Thanksgiving break starts on Monday, but parents work through Wednesday. Why can’t schools and workplaces get on the same page?

It’s Thanksgiving Eve. Are you feeling festive—or totally exhausted? Turkey Day tomorrow marks the unofficial start of the holidays, a period that is part-heartwarming, part-stressful, especially for women who shoulder the season’s merry-making and administrative load. 

In recent years, the burden seems to have grown with many schools closing for the entire week of Thanksgiving. U.S. Employers, meanwhile, typically shutter for Thanksgiving and Black Friday, leaving parents in a bind of how to care for their children. 

Extended Thanksgiving breaks typify the nightmare gulf between yearly school schedules and parents’ paid time off, with women typically scrambling to plug the holes. A TikTok creator struck a nerve in January when she compared her and her husband’s combined PTO (35 days) with her kids’ days off or half-days (37). “The math just does not add up,” she said. 

It’s not just a U.S. Problem either. A recent survey of 1,200 U.K. Parents found that 26% took unpaid time off during the summer months to manage childcare, with three-fourths of that share taking off five days or more. 

“Our school days and our work days are misaligned because they rely on an expectation that a family member, and most often a woman, is going to be doing the unpaid care work that allows other people to go 9-5 or 9-7 or 9-9,” says Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at New America, a think tank. “We’ve also created an economic system in which, in general, all adults in a family have to work. These outdated gendered expectations about unpaid labor and family caregiving don’t match up with economic realities, or, honestly, with a lot of people’s desires to be full and equal contributors to the economy through paid work.”

On Tuesday, a campaign by Paid Leave For All urged workers to set honest out-of-office messages about their caregiving responsibilities and call for basic paid leave policies. Examples online ranged from the tender (“I have a son who I want to be present for and parents who want to spend their later years with family”) to the lighthearted (“I’m spending Thanksgiving with my two tween boys who will absolutely deny that we’re cuddling”) to the politically-charged (“If you need me urgently please contact my legislators and ask why this still isn’t paid”). 

Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All, says the initiative is intended to draw attention to the 450,000 U.S. Women who have left their jobs this year and the care crisis that’s growing more acute as Baby Boomers age and tougher immigration policies shrink the care workforce. “If we don’t do something, finally, to change our policies, it’s going to impact all of us,” she told me. 

Working parents will solve the puzzle of this week by enlisting grandparents, finding and paying for additional childcare, or taking leave themselves. A friend of mine said she’s letting her kids be “TV zombies” for two days while she works from home, and my Instagram feed is flooded with influencers sharing ideas for how to keep kids occupied (links to buy are included, of course!). 

To be sure, this week can be a joyful time. “A lot of women don’t begrudge, in fact, they really value the time and energy that they’re putting into maintaining family and community relationships,” says Nancy Folbre, professor emerita of economics at UMass Amherst. “But to the extent that it’s symbolic of a larger inequality and levels of stress and loss of leisure, it can create some pretty burdensome resentments and bad feelings.”

It’s natural on Thanksgiving to call for gratitude for the unpaid labor American women provide—it’s worth some $1.5 trillion a year, after all. But it may also be time to dwell on the factors—like the school-workplace disconnect—that demand that labor in the first place. 

“There are just all these structural things that seem like relics of a past era that no longer fulfill a function,” says Folbre. “So, you look at it and you think, ‘Well, is that an architecture that is immovable, or is that an architecture that can be renovated?’”

Now there’s a conversation starter for the Thanksgiving dinner table.

Claire Zillman
[email protected]

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