Honestly, I think a serious contributor here is the number of families with two full time working parents more than anything else. My wife and I were actually talking about this last night.

We both work til about 5:30 or 6 every week day. Our kids go to after school programs where they play with friends, do homework, etc before we pick them up. We get home around 6 and they need to get to bed by 8. That gives us 2 hours every weeknight to make/pickup dinner, do something together as a family, talk about our day, and get ready for bed.

If either of us got off at around 3 every day both of the kids could come home. We could go to the store together and get things to make for dinner together. I could start cooking and they could help or do homework and then when my wife got home dinner would be ready for us to sit down and have a family meal. We'd end up eating healthier and being less rushed. On a lot of days the kids could have their friends come over for a couple of hours until dinner time and potentially that child's parent(s) could come over to visit while the kids played.

Instead, we're left with this weekly rush. I honestly don't have much of an idea who the parents of my kids friends are at school...because I don't ever see them. I barely see my kids friends. This is before we factor in things like soccer practice.

On weekends, over 2 days we try to balance house chores with family time with going to the store to get everything we'll need for meals for the week before anything else that might come up.

I cannot imagine that we're the only family with 2 working parents that experiences this. The seeming solution to the problem is for one of us to scale back, but that means figuring out something at work that will allow us to do that and ensuring that we're able to adjust costs to take a hit somewhere (assuming that asking to scale back doesn't put the entire job in jeopardy). The other solution is to try to invest what's left of that spare time into creating a side income so you can afford to scale back...which just feeds the problem.

As I've gotten older I've started to place a significantly larger amount of respect on stay at home dads or moms, because the longer we've been pushing this dual career thing the more I realize what we're giving up. It seems like so much chatter, movie references, TV references, etc over the last 2-4 decades has mocked stay at home parents as either being unimportant, uneducated, people who sit around watching TV and what not that as a society we've pressured an entire generation into feeling like raising a family instead of having a job makes you somehow less.

And I think it's breaking more of society than we want to admit. This isn't a gender roles thing either. I don't think it matters WHICH parent spends more time at home as long as one of them does.

We fuel this issue by generally meeting our significant others in college...where we are both training to have full time careers and taking on student loans that we'll have to work to repay. All just seems to be a huge, interconnected mess of a pattern.

I'm not actually sure what you could do to fix it, aside from providing companies tax credits for allowing "parent friendly" jobs to incentive them to have positions where the day ends when kids get out of school.