You take parental leave or your wife/husband does. How do you go into work and manage a baby at home. You don't.
It's as though society has become disinterested in supporting stay-at-home parenthood. My wife and I need both of our incomes to support ourselves and our future child, and neither of our jobs pay terribly! (Neither is a Bay Area tech salary by any means—but we also don't live in the Bay Area.)
Like is it just a given these days that you have a child, take maternity/paternity leave, and then put the child in a daycare? We would like to avoid that if at all possible.
A friend of mine made things work by having his wife quit her job and start her own small daycare at home, such that she could care for a couple of other children in addition to their own. But is something like that necessary for median-income families to support their children while avoiding daycare, these days? It certainly feels like it is, at least...
The main thing you can do, in my opinion, is be ruthlessly efficient at work, and find a way to deliver full time value with less than full time hours while working from home. Also squeeze in work at night, weekends, etc.
If you can't swing it financially, you have various choices -- Don't have kids, find higher-paying jobs, reduce expenses, or move closer to extended family/volunteers.
Nobody is "disinterested in supporting stay-at-home parenthood." On the contrary, the tax code is structured to give significant advantages to single-income (or at least lopsided-income) households over dual equivalent-income households.
Is it possible that we can change workplace expectations to remove synchronous communication & work in such a way that these things aren't roadblocks? Probably, and I would argue that we should.
Is that the current way of the world at the vast majority of employers? Not even nearly.
If the house burns down then sure, I’ll stop work, but day to day I start work when I start and finish when I finish. I don’t do a half assed job trying to do a home job and a work job at the same time.
I spent 110% of my take home salary for a nanny, and burned through my savings to get through the first few years without losing my job. I could not initially find any open spots in a daycare, except some that were so awful they seemed unsafe. It was a bit demoralizing having a doctorate in the sciences and realizing childcare costs over my full salary at that stage of my career.
Now he is old enough to be in public school, but public school is only a half day and closed about 4 months a year, so I still need to work from home half the day while parenting at the same time. It has been extremely difficult, but I have managed to do it.
One thing that has helped is to be ruthlessly focused on work during the few hours I have alone, so I can work less the rest of the time. Most people don't really do 100% focused work for their entire work hours... so the truth is you can do what is expected or more at a full time job in less than full time if you are good at what you do, and really focus.
I also re-married, and my new wife is awesome, and does some of the parenting, but is also a busy professional with a demanding job.
What else could I do? Quit my job and raise my son as a homeless person? Give him up for adoption? No- I was going to fight with everything I had, and try to succeed at both my career and as a parent. I think I am doing pretty well at both- I am an academic scientist and was able to publish useful research and earn tenure during the middle of all of these hard times when I was working reduced hours.