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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m just a few years younger than you are.  When my kids were little, my husband’s work more or less expected that I would handle everything at home, and he would be available at work.  (It didn’t matter that I also worked for the same hospital and knew is boss and coworkers.)

My sister is 35, and things are so different.  Her husband does close to half, and that’s what’s expected.  He took paternity leave when the kids were born, takes time off when they are sick half the time, goes to the doctor with them half the time, etc.

As a working woman, I think this is good.

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I'm 45 with the same set up as your sister. My husband does more doctor and dentist appointments than I do, he does half the work around the house, and he takes them to their sports half the time. He also gets them ready for school and puts them to bed half the time. Same with cooking. We alternate days on this stuff so I know he actually is doing half, it's not something I'm trying to convince myself of. He also took the first four weeks off, then another four after I went back to work after 16 weeks. He dealt with kids in the morning because my commute was worse so I left before they got up and I got home earlier in the afternoons so we each had them alone for the same amount of time M-F and neither of us has ever worked weekends. Now they're older and take the bus to and from school and we both work from home so things are much easier, but he has always been 50% responsible for everything related to the family. [/quote]

It sounds like you were older when you had your kids and rather than being the parent of older teens, you are more in the millennial group that the OP is complaining about.  You and your husband both take time off, won’t work weekends ever, come in late after dropping kids off, leave early for daycare pickup and to make dinner, etc.

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I said our kids take the bus to and from school, so there are no daycare drop offs or pick ups. Before they were in school we had a full-time nanny.

We take the time off we are provided with PTO (and not all of it at that). We generally take a week at Spring break, a week at Thanksgiving, two weeks at Christmas (our two firms are actually both closed for over a week then anyway) and then a day off here and there for other things. We've never gone into negative PTO and actually have a lot of leave saved up because we don't use it all.

We don't work weekends because we get our work done during the week. There have been exceptions, generally for trials when I did litigation, but now we prioritize starting our days earlier so that we can get everything done and not need to work on the weekend. We have "real" jobs, with billable hours and other requirements, but we also push back on ridiculous expectations. I'm not going to answer your 11 pm email immediately. You can get a response during working hours. My husband is going to take paternity leave because he is equally as responsible for our children. We've never had problems getting promoted, being liked, earning bonuses, etc. Our HHI is $500K so we're not millionaires but we're not not rich. [/quote]

Good for you!  I think this is all great and a huge step in the right direction for two parent working families.  
It was NOT like this twenty years ago.  My husband and I were both physicians at the same hospital, and it was expected that he take no leave, work whenever needed, and that I would take care of everything related to the kids.  My boss was a boomer, and she sounded a lot like OP saying that in her day women didn’t even mention that they had kids at work, let alone that they needed to leave by 6 or 7pm to take care of them.

I hear you, and I see the young men and women I work with, and I am SO HAPPY that things are changing!  
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