Parents’ Evening Routines
This project started with a friend’s response to my blog post on waking up early:
“[I] would love to hear more about people’s evenings. That’s the part no one ever really talks about. Do they spend time with children? Dinner? …This is often the thing that kills the early morning wake up time. Would love more transparency/insight there.”
That piqued my interest and kicked off a survey of friends of mine (also posted on LinkedIn). Analysis below.
Survey Demographics
Most respondents are in two-career households, though more of the men report having spouses who work part-time or who work from home.
(The survey asked about their routines before the pandemic started.)
Survey Analysis
Household Supports
The majority of families sampled in this survey employ some form of household staff to make their system run. Just over half of respondents employ full-time in-home childcare providers, and 59% use house cleaners.
(Important note: the respondents are not representative of the average U.S. household. This is one indicator of that—on average, only about 10% of U.S. households use in-home, non-relative childcare.)
The Biggest Differences in Evening Routines
How long the “evening” lasts
Most of the respondents said they “start” their evening—e.g., pickup kids, get home from work, or transition from at-home professional work to family time—between 5:30pm and 6:30pm, but parents’ bedtimes varied from 8:30pm to as late as 1am. (Some of y’all stay up late!)
The median routine lasted 4.5 hours, but it ranged from as low as 2 hours to as high as 6-7.5 hours.
Some of this variation is due to working in the evening, but most reported filling the time with entertainment (sometimes doing work in front of the tv), hanging with their spouse, reading, self-care, and scrolling through Instagram.
Those who get to bed before 9:30 typically describe their routine as “go to sleep right after kids go to sleep” or “tie up high-priority items and emails before going to sleep.” They may read a bit, but they aren’t consuming other types of entertainment.
Working after kids go to sleep
For some, the late sleep time is due to working in the evening, which is sometimes unbounded.
While 28% of those who work in the evenings say they are night owls, even more (39%) indicated that “I prefer not to do work in the evening, but my job demands it.”
One person who prefers not to work in the evening but whose job demands it takes a different approach: waking up early. “To minimize the time I spend working at night, I usually try to wake up and start working around 5 before the kids [wake up].”
Gender Skew?
Given the small sample size of the survey, it’s hard to make conclusive comparisons based on gender. That said, a couple of interesting nuggets:
First, as you saw above, the men reported working in the evening at twice the rate of the women.
Second, 17% of the mothers reported “I simply choose not to do work in the evening. That's my personal time.” However, none of the dads said that.
Of course, it’s hard to know how much of that difference is due to choices made about what kinds of job to take (e.g., “I can have a demanding job because my spouse does not”) or choices made about how to approach work regardless of how demanding the job is (e.g., “I could work more, but that extra time is low-value”).
Age of kids
While the survey didn’t specifically ask about kids’ ages, the responses (and what I otherwise knew about the families) indicated that the evening routine is vastly different between those with older kids and those with younger kids.
Those with younger kids tend to have a routine in which dinner prep starts immediately after getting home, followed by dinner and a short playtime (usually less than 30 minutes) before the bedtime routine starts. This happens because the window between parent arrival and kid bedtime is typically only 2 hours (or less!).
In contrast, those with slightly older kids might include an extra step of checking or helping with homework, which typically falls before dinner. Their kids are also going to sleep a little later, which creates more time in the evening routine, but the parents’ descriptions of their routine implied that it was still back-to-back-to-back.
Those with even older kids and teenagers have more activities (e.g., sports practices), which can push dinner back until late and eliminate opportunities for the whole family to spend time together.
Approaches to dinner time
Based on the responses, I categorized approaches to dinner using this framework:
Cook: “I start making dinner…”
Conveniently cook: “I pull something together or heat leftovers”
Reheat: “I warm up dinner or give kids food I've picked up on the way home”
Outsource: someone else—e.g., the nanny or spouse—makes dinner
It’s unscientific, I know, but hear me out. The goal of the framework was to capture differences in time and effort being spent on dinner during the typical evening. In reality, individuals do a mix of these strategies. Some of the findings:
Using the nanny
The first thing that stood out from the responses was that while 18 of the households employ a nanny or au pair, only 3 reported that the nanny or au pair prepares dinner for the kids. Given the tight schedules between arriving home and bedtime, giving the child care provider more responsibility for dinner would seem like an opportunity for some families.
Gender skew
The second thing that jumps out from the data is a fairly obvious gender skew (with the previous warning about small sample size). Women disproportionately have the highest-effort approaches, and at least 50% of the men aren’t doing any dinner preparation during the week. (Some of them do more on the weekends.)
Meal planning
Meal planning was cited as the number one element of evening routine effectiveness (see below), as it enables faster and easier dinner preparation—e.g., heating up food that is already prepared.
Cleaning
Some individuals specifically called out cleaning up from dinner in their routine. It could be that some are investing more time in cleaning, but I suspect the difference has less to do with the amount of time and effort and more to do with the order of activity.
For example, I clean throughout cooking and then continue the cleaning while waiting on the kids to (slowly) finish their food. Others might clean everything at the end or, you know, patiently wait and have a civilized conversation around the dinner table.
What’s in the bedtime routine
There is variation in how long the bedtime routine lasts. Many include more play and reading into that period and said that it lasts 45-60 minutes. In our house, in contrast, we play and read earlier in the evening, so the "bedtime" routine is much shorter—as little as 15 minutes.
What is critical for making your evening “effective”?
“Alcohol.”
Success Factors
Bedtime routines
The number one factor cited for effectiveness was how much kids cooperate with the bedtime routine. And based on some of the reports, it can be kind of a sh*t show.
I did a previous “ask a bunch of parents” effort on this topic, and it yielded the following insight: no one really has a clue.
The main strategies people used were around being consistent in the routine and trying to tire the kids out, but these weren’t foolproof. I guess we’ll have to wait until they grow up!
(If interested, you can download that short report out here.)
Being in a rush
Based on the question setup and the sample answer, most respondents provided a bare-bones description of their routine. Just the facts, ma’am.
Thus, it was interesting to see where respondents put a little flavor or characterization into their answers. The main place that happened was when people described being rushed. Some examples:
“Rush home to relieve nanny by 6pm…”
“Race home by 5:45 to release nanny by 6. Kids have normally eaten so I quickly change and play with them while trying to prepare dinner for husband/me and then kick off bath”
“5PM: Sprint from the office to tackle traffic.”
It was then interesting to me to compare those “rush” statements with the answers to What is critical for making your evening “effective”? Specifically, that two of the most cited factors were being centered and present and having time to decompress.
I found this observation insightful:
“Starting the night without a deficit helps. Pre-Covid, I'd be racing home from work, stressed about what I didn't get done and then trying to reset to be a good mom while also being entirely exhausted. Now, I feel a little more able to engage more completely with my kids when I'm not working because I've cut out the commute, all social activities, etc..”
How has your evening routine changed since the pandemic started?
“Waaaaaay less hectic.”
Since the Pandemic
The majority of respondents reported that their evening routines have changed since the pandemic in some way. The most cited elements:
Earlier “arrival” = more flexibility
Because working from home eliminated the commute, the most cited change is that many "arrive home” (i.e., start family time) earlier than before the pandemic.
Some have used that change to shift the entire routine earlier, including an earlier bedtime for their kids and themselves. However, others have used the extra time to, among other things:
cook more robust meals
more quality time with family (e.g., taking a walk, spending time outside, board games, “added rapping a song to recap the day with my daughter (with her being a different fairytale character in it each day)”)
spend more time with their spouses
More time as a whole family
The lack of work travel and working from home has, for some, meant that both partners are home each night, enabling both to contribute to the evening routine (it may have been one-sided previously).
Related to that, several people reported that having both parents at home enables them to have dinner as a whole family. Before the pandemic, the kids may have had a separate, earlier dinner time, or just one parent would be home for dinner.
Blurred lines and more work
While some find it "waaaaaay less hectic," others find the blurry line between work and home difficult.
No one reported having less work to do at night. However, several mentioned having more evening work, partly because they are juggling childcare duties during the workday.
Because of this blurring, implementing routines that enable a mental transition from “work” to “home” each day may be even more important. For example, several of my clients have introduced (solo) walks at the start or end of the workday to simulate the break that was created by their commute.
Reflections
While there are many approaches, I didn’t come across any silver bullets to making the evening routine easier. Hence, I find it difficult to synthesize “recommendations” from the survey. Instead, some reflections:
The importance of making choices
I’ve never seen any reasonable productivity strategies that didn’t involve (a) making clear choices about what matters and (b) being comfortable with the implications of those choices.
That comes to mind because of the varied ways people described their post-kids-bedtime efforts. For some, the time on Instagram is critical to connecting with friends; for others, it’s just wasting time. For some, watching tv—good or trashy—might be fundamental to decompressing; for others, it’s just stealing time from sleep and productivity the next day.
There’s no right or wrong generally—only right or wrong based on what’s most important to you.
Doing more work, at work is also part of this choice framework. Being more productive during the workday is the choice to remove external distractions and not give in to temptations to distract ourselves. And choosing to work less in the evening is a choice about what matters to us.
The opportunities to use flexibility to our advantage
One of the best strategies for productivity is to match our activities with our energy levels—e.g., do the hardest work when energy is highest and focus on other things when it wanes. However, implementing that strategy is normally constrained by the fixed schedules of work and school.
But since we’re all working from home, there are greater opportunities to flex our schedules into something that works. There’s no reason that all of our kid time has to be between 5:30 and 8pm, for example. A client of mine has family walks over lunch. In the survey, another person said that they “get dinner started throughout the day.” I suspect that happens when she’s lower energy or might want to take a break from work anyway.
The importance of redesigning the routine from the ground up
One thing my wife and I realized over the past weeks is that we’d never really adjusted our routines with the pandemic. There were changes, sure, but they were only incremental moves to accommodate a “temporary” disruption. How foolish that seems in retrospect!
We kept working in the same way even though some of the pillars of the larger routine—our childcare coverage, our access to gyms, taking vacation in the summer—were interrupted. I’ve heard the same from coaching clients.
Especially with school about to start, now may be a good time for all of us to take a more fundamental look at our approaches. We might ask ourselves:
How is this working for us, right now—tactically, physically, emotionally?
What habits served us well before but aren’t useful now?
What do we need to optimize for in this moment?