If You Want Work/Life Balance, Embrace The 4:4 Approach

Being a parent, and responsible for raising well-balanced, decent children, is already a pretty hard ask.

But doing all of that at the same time as juggling a full-time job seems just about impossible.

If you’re one of the many Australian parents currently struggling with this conundrum, we might have a solution for you: It’s called the 4:4 Life. What is it? Well it’s a solution that just might be what your family needs, as long as you can make it work for you.

What Is The 4:4 Life?

Essentially, the 4:4 Life works on a simple premise: that both parents invest equally in both work and childcare. This means that each parent works 4 days a week, and is available for their family the rest of the days.

Genius right?

Working four days a week means that each parent has an equal amount of time to put into their careers, building their skills and superannuation, as well as to participate in family and child caring. So you have time to work as well as time to go to the gym, get your food shopping done, help kids with homework or undertake one of the hundred of other tasks involved in creating a healthy parenting environment, many of which are often neglected.

We Don’t Have Enough Time

The 4:4 Life makes sense for busy modern families because we’ve seen just how difficult it is for both parents to work while also having enough time to spend with their children. Sure, productivity and having women in the workforce is important, and we aren’t saying that it’s not. But if you don’t have outside care available, in the form of a grandparent or nanny, parenting and working can seem like the marathon that never ends.

This situation is felt even more acutely in areas where the cost of living is higher. As parents struggle to buy the house, get to work on time, pay off the car and send their kids to schools, there’s a need to put in more hours to break even. And more hours at work means less hours at home.

A Cultural Change

For women, getting into the workforce after having children has been a dream that took decades to achieve. The only problem is that while our concept of whether it’s ‘appropriate’ for a mother to get back to work after having children has changed, our expectations of her duties at home have not.

It was just last year that the UN released a report that showed women do 2.5 times more unpaid work than men. In Australia, these numbers are more or less on par, with women doing 311 minutes of unpaid care and domestic work every day compared to just 172 minutes for men. You might think that this is because men do more paid work, but you’d be wrong. A survey undertaken by Household, Income, Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) showed that women do more hours of paid employment, housework and childcare combined regardless of which parent made the most money, or even when both parents made an equal wage.

So why is this? Well it’s all about cultural expectations and equality. It shouldn’t really be about who does what, but about equal responsibility for parents across the board. Instead of talking about the challenges of working mothers, let’s bring the term ‘working fathers’ into the equation, and understand that parenting is not something that should be shouldered by one party, just as paid work and housework are not done by one party alone.

Let’s Make Time For Harmony

At it’s core, the concept of the 4:4 Life is balance, harmony and rest. It allows parents time to unwind, to show their children that they can relax, and to prove to them that family is important. It shows partners that all kinds of work, paid and unpaid, is to be shared, and encourages a more community-focused approach to raising kids.

Now, the 4:4 Life is not going to be an easy shift. For one, it involves us as a society moving forward into the idea that remote working can be just as effective as showing up at the office, and that 40 hours worked is not necessarily the measure of a successful week. It also requires men to rethink how important they are in their children’s lives on a day-to-day basis, which might mean changing the way we as a society approach masculinity.

It’s all a challenge, but one that is as worthwhile as any other change we could make, not just for our kids and the next generation, but for ourselves.

What do you think?

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