I just checked, and it turns out that babies and toddlers don't stay awake an in need of attention for 100% of every hour. They are also not awake for 100% of 9

I just checked, and it turns out that babies and toddlers don't stay awake an in need of attention for 100% of every hour. They are also not awake for 100% of 9-5 work hours. This is not rocket science. Nope, just for the majority of that time. You might be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of work, but not anything remotely close to what you could do in a full work day. Here's the thing: if you're a decent human being and someone is in a meeting and their kid wakes up unexpectedly you can reschedule the meeting or delay it a couple of minutes. If someone is not in a meeting then who gives a damn if they spend an hour or two in the middle of the day playing with their kid? It's not an hour or two. It's also not lost on me that these policies universally favor people who don't have children, or who are not expected to look after children. While the deployment of child rearing would ideally be a 50/50 split, it is still split such that women are expected to do that, so a policy that says "you can have a job or you can have kids" is inherently biased against women. Whether or not you have kids is your choice, and it's on you to make the required arrangements for childcare. It's not on the employer - some of them are struggling as much as you are - to deal with your choices. In most developed countries, maternity leave (and paternity leave for those who have it) is paid for by taxes via social security, not the employer.