School’s starting soon. Why are parents and kids still in limbo?

Karla Hayward, a working parent in Newfoundland, finally got back to her office in July, while her daughter has come home from camp each afternoon, as Mom puts it, “sweaty and starving, just as I want her to be.”

Yet when she looks ahead to the fall, she has no idea if she’ll still be at the job in marketing that she loves, because her 5-year-old might be stuck at home again. Although her employer has figured out how to get staff back to work, and her kid’s summer camp is operating, there is no concrete plan – or even a best guess in many places – for how to get millions of school-aged children in North America safely back to class.

Instead, she feels that authorities have left families – and particularly women – to simply “figure it out.”

“There is a pervasive thought that women know how to deal with the children, women will figure it out,” she says. “But coping with something for a few months is very different than coping with something looking out