What is matrescence? Part 2

My eldest started school this month. She goes in at 8:40am and comes out at 3:10pm.

Which means that if I drop her off and get home, I can start work just after 9am if I’m lucky. I need to stop working around 2:30pm to get stuff together and get there in time to pick her up. That’s five and a half hours. On a good day.

I run my own business. We can’t afford to live on a single or part-time salary. Wraparound childcare (the before and after school clubs that would extend those hours) is full. And even if it wasn’t, that would cost more. Even more than that, she flat-out doesn’t want to go. She needs me right now, as she adjusts to this big new world.

I’ve already written a piece about the fact that the 40-hour working week is 100 years old. So let’s look at the school week.

In the late 1800s, compulsory schooling was enshrined in law. School boards set hours to roughly between 9am-4pm to maximise the use of natural winter daylight. When schools started providing lunches in the mid-20^th century, children no longer needed 2 hours to walk home and back again, so the lunch break shortened, bringing the end of the school day forward. At the same time, the 9-5 working day became the white-collar standard, which was fine when there was someone at home.

But when the economy shifted to a dual-income model in the late 20^th century, neither the school hours nor the work hours shifted to compensate. They both contain the assumption that there is someone at home. But around 75% of mothers and over 90% of fathers in the UK are now in paid employment. And half of all families have both parents working full-time. 

Throw school holidays into the mix. Children are on holiday for roughly 71 weekdays per year, while full-time workers get a legal minimum of 28 days of leave. Even if you have two parents who don’t take overlapping annual leave (bye bye family holiday), there are 15 days of childcare unaccounted for.

This is the peculiar state of modern parenthood: the structures around us were built for a world that no longer exists. We have to carefully manoeuvre our way around the gaps between work hours and school hours, absorbing the additional stress because that’s normal. 

It doesn’t add up. The nuclear family simply cannot do it all. And that’s partly because it was never meant to. 

We were never meant to do this alone

Throughout most of human history, children were raised communally. Not by one person, or even two, but by a wider community, so-called “alloparents” made up of grandparents, neighbours, siblings…just the people who happened to be nearby. Care was distributed. No one was expected to absorb it all. And when things felt impossible, there was usually someone nearby to say: I know. You’re right. Me too.

We have slowly, incrementally, dismantled all of that. The modern nuclear family of two adults, sometimes one, sealed off in a house and managing everything privately is a remarkably recent and remarkably isolated unit.

We can artificially rebuild that village. But it consists of paid-for logistics like childminders, before- and after-school clubs, and activity classes. Things that keep life moving. They aren’t real community. They don’t replace the secure, continuous connection that we increasingly understand children of all ages need to thrive. We remain siloed islands of busyness. 

Because into that isolation, we have added a relentless cultural expectation of productivity. The dishwasher is a small but telling example. It genuinely made life easier. I’d struggle without mine. But what it also did was clear half an hour from the daily schedule. Instead of that half an hour becoming rest, it became capacity. Time that was an enforced moment of mindlessness could now be filled with something else. Something useful. Something productive.

This is the trap matrescence lands you in. Slowing down to a baby’s pace, spending an afternoon copying each other’s expressions, exploring each other’s faces, doing what looks like nothing from the outside…it feels wrong. Lazy. Wasteful. Because we have been so thoroughly trained to measure the day by what got done.

So it’s easy to feel like you’ve failed if the laundry hasn’t been put away, the beds haven’t been made, the dinner was late. But you haven’t failed at anything real. You’ve failed to meet an unrealistic standard of shallow productivity. Visible tasks. Busy work. Instead, you’ve done something that doesn’t show up on a list but matters enormously: being present with your child.

Bonding isn’t unproductive. It produces emotional connection, happy hormones, and the foundation of a secure human being. It just doesn’t produce anything you can tick off a to-do list.

The problem is the often silent, always insidious narrative around us: that bonding doesn’t count. That it should happen naturally, without effort or time dedicated to it. And nobody is there to tell you otherwise, because you’re doing it largely alone, in a nuclear family unit that was never designed to carry this much.

This would be hard enough if matrescence were short. If there were a clear point at which the identity reorganisation settled, the isolation eased, and the new version of yourself became familiar. But that’s not how it works.

Matrescence doesn’t end when you think it does

One of the things that surprises people most about matrescence is how long it lasts. Researchers who study matrescence suggest that the acute phase lasts at least two to three years.

And according to psychologist Dr Aurelie Athan, who expanded the original definition, matrescence may arguably last a lifetime, recurring with each child and resurfacing at new milestones. Weaning. Returning to work. Starting school.

My eldest starting school reopened questions I thought I’d already answered. What do I want from work, now that the shape of the day has changed again? Who am I, in this version?

These aren’t questions that appeared from nowhere. They’re the same questions matrescence has been asking all along, cropping up again at a new threshold.

And that matters for how we think about support. If matrescence resurfaces at milestones, then the moments when parents most need support are not confined to the early weeks. They’re at the transitions, when the identity question reopens.

Finding it hard is not a personal failing

We live in a society that built its structures around a version of parenthood that no longer exists, in unnaturally isolated nuclear family units, with a cultural narrative that treats slowness and presence as laziness. Meanwhile, new parents are living through a transition that has never been fully recognised, lasts longer than expected, in conditions that were never designed to support it. 

Finding that hard is not a personal failing. It’s a structural one.

Whether you’re in the early weeks of matrescence or navigating a new milestone years later, coaching can be a useful space to put it all down and think clearly.