By Meenal Arora

New Delhi, Nov 27 (IANSlife): Gone are the days when the responsibility of earning was only shouldered by fathers while mothers were limited to managing the household. Now that both parents need to work for better wellbeing and facilitate every necessity to their kids, their lives often turn into a frenzied routine. What adds to this hectic lifestyle of modern working parents are the early school-going hours of their children. This makes balancing their own career one of the biggest challenges.

A child who starts going to school needs constant parental assistance for better learning outcomes in their academic as well as social lives.

However, it turns out to be an impossible task for working parents to spend adequate time with their children due to their busy office hours and children's early school timings. While these parents are usually engrossed in their 9-5 jobs, children's school timings are generally between 7 am and 1 pm. This leaves the parents with no choice but to hire a babysitter or maid to look after their children when they reach home after school. In doing so, parents mostly fail to keep a check on what their child is learning or doing after school hours. Parental absence, in today's age, has emerged as a growing concern for children, affecting their cognitive abilities and turning them aggressive in their approach.

A lower level of parents' participation in the child's overall surroundings during infancy, significantly affects their coping mechanism to deal with anxiety and makes them incapable of interacting with the society at large.

There is indeed a whole lot of challenges, which working parents struggle with nowadays. Early school timings are found to be the biggest contributor to this parenting gap. On the contrary, imagine if children's school timings are aligned with their parents' working hours, how comfortable would it be for both of them. To make this possible, school authorities must take concrete steps towards plugging this gap and introduce a full-day child-centered curriculum. Doing so can turn out to be a game-changer for both parents and children.

As a result, parents will also be able to balance their careers while helping their child to excel in theirs. This could be an intelligent and effective way to address the growing parental absence among today's children.

Meenal Arora is the founder-director of the Shemford Group of Futuristic Schools.