Why millennial motherhood can feel like rearranging chairs on the Titanic

Alyx: Between your piece this week and Georgie Dent’s press club address, there’s a lot of talk about the pressure on parents. Why now?
Kate: It’s a combination of a crazy economy, that means that families have to have two full-time incomes or very close to it in order to make things work, and not taking our foot off the pedal when it comes to domestic labour. For the first time in history, more Australian families have two full-time working parents than any other configuration. So there’s more paid work, but care work – the amount of time we spend parenting – has gone up too. We’ve dropped a little bit of housework, which is great. More power to that. But care work’s gone up and paid work’s gone up. And there’s not really space to pull back.

Alyx: Time use surveys suggest people spending more time parenting than they used to. And what I want to know is: what were parents doing before?
Kate: I went to multiple experts to sense check this, asking: “This feels wrong. Is this wrong? Can it possibly be right that we’re doing more hours of parenting every day than parents did in the middle of last century?”
But the numbers in Australia and across the world track upward from about the 80s. There’s been an increasing tendency towards intensive mothering – the idea that it requires more input from us if we want our kids to get the best out of the world. Whether that’s reading to your child, or talking with them, helping them to emotionally regulate, or being very present and intentional in the way you parent.
There has also been a big increase in supervisory care. So in previous decades, it might have been that you’d say to your kid, “walk home from school by yourself” or “go play with your friends by the creek”.
Now there’s more anxiety on a couple of levels. One is to do with stranger danger and the other is to do with road safety, and the way our cities are built, which makes it unsafe for kids to wander unsupervised. And that’s both good and bad. It’s obviously got that helicopter parent edge – the lack of resilience and freedom for exploration. And yet on the flip side, there are times when parental anxiety is appropriate. The good old days actually had a lot of dangers in them. I’m definitely not saying millennial parents have got this balance right, but I think that’s the space they’re playing in, and it does have an impact on how much time kids can spend independently.

Alyx: Obviously, we don’t believe in individual solutions to structural problems, but you’ve been talking to a lot of people who are deep in this. Can you tell me some corners they’re cutting?
Kate: It’s actually one of my favourite questions to ask people who have young children: what balls are you dropping? One friend told me that on multiple nights a week she serves her children Weet-Bix for dinner. There was a Facebook post on a very popular mum’s group, asking: “How do I do this? I’m about to go back to full-time work. I’ve got two little kids …” And I think one of the really telling things is that all of the solutions offered are little hacks. Things like “put your kids to bed in their clothes for the next day”. So, after bath time, straight in their school uniforms. Or batch cook, or buy a whole lot of liquid breakfasts. And, yes, some of these systems can be mildly helpful. But I think if we’re thinking these are the answers, it’s like we’re arranging our chairs in the nicest configuration on the Titanic.

There’s been a lot of chat about bogong moths in the office this week, as swarms of them begin their annual migration. Since I learned that the best way to remove them from your home is by luring them out with light, I’ve been looking at lamps. In the entirely hypothetical scenario where my place is inundated with winged things, I’ve settled on this indoor/outdoor rechargeable table lamp from Australian lighting brand Nook ($289). Its form is inspired by forest sponges, and I think it would look quite spooky-chic with a few moths trailing behind it. I ran this prospect past Donna Lu from our environment desk, who said it might work if you turned off all your other lights first.

Also, I have to apologise for last week’s wishlist item. A reader who tried to buy the fancy French hand sanitiser found that it couldn’t be delivered to Australia after all. I emailed the manufacturer asking for alternatives, but they said for the moment they only distribute in France. So if you know someone going there, ask for a souvenir.

Last week, I asked you to share things that gave you joy that you’d spotted while out and about lately. Jane Mardon saw this display at the entrance to the Archaeological Museum of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges while on a camping trip in France recently.

Closer to home, on a recent trip to the bank, Kathleen saw: “A security guard all in black, very muscle bound, tough looking and complete with bulletproof vest, sucking a strawberry milkshake through a straw.”

In a recent advice column, Eleanor Gordon-Smith wrote for us: “There should be an amnesty each year when we confess our administrative stuff-ups so we wouldn’t feel so alone.” So, in that spirit, tell me about the skeleton made of undone chores that’s hiding in your closet.

I’ll go first: I have not cleaned my oven in more than five years. I cook with it pretty regularly, and every time I do, it smokes. Share your own by replying to this email, or contacting savedforsunday@theguardian.com. I’ll keep you anonymous if you prefer.