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February 25, 2016

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Home » Opinion » Chinese Views

Conflicts between workplace and school schedules cause anxiety for urban parents

By Chen Weixian | February 25, 2016, Thursday | Print Edition

PRIMARY schools in Beijing have started a new semester this week.

For families concerned, this means there must be someone who can send their child to school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon, and handle school-related tasks like buying special notebooks and other supplies.

Discussions of school reforms mostly center on the quality of education. But for parents like me, the most pressing issue is coping with the school schedule.

For example, take the schedule of my daughter, a second grader:

06:50: get up and have breakfast;

07:25: leave home;

07:40: pre-class reading starts;

15:30: (three days of the week) and 16:30 (two days of the week): leave school.

To make this schedule work, extra manpower is absolutely needed to support parents, both of whom are likely to work outside the home until 6 or 7pm in order to afford with the high costs of living in a city like Beijing.

These days, there are generally three strategies urban parents use to cope with the obligations posed by their school-age children.

Solution One: enlist the help of grandparents, who normally move into the same apartment as the parents;

Solution Two: hire a full-time nanny, in case Solution One is not an option;

Solution Three: one parent stays at home, possibly assisted by a part-time nanny.

My own household has seen its own share of HR maneuvers.

My parents-in-law recently “retired” from assisting with their grandchild after nine years of hard work and loyal service (although at one point, they quipped that taking care of their grand-daughter was like “a life sentence without the possibility of parole”).

My own mother came to fill the gap, shifting her attention to my family from my younger brother’s family. Meanwhile, this shift has meant my brother’s wife has opted for Solution Three, with her own parents assisting from time to time in lieu of hiring a nanny.

The primary school that my daughter is attending used to offer, at an additional charge, optional extra-curricular activities and dinner so that pupils could stay at school until 7pm.

This was a wonderful arrangement for parents! This service was eventually rescinded under reforms that forbad schools from offering paid activities.

This has resulted in great inconvenience for parents and huge costs for society as a whole.

Weighing different solutions

Solution One means deploying the elderly, who might otherwise enjoy peaceful retirement.

Solution Three entails removing productive persons from the labor market.

Solution Two could create employment opportunities, but good, trustworthy nannies are difficult to find and expensive.

Some agencies are popping up to cover the hours between when children leave school and parents leave work.

Their services include picking up kids from school, arranging activities and feeding them. Concerns about security though have kept many parents away from these agencies.

The law should provide more support for parents.

For example, if both parents work, one of them should be legally allowed fewer working hours to match with school schedules. Hiring a nanny should also be tax deductible. Grandparents should be entitled to some incentives too, like reductions in medical bills.

Less than one week after arriving in Beijing, my mom concluded that she cannot stand the weather in Beijing and plans to head back to sunny, tropical Xiamen soon.

This means more HR reshuffling is on the horizon for our family organization. Should we try to find a reliable nanny? Or maybe my wife will have to leave her job. Ugh, what a great way to start school again!

 

The author is a senior corporate manager and freelancer based in Beijing. He can be reached at weixianchen@sina.com

Chinese Views


 

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