Millennial mothers are not trapped by their homes but by an impossible expectation that they maintain everything – career, motherhood, partnership, self-care – simultaneously and without complaint. This is the finding of a new analysis of the pressures facing today's parents, as economic and time pressures mount.
Katherine, a mother of two, describes her dilemma beside an overheated indoor swimming pool in Sydney. She wakes between 5am and 5.30am to “get the jump on the kids”, using the time to shower in peace, start preparing her daughter's lunchbox, or, if she's really doing well, get a quick workout in. The children wake between 5.30 and 6am, and from that time it is a mad scramble to get them ready to leave for school and daycare by 7am.
Economic toll of parenting
New research shows that the cost for Australian families of raising two or more children has risen to at least $36,500 a year. The cost of keeping a family afloat has increased by 134% in two decades, while household income has only grown by 102% in the same period.
Georgie Dent, the chief executive of The Parenthood, which published the research, says having children reduces the earnings of Australian women by an average of 55% over the first five years and that Australian families now need two incomes to stay afloat. Both parents working full-time became the most common setup for households with children under 15 in 2024 for the first time.
Time stress and care work
According to a major study conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the most time-stressed group in the country were single mothers of children aged under 15, with 56% saying they were “always or often” rushed or pressed for time. Having a partner scarcely seems to make a difference to how extremely time-pressured mothers feel – 54.6% of women with children under 15 who have a partner report being time-stressed.
Men with young children have the highest rate of time stress (46.6%) of any group of men in the country. In Australia, men have increased the amount of time they spend caring – for children and disabled or elderly relatives – by half an hour a week over the last 20 years – 5.5 hours a week in 2022, up from five hours in 2002. But women still do nearly double the number of care hours as men, and have seen their care work increase too – spending 10.7 hours a week caring in 2022, compared with 10.1 hours in 2002.
Workplace too greedy
Prof Lyn Craig, a leading researcher in gender dynamics and household labour at the University of Melbourne, says: “I just think the workplace is too greedy.” She notes that many people expected that as a result of women spending more hours in paid work, men would spend more time doing domestic labour, but that isn't what has happened. The shifts at home have been far slower than the shifts in the workplace.
In 1963, Betty Friedan identified “the problem that has no name” – a pervasive despair among white, middle-class US housewives who were trapped by expectations that their domestic lives would offer them total fulfilment. But 60 years on, the feminine mystique has flipped. Millennial women, it seems, are not trapped by their homes but by an impossible expectation that they maintain everything simultaneously and without complaint.
Structural solutions
Annie (not her real name), a mother of two young children, says: “I'm now at a point professionally where I should be kind of at my maximum, like my peak professional moment. And I just feel jammed. I feel torn ... I can't invest the time and the energy to deliver the professional product that I want to deliver and be the mum I want to be.”
Dent and her organisation The Parenthood propose policy solutions including longer paid parental leave and parental leave that men are incentivised to take alongside better access to affordable, quality childcare. Despite the exhaustion, the financial pressure, the feeling that we are all furiously spinning our gears to keep our lives in motion, the women I have spoken to do not hate their lives. They do not regret being mothers.
