The idea that you need to save up a certain amount of money before having kids is so common it can feel almost like a moral law. But it isn’t, and I said as much recently when a reader wrote in to my advice column asking if she’s too poor to have a baby. I argued that we don’t owe our kids a certain level of material wealth.

And then I got a question from another parent: my editor, Katie Courage. She pointed out that what also plagues her as a parent is time poverty. Maybe we don’t have to guarantee kids a certain amount of money, but what about a certain amount of time?

Here’s Katie’s question, and my response below. Your latest column, responding to the reader who asked if she was too poor to bring another kid into the world, was refreshingly hope-inducing! Money questions around raising kids feel so ubiquitous no matter what circumstance your family is in, so this was really worth reading for a totally flipped framework on the issue.

The resource-scarcity concern that is perpetually circling in my mind, alongside the financial one, is time. As a working parent, I constantly feel time-poor, especially when it comes to quality time with my kids. So much of the time I get to have with them is consumed with the simple logistics of life.

Evenings really only have room for dinner and bedtimes. Mornings are a blur of breakfasts, navigating clothing choices, work meetings, and school dropoffs. And a good portion of weekends go to simply fighting entropy (that is, laundry, cleaning, yardwork).

We do pack in plenty of kid activities, time with friends, and weekend camping trips. But it seems like it would be so much better for my kids if I could materialize more undirected hours of puzzle-doing, book-reading, and rambling nature walks by the creek together. I was raised in the early days of intensive parenting (with so many amazing creek walks!), and I had my first child around the culmination of Instagram parenting influencers pushing this sort of style.

If you’ve watched more than two episodes of Bluey, you’ve seen how this era calibrated expectations for parents to be almost constantly available for child-focused, child-directed activities. But if I let dishes pile up in order to play all weekend (as I read as an actual suggestion in a 2010s parenting book) or if I skip out on exercise to pick the kids up early, I know I won’t be showing up for the time together as energized and as minimally stressed as I can be. So I find myself in a constant inner battle, and the only winner is seemingly constant indistinct guilt.

Is there a way of looking at this that feels less zero-sum? I really sympathize with this feeling of time poverty — and I bet almost every working parent does, too. But I want to share some research that might make you feel better.

First, you’re actually spending a lot of time with your kids, relative to middle-class parents of the not-too-distant past. Moms now spend more time with their kids than they did in 1965, even though the majority of moms weren’t in the paid workforce then. Dads are also doing more than they did back then.

So why does everyone I know still feel like they’re not hanging out with their kids enough? The problem has to do with that word “enough.” To know what constitutes enough of something, you have to know what goal you’re aiming for. Historically, this was pretty simple: Your goal was to raise kids who could work — typically on your farm, or maybe in a factory, mill, or mine.

Sure, you also felt love for your kids, but at the end of the day children were an economic asset. You needed to feed and shelter them so they could produce income for the family. But in the 1930s, the United States banned oppressive child labor, and kids stopped being wage earners.

Now that they were economically worthless, we had to ask ourselves: What role do they play in our lives? Our collective answer was to sentimentalize them more than ever before — to treat them as precious, not financially, but emotionally. As author Jennifer Senior has documented, our collective script about parenting flipped upside down in the decades between then and now.

Kids no longer work for their parents; instead, parents work for their kids. And what’s the ultimate goal of the modern parent? Buttonhole one of them in the street and they’ll tell you: “I just want my kids to be happy!!” (potentially with some soul-rattling desperation in their voice).

Trouble is, happiness is a very elusive goal. Even a single ingredient of it, professional success, is elusive — and getting more so by the day. And so we end up with the intensive parenting culture you described, where parents expect themselves to spend endless hours on stuff that they hope will enrich their kids, boosting their self-esteem, their skills, and ultimately, their success.

Music lessons, soccer games, karate, chess, elaborate craft projects, and the long et cetera of child-focused activities. But pursuing happiness is an unbounded search process.