Australian mothers face a squeeze between work, care and rising costs

The room to cut back is gone

The Parenthood, an Australian organization, recently reported that raising a family with two or more children costs at least $36,500 a year. Over the past two decades, family expenses have risen 134%, while household incomes grew 102%.

Georgie Dent, the organization’s executive director, says Australian women’s earnings fall by an average of 55% in the first five years after having children. More families now need two incomes to make ends meet. In 2024, households where both parents worked full time became the most common family arrangement for the first time among families with children under 15.

Catherine works four days a week. ChatGPT suggested working from home or switching to part-time hours, but neither offers a practical escape: she cannot work from home, and cutting her hours further would make the family’s finances harder to manage. Her entire salary goes toward the mortgage; after several interest-rate increases, it is no longer enough.

Working a fifth day would raise her income by 20%, she says, but leave her less time with her children. Working fewer than four days is also out of reach financially, and she worries she would not be able to do her job well or be taken seriously.

“I don’t want to stay home five days a week. I don’t want to repeat my mother’s life exactly. But I want to pick my children up from school, bring them home and spend a calm evening with them. I have absolutely no way to do that.”

The chatbot could name the conflict, but it could not change the conditions producing it. Catherine says that recognition broke her.

More time at work, more time caring

Money is only part of the squeeze. A large Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that 56% of single mothers with children under 15 always or often felt rushed or pressed for time. Among women with children under 15 living with a partner, the figure was 54.6%. Fathers of young children were the men most likely to report time pressure, at 46.6%.

Research across 11 countries, covering almost 50 years, found that direct childcare time rose substantially everywhere studied. From 1965 to 2012, mothers spent twice as much time caring for children, on average, and fathers spent three times as much, though men started from a much lower level.

In Australia, men’s time spent caring for children, older people and people with disabilities rose from five hours a week in 2002 to 5.5 hours in 2022. Women still do almost twice as much of this work. Their weekly total also increased, from 10.1 hours to 10.7 hours.

Despite the huge increase in women’s paid work over the last 60 years, today’s mothers are not doing less childcare. Photograph: Tetra Images/Alamy

Source: theguardian.com

More women are in paid work, but the care work has not simply moved elsewhere. Women have not stopped caring for others, and men have not reduced their paid work. Lin Craig, a University of Melbourne professor who studies gender relations and domestic labor, says young women—and young people more broadly—are carrying a growing load.

“People are just doing more of everything at once,” Craig says. “They’re combining one thing with another.”

‘I look around after bedtime and the house is absolutely trashed.’ Photograph: Thanasis Zovoilis/Getty Images

Source: theguardian.com

Craig has argued that childcare is especially difficult to hand off because it combines labor with love. Two decades after she described the challenge of meeting children’s need for care without overloading women, the central tension remains.

The standard of success is part of the problem

The usual fixes do not address the whole bind. Catherine already works four days a week. Annie, a mother of two young children whose name has been changed, says her school day runs from 9:00 to 15:00, while school holidays are much longer than any parent’s paid vacation. “Who came up with this?” she asks. “Working men whose wives stayed home.”

The Parenthood is calling for longer paid parental leave, incentives for men to take it, and greater access to affordable, high-quality childcare. Annie also wants shorter working hours and a rethink of what counts as a good employee. In her industry, success is associated with long hours and visible busyness; doing a manageable amount of work well and going home to family does not fit the ideal.

I think that gap matters as much as the calendar. A system that makes care expensive and schedules work around constant availability leaves families with little room to absorb an ordinary disruption. Better childcare or leave could help, but neither alone would change a definition of professional commitment built around being perpetually busy.

The millennial mothers in these accounts are not saying they regret having children. They are describing lives they wanted—a family and work they care about—that have proved much harder to fit together than they expected. Their question is not whether motherhood is worth it. It is why wanting both a career and time with your children should require such a precarious arrangement.