and work-life balance, too. The norm of part-time work reflects a larger cultural ethos that your job should fit into family life, not compete with it.

Although most U.S. mothers express a preference for part-time work, fewer than a quarter of U.S. mothers of young children actually work part-time. Why can’t we adopt a Dutch-style part-time work culture here? It’d be good for kids (more time with parents!), and good for parents (less stress!). It would offer a happy medium truce to the mommy wars. It might even encourage births by making parenthood feel more sustainable

To approximate the Dutch model, we’d need more flexible childcare options and better job protection. The other big obstacle is health insurance, which is tied to employment in the U.S. The Netherlands, like most OECD countries, offers universal healthcare. You can’t really offer part-time insurance, so employers have to pay full price to cover part-time workers-- not a great deal when they could have a full-time worker at the same cost.

Still, given that part-time work is preferred by many parents and has obvious benefits for kids and families, it seems worth exploring ways to create a model a like the Dutch one, where part-time schedules are normalized and even encouraged. It might be a model that both the left and the right can get behind (without either side being totally thrilled): making it possible to do more stay-at-home parenting while also keeping a foot in the work world. As it is, parents who step away from the workforce to be home with their children often pay a stiff penalty when they want to return to their careers; the “mommy track” has few on-ramps and off-ramps. That’s a loss not just for workers, but for employers and the economy as a whole. A sustainable way for parents to go down to half-time work might offer a compromise solution that lets parents remain connected to their workplaces while still being present at home. It will require creative solutions to the problems of health insurance, job security, and affordable childcare, which means that a viable part-time track is unlikely to emerge without some smart public policy and government investment.

In the meantime, there is already a shadow workforce of part-time parents in the U.S. These are the gig, shift, and occasional workers – the Uber drivers, the Instacart shoppers, the Task Rabbiters, even the multi-level marketing (MLM) hustlers selling make-up and leggings. There is a mom in my neighborhood who does airport rides at night so she can care for her autistic daughter during the day. I know other mom who do grocery runs for neighbors. Too many parents are trying to fit childcare around just-in-time corporate scheduling arrangements that mean that a shift could pop up at the last minute and set off a scramble for coverage. The MLM path draws many mothers looking for a little income, but can also lead to debt and financial ruin.

Unlike Dutch part-time parents, these shadow workers rarely have access to health insurance or job protection, and their childcare arrangements may look like a patchwork of called-in favors rather than stable, high-quality coverage. That’s not great for parents, and it’s especially not great for kids, who benefit from consistency and security. This shadow workforce is living on the edges of the economy. A more formalized part-time path would be a balm for the many parents who feel their only option for work-life balance is through precarious DIY.

If we want to encourage births in the U.S. and ensure that parents and children thrive, we should be willing to get creative and draw from the best international models. That means tossing out the fake mommy wars dichotomy and helping parents find actual balance.