Since becoming a mom to now one-year-old twins, the question I hear more than any other is: What are you doing for child care? I used to hear it said with curiosity. Now, I hear it as a kind of quiet panic, shared between working parents who know the answer is never simple or affordable. Daycare? If you’re lucky enough to make it off a waitlist. A nanny? Maybe, if you’re one of the few who can make the math work. And for so many women, the question becomes more existential: Does it even make sense to go back to work?
The irony of Take Your Child to Work Day is that we’re already doing it—every day. Even if our kids aren’t physically with us, they’re ever-present: in the sick days that derail our schedules, the backup care plans that fall through, the mental load we carry into Zoom meetings and Slack messages. And unlike the once-a-year photo ops that flood company Instagrams and LinkedIn, this version of parenthood isn’t all that cute. It’s exhausting, precarious, and profoundly unsupported.
We’ve told working parents, especially mothers, that this is just what adulthood looks like: tough it out, make sacrifices, hustle harder. But this isn’t a lifestyle issue, it’s a structural failure. In the US, child care is both unaffordable and inaccessible. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of care now rivals public in-state college tuition. To add insult to injury, these costs are rising faster than wages.
The ripple effects extend beyond families. It’s bad for business too. Moms First’s landmark child-care report, in partnership with BCG, found that 63% of parents made career compromises—reducing hours, switching jobs, or declining promotions—to manage child care. With women being more likely to leave the workforce altogether. That’s not just a gender equity issue, it’s a significant talent drain, a productivity killer, and an economic liability. The US Chamber of Commerce estimates that child-care gaps cost states billions in lost earnings, productivity, and tax revenue every year.
Still, the dominant narrative persists: they grow up fast, you’ll figure it out. This is the American prosperity gospel—work hard, get married, start a family. But it never quite worked for women, who were asked to sacrifice career ambitions for caregiving roles, without the social or economic scaffolding to support either. It certainly doesn’t work now, even with so many fathers rising to the occasion, more present than the generations before them in the lives of their children. We’re in a country with no universal paid leave, no guaranteed child care, and no real plan to change that, at least not under this administration. American culture promotes parenthood but treats it as a personal choice instead of a societal necessity.
Yes, some employers are stepping up: offering parental leave, child-care stipends, backup care programs. These efforts matter and they’re commendable. But they’re accessible only if you’re lucky and quite frankly that’s not enough. We cannot build a care infrastructure on corporate perks alone, especially when they’re often limited to white-collar workers at well-funded organizations. This isn’t just unfair to employees, it’s a neverending climb for employers too who have been picking up the slack of the public sector for years now. A country that claims to value families should not be outsourcing care to HR departments.
The solution isn’t a mystery. Other industrialized nations already do it: subsidized child care, paid family leave, predictable schedules, and wage protections for care workers. These aren’t radical ideas, they’re basic supports. But we also need a cultural reset: one that stops treating caregiving as “women’s work,” and starts recognizing it as foundational to our economy.
If we want to build a workforce that works—for everyone—we need to stop pretending parents can do it all, alone. Employers should offer more than perks. They need to advocate. You can join companies like Etsy, Patagonia, Morgan Stanley, and Chobani in the National Business Coalition for Child Care. Lawmakers need to stop debating whether families are worth investing in and start making it a legislative priority. And the rest of us? We need to stop romanticizing resilience and start demanding support.
Just one year in, I already know the truth: children do grow fast. Every moment with my twins feels sacred and I want more of that time, not less. But I also want to feel like myself. For me, that includes my work. It grounds me, challenges me, and makes me a better parent.
That shouldn’t be rare or just an option for those who can afford it. It should be the baseline, because Take Your Child to Work Day was never meant to be a full-time arrangement.