I love having a house and yard, and never having to pollute the environment to shift my bag of carbon water to do the same work worse somewhere less adapted to my being. There will come a time when passions die about RTO and companies stop paying for real estate simply to improve profits for those that don’t need to be collocated. “Culture” and other malarkey will matter not at all once passions die, the current management retires, and the bulk of workers went to college and high school online.

Then children will have their parents again.

In most developed countries, parents already spend more time with their kids than at any point in the past fifty years:

https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids

(What they've sacrificed, at least in the US, seems to largely be non-work social connections and group participation.)

I will bet you, furthermore, that pre industrial America parents, fathers included, spent way more time with their children than post industrial and more likely post war America. The data linked only extends to the start of post war American history though, and I’ll wager there’s no quantitative source to back me up. But the commuter culture started with the highway and interstate system, and before that factories brought parents away from the home en masse for the first time. Frankly I see the breaking down of the commute and office culture as a reversion to a more historically natural state where families are generally together most of the time.

That seems very unlikely, if going back more than a few decades. When parents used to work on the family farm one could be around the kids all day.

> tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job

It's not about not doing a good job, it's about wanting to be near the kids when they're young.

Yeah, coming from a horrible situation, everything is an improvement. The article isn't very clear on what qualifies as "kids", but if teenagers aren't pulling the average down, that is still a very bad number.

This is odd to me. This is not a long distance. Is there zero transport infrastructure where you live?

Some of the more dense urban areas(US Northeast and west coast population hubs) have somewhat effective transport in the locality but due to living where it's affordable most workers who would want to leverage this have problematic commutes crossing multiple travel systems. Things change from county to county and city to city.

Look at the cluster that is determining where the California High Speed train corridor will stop along the way and the complications from interests and that. Same story, different protagonist and perspective.

There is, in fact I lived a 5 minute walk from a bus stop and worked near a subway stop. My commute was:

  1)  5 minute walking    
  2) 15 minutes bus to end of subway line  
  3) 25 minutes subway to transfer
  4) 10 minutes subway to stop near the office 
  5)  5 minutes walk 

Perhaps try a reel mower or an electric mower?

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment...

For instance, I can vacuum and mop my whole 3k sq ft house in a solid hour or so (including the stairs). Do that 2-3 times a month with spot vac in between and the entire place is always super clean and I barely spend any time. It doesn't even kill an afternoon.

I later bought an electric blower and lawn mower. They are super quiet. No exhaust. It helps to have a small yard.