Georgie Dent interview, working mums: Why isn’t anyone fixing the parenting conundrum facing working mums

It’s a mystery working mothers across Australia know it all too well.

How are women expected to maintain a full-time career? parenting in a world that has not caught up? Because there are not enough hours in the day to do both, we are witnessing the rise of the ultimate burnt out generation of mothers.

It’s an issue that has been reignited this week, and one that Georgie Dent, CEO of The Parenthood, is keen to change after admitting the current system is ‘broken’.

The attorney turned journalist and best-selling author is an advocate for parental leave, access to quality early childhood education, and family-friendly workplaces.

She told nine.com.au this week that Australian households have changed significantly over the past two decades, while the cost of living, especially in relation to housing, has risen sharply since 2020, but society is not keeping pace.

“It’s very rare now that a parent is not involved in the paid staff,” Dent said.

“More parents than ever are in paid work, and much of that is purely out of economic necessity. Yet many of our systems, from schools to workplaces, early childhood education and care and paid parental leave, still reflect the outdated idea that there is a parent at home who can easily take on the care and household burdens of raising a family.”

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The catalyst for Dent’s comment was a post on ABC Lifestyle’s Instagram page, starting with a series of slides that began: “Working Moms: Math Isn’t Math.”

The post pointed out that while standard school hours in Australia were about six hours a day, the normal working day is eight to nine hours, not including the commute.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that women make up 38 to 39 percent of Australia’s full-time workforce, while about 73 percent of Australian households with children aged 0 to 14 now have two working parents – up from 60 percent in 2005.

While most employees receive four weeks of annual leave, school holidays last twelve weeks or more per year.

Then there is the time taken up by extracurricular activities, which further consume parents’ workdays.

Meanwhile, globally, women spend 2.5 hours more per day on unpaid work at home than men – here in Australia that’s around one hour and 19 minutes per day – which begs the question: how can mothers balance it all?

It prompted ABC Lifestyle to ask: “What are your secrets to balancing work with drop-off and extra-curricular activities? How do you manage school holidays? How do workplace and education systems need to change to support working mothers? We’d love to hear from you.”

Women responded to the comments in droves, and they weren’t happy.

“I would like to say at the end of this article/caption: ‘How can we change this? What needs to change in our society?’ Instead of ‘How do you do that?’!” wrote one.

“It’s not. We’re all completely burned out,” said another.

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“It’s not, we have no tips, the system is broken and we are too exhausted to do the advocacy needed to change the system,” was another comment.

“We don’t have that – we have silent, existential breakdowns, periodically throughout the year. Waiting for the next moment of downtime, break or offer of help,” said another.

“Tips? Srsly? Ummm, how about dismantling the patriarchy. There’s a tip for you,” another commenter wrote.

“Talk about working parents and what needs to change in society and in the workplace, instead of asking mothers for tips on how to combine everything.”

Dent told nine.com.au she found the comments from stressed mothers heartbreaking.

“I think the strong reaction to that post is telling. I think it shows the incredible burden and weight that so many working parents, and especially working mothers, carry,” she said.

“That’s what we hear every day. Parents desperately wonder what they are doing wrong, when they are doing nothing wrong. They are not failing. The system is failing them.”

“We hear all the time that families trying to raise and provide for their families seems almost impossible.

“We know that fewer people have a village around them to help, and we know that raising children is a huge undertaking. It is demanding, exhausting, intense and beautiful, but it takes a lot. It takes patience, it takes time, it takes resources and all of these things are complicated.

“We cannot expect families to continue to close these gaps.”

Dent said Australia’s economy and society currently runs on “the invisible work of parents – especially mothers”.

While she said many would call this a work-life balance issue, in reality it was “a stunning policy mistake.”

“The Parenthood exists to do advocacy around the system because we recognize that the system is broken,” Dent said.

“This is not an individual problem that individual parents are trying to deal with. This is a structural problem, and structural problems require structural solutions.”

She cited Australia’s paid parental leave policy, which she said remains woefully inadequate, especially compared to the rest of the developed world.

The Australian Government-funded Paid Parental Leave (PPL) scheme was introduced on January 1, 2011, providing parents with up to 18 weeks’ pay at the national minimum wage after the birth or adoption of a child.

Although Dent said this was intended as a “starting point,” it remained largely unchanged for the next decade.

She praised the changes coming on July 1, which will increase PPL entitlements to 26 weeks and include pension benefits, but said there is still a long way to go.

“We have to be realistic that Australia lags behind the developed world in providing paid parental leave. In the OECD, the average length of paid parental leave is 53 weeks, and in most of those countries it is paid at a replacement wage and not the minimum wage,” she said.

“We would like 52 weeks, ideally divided between the parents.”

She also wants Australia to finally introduce policies that provide high-quality early childhood education and care that are available, affordable and accessible to all families.

“We have a patchwork of early childhood education and care systems,” she said, adding that the childcare subsidy had not achieved its objectives.

She also hoped that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would fulfill his promise, dating back to when he was opposition leader, to “make universal early childhood education and care a reality”.

“There is work to be done to move us toward that goal.”

Dent believes that it also makes sense to use existing school buildings, especially in rural and regional areas, for both childcare and before- and after-school care. The latter to compensate for the difference between the average school day and working day.

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