Going back to school can be a headache, also for parents. Many reduce their hours, turn to their relatives, give the house key to their 13-year-old son. Or they exhaust all options at the same time. This is September for Alicia Grau (45 years old), a Valencian mother who juggles making her work life compatible with taking care of her four children as they go back to school, which threatens to be the most expensive in history. "Conciliation has become a luxury available to very few," he laments.
A few days before the start of classes in many schools and colleges this Monday, Grau is already beginning to prepare. Months before, in fact. From June to September, she and her husband resort to a reduction in working hours to be able to take care of their children, which reduces the monthly budget, but "in the end it pays off because, with four children, summer school is outrageous." Additionally, for the first week of September, they work in reverse shifts - she in the afternoons and he in the mornings - so that the children are never alone.
However, they are on the verge of the real conflict that breaks out with the start of the course: classes in this time of transition end at 1:00 p.m., but Alicia's work day extends until 2:00 p.m. This is the time in which parents most feel the lack of work flexibility, which already affects almost half of workers (47.6%) in Spain. These data belong to the Study on Well-being and Occupational Health in Spain 2026, prepared by Edenred, which also indicates that 24.9% only have limited options and another 22.7% do not have any.
"We know that this represents an extra effort for companies and that it is not easy for them to reconcile in all positions, but we also think that it is essential that they give tax credits to companies that favor conciliation," says Grau, who is also president of the FamilyUp association. With this, he believes that companies would favor conciliation to a greater extent and it would even be an advantage for retaining talent. And it is not far from reality. Eight out of 10 workers consider that conciliation improves the company's attractiveness as an employer and reinforces commitment to the organization, according to the latest data collected by InfoJobs.
However, by not finding these flexibility options, half of voluntary job changes are already linked to reasons related to not having sufficient work flexibility and 65% of those surveyed consider it difficult or very difficult to find a job with better conciliation conditions. They see this every day - especially at the start of school - Patricia García (38 years old) and her husband Sergio Boda (40 years old), directors of the Semillas Nursery School (Madrid) and parents of a seven-year-old boy who is in second grade. "Now at school you can see many parents with the computer in the yard or on the stairs because in the end they are teleworking for a little while," says García. "The children have many months of vacation, we as parents cannot spend so much time standing still dedicating it to them."
For them, reconciling has not been easy either due to their status as self-employed. To cover the five days that their child is already at normal hours (until 5:00 p.m.), they take turns between fathers and grandmothers. "If we don't work, we don't get paid. So only thanks to the grandmothers, most of the time, we achieve everything... and sometimes not even with that," they say. Without this help, they would have to hire someone from outside, which they find more difficult due to the mistrust and responsibility it entails, especially when traveling by car.
Furthermore, due to the long hours that can extend until 9:00 p.m., the only way they can advance in the management of their business is to sacrifice their own rest. "Almost always" they start working on the computer at night, once their child has fallen asleep, in order to ensure "quality time" with them on weekends and free afternoons. For this reason, according to InfoJobs data, among those who find it more difficult to reconcile, flexible hours remain the most requested measure (53%).
