Should I pick up my son at “parents’ time”?

Should I pick up my son at parent time »? During my maternity leave, my eldest son, knowing that I was no longer available, made me discover this highly guilt-inducing expression invented by the school. For those who don’t know, parent time is 4:30 p.m., the end of class. Does this mean that when I went to pick it up at 6 p.m. at the recreation center, I was not a parent?

There is worse. The fascinating sociologist François de Singly, a great specialist in the family and education, and a no less fascinating colleague, explained to me recently that we have long talked about “mom time” to describe this time of day. And for good reason. Under a radiant June sun (have you also forgotten that feeling in your thermal sieve blocked at 19 degrees?), I was able to see that 99% of the parents massed in front of the school gate at 4:30 p.m. were ….mothers. Of course, there were surely among the lot of women whose staggered hours allowed them to finish their working day earlier. But the statistics say otherwise.

When a child is born, it is overwhelmingly women who adapt their professional activity to family life. To them part-time, parental leave and career breaks. Thus, we learn from INSEE, 7% of inactive men are for family reasons, against 54% of inactive women, and this, for years.

A state of affairs so rooted in people’s mentalities that a third of the population (27% of women and 40% of men) declare that it is normal for women to stop working to take care of their children figures up six points compared to last year), according to a chilling study by the High Council for Equality between Women and Men. It does not matter if they will pay dearly for this dedication at the time of retirement, as the debates around the reform wanted by Emmanuel Macron remind us.

I have since returned to work and my son to the recreation center. All guilt is taken from me when he yells at me for coming ” too early “ and that he has “couldn’t finish his paper airplanes”.