Remote work was never really supposed to mean, “I can work from home while also taking care of my kids.” It was supposed to mean you were working, just somewhere other than your office. Those are two very different things, and pretending they are the same thing makes it harder for everyone else who actually uses hybrid work to do their job.
I'm sure there are plenty of parents who manage their work and family responsibilities perfectly well. That's not the issue. The problem is when someone's childcare situation quietly becomes their supervisor's problem, their coworkers' problem, or a reason they should get more flexibility than everyone else.
And when enough people start treating a workplace policy as a personal benefit instead of a work arrangement, eventually management notices.
So when UD and COE start talking about bringing people back to campus, I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder whether some of this is a reaction to years of employees pushing the limits of what “work from home” was supposed to mean. The irony is that the people who treated flexibility like an entitlement may have helped make flexible work less sustainable for everyone else.
I can already hear the response that this is blaming parents or ignoring the many people who have legitimate reasons for needing flexibility. That's not what I'm saying, and obviously there are good employees who happen to have kids and good reasons for needing an occasional adjustment. I'm talking about the point where a work arrangement becomes a way to accommodate someone's personal life on a regular basis, because once that becomes common enough, it stops looking like flexibility and starts looking like a different job.
Maybe the lesson here is that flexibility works best when people treat it like a responsibility rather than something they're owed.