Working parents can’t control everything—use buffers and routines

A Pew Research Center study finds working parents often blur work and parenting. The piece argues that the “planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long tasks take—quietly steals free time, and offers three practical ways parents can counter it: pad

Working while parenting can feel a little like juggling flaming swords: everything works fine—until a surprise arrives. A “come pick up your feverish kid” call from daycare can derail an afternoon. A last-minute project deadline can collide with little league games. The result is familiar to many parents: defending your commitment to work while wondering how you missed the moment your child’s home run cleared the field.

A Pew Research Center study captures the pressure in plain language. finding working parents feel like they’re “supposed to work like [they] don’t have kids and parent like [they] don’t have a job.” The strain is tied to how workplaces and other institutions are set up—still under the assumption that every employee has a stay-at-home spouse managing the children.

Parents, the study’s framing suggests, aren’t looking to work less. They just don’t want to feel like they’re constantly missing out—on their kids’ childhood, and on basic self-care.

There’s no single move an individual household can make to fix a system that tries to squeeze 28 hours of productivity out of an average day. But there is something parents can change about how they handle their time. and the difference can be practical: more breathing room. fewer cascading delays. and less time spent cleaning up problems created by “not enough time.”.

The culprit shows up early—when planning goes wrong.

In one household, the pattern looked ordinary at first. A local middle school was only 7 minutes away by car. yet a 12-year-old son was just barely on time nearly every day of 6th grade. and tardy the rest of the time. The story shifts from “how could this happen?” to “it was our fault. ” because his repeated lateness traced back to his parents’ expectations.

They believed—despite plenty of evidence—that getting everyone ready would take an hour each morning. That meant feeding and dressing their son, getting pets squared away, loading up the middle-schooler and high-schooler, and managing the usual morning requirements without major setbacks.

But mornings don’t stay tidy. In their case. the planning optimism didn’t account for bickering. misplaced homework. a life-shattering hangnail. lost coffee. the dog getting unearned freedom without a leash. cranberry juice spilled onto clean laundry. or even bleeding—let alone all of them in one morning.

This is where the cognitive bias comes in. The planning fallacy. first coined in 1979 by economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. describes a common tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take. even with experience suggesting those tasks run longer. The article ties the mistake to two forces: a bias toward optimistic outcomes and “anchoring” to an original plan.

And once that bias becomes habit, it doesn’t just create stressful mornings. It can steal free time from working parents across the week.

Nearly six out of ten working parents take care of work-related tasks while they’re with their children, according to the Pew Research Center study. A solid 70% of parents handle parenting tasks while they are at work.

Some of the boundary blur comes from hard constraints. If you need to make a call to a teacher, orthodontist, or camp, it can be nearly impossible to avoid doing it during working hours. Employees can also be handed more work than can realistically be finished in a typical workday.

But the piece argues that a lot of the week’s waking hours can get swallowed by the planning fallacy—especially when deadlines tempt people to assume “everything goes normally” will be enough time.

Take the example of a report promised by next Monday. It’s plausible—until it isn’t. On Wednesday morning, the Jenkins file needed for the report is corrupted, forcing hours with IT. Then on Thursday, a daughter has a half day, cutting off work time that afternoon. On Friday, the office adds a mandatory team-building exercise to plant trees together.

At that point, the deadline pressure turns into a tradeoff. The only way to finish the report by next Monday is to pull time from somewhere else—working through the weekend. That means missing out not just on family time. but also time for household chores. grocery shopping. and self-care. activities that can help prevent future planning fallacy headaches.

The other option—asking for an extension—depends on a kind of flexibility that employees don’t always have.

The real sting is how personal the correction would feel if time travel were possible: telling your boss you’d have the report by next Monday instead. But in the real world, the delay has to be managed without a rewind button.

There’s no magic way to fully defeat the planning fallacy. The piece stresses how difficult it is to combat even when you’re proactive. because humans struggle with probability—especially compound probabilities. where one small problem multiplies into several. Plans often assume everything will be typical.

That idea is captured through a quotation tied to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Still, working parents can push back using practical tactics that make “normal” less likely to blow up the schedule.

First: add time to every estimate. Build padding into both work and home plans. Giving more time than expected on work projects can help set boundaries around home life. while padding estimates for kid-related tasks can reduce family stress and lessen the likelihood of dealing with fallout from tired. cranky kids.

Second: befriend the Sunday Reset. Unexpected snags are one reason plans break—but so are the known inconveniences people forget to calendar. The article points to random school spirit weeks as an example. A Sunday Reset is described as a weekly planning session that prepares families for the next seven days so they feel ready for what’s coming.

Third: do something today that you’ll be glad for tomorrow. Small, preventive actions can protect time later. Putting keys on a hook. for example. means you won’t be scrambling to find them in the morning. which reduces the chance of falling into the morning “out-the-door” planning fallacy. Less scrambling also helps prevent a domino effect of wasted time.

The theme running through all three strategies is simple: stop treating “estimated time” like a guarantee.

Working and parenting in 2026, the article says, is not for the faint of heart. Workplaces still expect employees to commit to the office as if a stay-at-home parent is holding down the fort at home. while parents are dealing with more hands-on realities than they faced in the “benign neglect” they received.

That commitment leaves many with little time for themselves, friends, or hobbies—along with guilty feelings. Individuals can’t rewrite the systemic assumptions, but the piece argues that changing how you look at time can still help you find more hours for your family.

It closes with a specific promise to readers who recognize the pattern: recognizing how you may be falling for the planning fallacy can help reclaim several hours per week. When that bias happens at work. the underestimated time often gets made up somewhere else. usually by missing time with children. When it happens at home. it can trigger stressful situations that bleed into work time. including overtired kids having meltdowns and refusing to go to daycare.

Padding time estimates, doing a Sunday Reset every week, and making things easier for your future self are presented as the three levers that can reduce the planning fallacy’s impact. Put together, they can help buy back free time—the kind that doesn’t arrive only after the weekend is already gone.

working parents Pew Research Center planning fallacy time management parenting and work Sunday Reset Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky Douglas Hofstadter