"It's quicker"

It is. I'm not going to argue that a four-year-old does a strap faster than you, or that a nine-year-old packs a bag in the time you'd take. On any given morning, the quick version is quicker, and the belief is true.

The problem is the word "morning". The takeover saves you the margin today, and it saves you nothing tomorrow, because tomorrow the job is exactly where it was. Ava can't do her straps any better on Wednesday for you having done them on Tuesday. So you do them on Wednesday, and on Thursday, and next year, and the year after, and the twenty seconds a day adds up to a number that I won't invent for you but that you can work out from the marks you made in chapter 1. The quick version isn't quick. It's a small payment that never ends.

The slow version is expensive for about a fortnight. Then it gets cheaper, and then it gets free, and then it's the child's job and not yours. That's the whole trade, and it's a good trade, and the reason it's hard to see is that the cost of the slow version lands this week and the saving lands next year. The habit is built on the difference in timing. You're always choosing between a real cost now and a saving you have to believe in.

It's a bit like stabilisers on a bike. They make this ride easier, and they make the next ride exactly as hard as this one, and the day you take them off is the day the ride starts getting easier for good.

There's a bigger version of the same point. Giulia Dotti Sani and Judith Treas, using time-use surveys from eleven Western countries between 1965 and 2012, found that the time parents spend on childcare rose over that period, for mothers and fathers, and that the better educated spent more of it, with that gap widening in a number of countries. That's a finding about averages across countries and it says nothing about your morning. But it does say something about the story you might be telling yourself, which is that parents today have less time for children than parents used to and so have to take the shortcuts. The surveys say parents are spending more time, not less. The takeover isn't what a time-poor generation does. It's what a very attentive one does, and attention that's always pointed at the job leaves the child watching.

So the belief is true on Tuesday. Chapter 21 is about how to find the margin, and it's smaller than it looks. For now, the thing to hold onto is that "quicker" has a hidden word after it, which is "today", and that you've been paying the today price for a long time.