How do full time working parents take their kids to and from school?

I don’t know about the USA but here in the UK, schools often have before and after school care clubs. My daughter goes to one from 7.45am in the mornings and until 6pm in the evenings. She likes it a lot as she is playing with friends all the time. She also goes to some after school activities, like a gym class, that run in school. The care club staff fetch her back to their room. It’s a good scheme. The government also don’t charge me tax on what I pay for this so instead of £220 a month, it’s about £155 – an amazing saving.

I think that you would also try to arrange your working hours so that one parent in in work early and the other takes the child to school then the early worker can pick up at a reasonable time while the other parent works later. I drop my daughter off and my husband picks her up.

Lots of people (mainly the women) also work part time so that they can look after their children.

I really have no idea how this could be done unless someone made a deal with a cab company.

When I was a kid, our school had no bus service, so the mothers ran a carpool. Each of three or four mothers in my neighborhood would take all the kids a week in rotation. Other neighborhoods had similar carpools. But that was back in the day when mothers were commanders of the homes and, through coffee klatches, cocktail parties, and orgs like the PTA, watched over and ran the neighborhoods. As much as being a housewife is denigrated today, it was a full time job and required social skills and economics to run a home and neighborhood safely and well.

I wish one SO or another, especially in families with children, would take up the mantle left behind by these women, fill the void, stay home and raise the kids. I think our kids would grow up more secure, less neurotic and our society would be better off. But I know how real wages have fallen off in all sectors over the past fifty years and the economic demands now require both parents to work fulltime. It’s a goddamn shame. And our society is paying for these low wages through the nose.

It’s a thing, certainly.

Especially in my area, where urban sprawl has led to long commutes being normal. When I last worked downtown, I had to leave home at 7 AM to get to work by 8:30, and when I left at 5:30, I wouldn’t be home until nearly 7 PM.

Before and after-school clubs wouldn’t help, since they start after I left for work and ended long before I got home. There was a $20 fine for every minute after 6 PM a child was picked up.

A lot of people around here hire part-time nannies just for the before/after school thing.

My kids’ elementary school had before and after care, kids could be dropped as early as 6:45 and stay until 6 p.m.

When I got full custody of my kids, I began to have someone come in the morning to get them to school. I usually leave the house about 5:30, so the sitter comes then and works 2½ hrs to get them to school.

Our area has several “day care” facilities that have a small bus that takes them to and back from the schools. The parents drop them off before school time and pick them up in the late afternoon.

You pay someone. Either a before and after school facility which transports your kids for you or a private individual.

I forgot to say that I have a small social network who scoop up my child at the same time as theirs if there is some sort of crisis that shuts the school. I often get a text message from them before the one from the school. But I really know I am lucky with this one.

I’m a single mother and I have not yet read the previous responses. I can tell you what I do. I work 9:30 to 5:30 with a 45 minute to one hour commute, for starters.

Either she gets on the school bus at 8:10–8:15, and then I get my at together and get in the car, or what I’m doing lately is driving her to school around 8:20–8:30 (school starts at 8:30 but she can be dropped off as early as 7:50), and then I continue onward to work. After work, I pay for the Y at the school, which is essentially day care. I pay about 400 dollars per month for 4 nights. It’s until 6:30, so I get out at 5:30 and then have the ride. On one night of the week, she has tennis lessons and then a friend picks her up there and watches her.

In the past, I’ve paid up to $1,000 per month for day care combined with preschool. Then it went down to 700 per month (my mom picked up a few days). To me, $400 per month is cheap. Luckily I have a good job.

I’m now retired, but when my wife and I were both working, we made arrangements with providers for early drop off and late pickup. In some cases, the school had on-campus arrangements.

@Espiritus_Corvus But I know how real wages have fallen off in all sectors over the past fifty years and the economic demands now require both parents to work fulltime.
It is definitely a shame. Don’t get me started on this topic, I might not know when to stop. The hard-fought fight for equal opportunity for women should have provided a scenario in which the job of homemaker could command the respect it truly deserves, and could be fulfilled by either parent.

School buses?

When I was a kid plenty of the other kids got dropped at their babysitter’s house by the school bus in the afternoon.

Lots of ad hoc ways to work it out. People do all the time. Not easy but it can be done – and is.

The more difficult days were when one or both of our kids were sick. Kids in elementary school get sick a lot because parents have to work and send their sick kids to school. My wife would simply have to cancel her classes she was to teach and tend to the boys. I know we had it easy compared to many moms for who missing work was not an option.

This is why I’m never moving out of state lol! Too many relatives to help out and my sister owns two day cares.

@Mariah School buses were a life save for me too. When I moved to this town, as a single mom I managed to get my kids enrolled in a school out of town, outside of the district I lived in. That gave me time to get them ready for school, and when they left for the bus I got myself ready for work.
However, kids in “town” don’t get bus service. The logic is, there is a school close by.

I think in larger cities kids don’t get bus service unless the government says they have go to a school outside of their district (ie busing.)

As a daycare provider, getting kids to and from school was part of my job.

I spent many hours picking my grandkids up from school, and dropping them off.

Oh, regarding your concerns in hiring someone you don’t know: You have to make the best choice you can. Get referrals. Unless they have family, that’s what everyone has to do.

When I was little (think 6–10) my mom would pack us up and make us walk the quarter mile to the bus stop in the morning and wait for the bus. The bus would drop us off after school and we would do the same walk back where we would eat pizza from the fridge and proceed to the garage for wood and nails and hammers to build a really sketchy tree-house that dangled over a creek until our parents got home.

It is a miracle I am still alive. Actually not a miracle. We just weren’t stupid and we were given proper training with a table-saw.

Kids walk or take the bus if they go to a public school in their district. It used to be that the elementary started the latest, and the high school the earliest, but some school districts got smart and realized young children might need to be escorted to the bus or to school, so an earlier start for them is better. It gives a parent time to drop their child off and make it to work in time. Teens, who can fair for themselves, also need more sleep time in the morning, and so later start times make sense. Some school districts still have not made the switch, and are very resistant.

Many schools have breakfast available now, so children who need to be dropped off early are not the sole kids in the school. Also, many elementary schools have aftercare. The kids can play games, do homework, sports, all sorts of activities.

I took a bus when I was in K-4. Once in a while I walked from school with my mom. Then I moved and my elementary was just a 5 minute walk. My junior high was a 20–25 minute walk. We kids walked by ourselves to school.

@JLeslie you and @johnpowell are referring to a time when Mom was home to field you, to monitor you. The OP’s question is assuming she is not. She’s asking how does one go about finding that replacement.

@Dutchess_III :: My mom did all the accounting and office work at my dads welding and machine shop. She worked longer hours than he did. Dinner was normally Taco Bell she grabbed on the way home from work.

@Dutchess_III No I’m not. When my mom worked my sister and I walked to school on our own. I was 10 and she was 7. We walked home on our own, and my mom came home a couple of hours later. I’m not saying that was a great thing. My sister was too young, but I was fine with it. My mom was able to work flex hours, so she was able to leave very early and get back home relatively early. Some days she could drop us off at elementary school, but she never drove us home. We were basically latchkey. Almost all my friends were.

When we were younger my mom only worked part-time and the days she wasn’t home when we got home we had a babysitter.

My niece and nephew stayed in aftercare at school until their mom picked them up after work.

Some people, if it’s possible, will either work part time or not at all while the child is small. Believe me, as someone who paid over 1,000 per month for child care, it ate up a big chunk of pay for me when my daughter was little.

Some will try to work a job or adjust their schedule so they are not working late hours. Sometimes if one or both can work some shift work, one may work at night and one will work during the day. How that works for people who want to have sex, I’m not sure but they make it work.

Some schools have after care at the school itself. My daughter goes to a program where she’s paid up until 6:30 pm. It’s for this reason that she is not a child who wants to or is able to go to bed at 8 or even 9 pm. For people who don’t have that option, they pay a babysitter to pick the child up or be home when the bus drops the child off, so the child is supervised by the babysitter until the parent gets home.

Those are some options that people use to make it work.

@jca :: My sister worked at Symantec. Yes, think anti-virus and disk doctor. After childcare for Corey (he was 3) she would have actually made more collecting welfare. It was so fantastically expensive.

I did it for years:

6AM Wake up
7AM Out the door
8AM Drop daughter at school
8:30AM Arrive at work
1:30PM Leave work
2PM Pick up daughter
2:15PM Daughter to grandma’s
2:45PM Back to work
5:30PM Leave work

Did that 5-days a week for five years — until my wife got a more flexible schedule. Now, I drop off and my wife picks up.

There you go @cookieman. As I said, I got my kids on a bus schedule. They were out the door to the bus stop at 7:00. They got home at about 4:00 and I got home about an hour later. They were 8 and 10. I guess I’d get SRS called on me now.

When they got into Middle School and HS they walked. Another reason I moved to this small town. In town you can walk anywhere.

@cookieman I’m exhausted just reading that schedule. I would hate it. I could do it, but I’d hate it. I hate 8:30–5:00 for 5 days straight to begin with, add in that other stuff, yuck.

@JLeslie: It is a lot, but I learned to use being in my car to my advantage. I have listened to thousands of podcasts and audiobooks.

^^It has its rewards.

@Dutchess_III: And… (not to oversell it) two nights a week for many of those years, I taught a class from 6PM to 10PM.

^ Give the man a cookie!

@janbb: Yes please.

I took evening course at University 2 nights a week and on Saturday mornings. And played volleyball 2 days a week. We were Power Rangers then @cookieman!

@Dutchess_III: Indeed. That’s a lot of work right there. Come, share my cookie.

Can’t! Gotta run! But thanks!