"Institutional Lag" Is One Big Reason Working Moms Are Barely Holding It Together

I fully expected mornings to be stressful once I became a mom. Waking up and immediately having to take care of other people, get them where they need to be, all while setting myself up for the day I need to squeeze in while they’re at school or daycare? It’s a lot.

But it turns out, the afternoons as a mom are where things get really chaotic. And I don’t just mean that “witching hour” right before dinner time where everybody’s over-stimulated and over-tired and over-all-of-it. Afternoons, when the school day ends at 3 p.m., but you have work until 5 p.m. and after-school daycare ends at 5:30 p.m. and soccer starts at 6:00 p.m. — that’s where the true chaos happens.

And while all of us are running around like crazy, trying to follow every “sports mom” hack we find on TikTok and promising ourselves that a crockpot dinner will always be the solution (except, oh shit, you forgot to do it before you left for work, I guess it’s McDonald’s again after ballet class), we’re blaming ourselves. We’re doing something wrong. It’s not supposed to be this hard. Surely there’s a solution, right?

*screams into void* RIGHT?

Like so many other things that plague moms in our society today — we can blame an archaic setup that was constructed back when things were very, very different. And in this particular case, it’s called the “institutional lag.”

What is “institutional lag”?

The phrase “institutional lag” has been around for a while and can be used to describe a ton of different situations. Its loose definition is “trying to ‘adapt the old’ when it is no longer adequate” or a period where socio-economic norms are lagging behind technological advances. Basically, it’s trying to keep a system that was created without some of the more modern things we have in place now — like a system where there was always a parent at home to take care of children.

In an Instagram reel, Melissa Panzer, whose account focuses on discussing the “mental load” of working moms, she describes the current school-work-extracurriculars setup as feeling impossible to handle because everything is still based on an early 20th century model. In those days, she says, kids were expected to come home and help take care of their younger siblings, to work, and to perform household labor — always with a parent at home to care for them. “And that unpaid labor was built into the system,” she says.

It’s how men knew they could go to work without ever having to spend a millisecond wondering about their children’s schedules, wants, or needs. It’s why the 9-to-5 labor work day felt effective and solid, and it’s why the school day could start and end earlier.

But as Panzer points out in the video, society started to change when dual incomes became necessary for many families. Add into that the higher rates of single parenthood as we moved into a more modern society (and ditched all those deadbeat husbands), kid extracurriculars becoming bigger and more time-consuming, childcare becoming more expensive — it all symbolizes a new way of life that the current school day set-up doesn’t match.

“So now you have a modern work day layered on top of a mid-century school day,” Panzer says.

The call, unfortunately, is coming from inside the house.

Can we fix the “institutional lag”?

And the real problem is — there’s no incentive to fix this. We’ve seen it play out for decades. The U.S. is still the only developed nation in the world — one of seven in the United Nations — that does not have federally-mandated maternity leave. And for what reason? Because moms in America seem to be the best they can and do it all, even without the government help?

Sure. Of course. But that’s why we’re all stressed and reading a million guides on gentle parenting and making freezer meals for hours on a Sunday and losing our minds over “weaponized incompetence” because our partners “forgetting” to load the dishwasher one night a week is enough to send us over the edge.

But hey, stop freaking out. You’re going to be late to baseball practice.