As I write this, my household is operating on overlapping schedules that cannot afford to fail. My aging in-laws are visiting us, and their days are structured around medication timings, specific dietary requirements, and routines that are precise rather than flexible. Care work, I have come to realize, is not something that can be “put off for the moment”, and neither is it something that be “caught up on” later.

When I was sharing this with a colleague, she described her own experience caregiving for a close relative who is suffering from dementia. The family moved from the United States to India because care support is more readily available in India. And yet, the strain did not disappear. The mental load of caregiving, a child in crucial school years, and a demanding professional role culminates into anxiety of not being able to give “enough” to any one role.

“For a professional in academia, there is this added belief that we can solve any problem. We think that hard work, dedication and a receptive mind will make it possible to ‘do it all’. Stepping back, rethinking the approach, reaching out to others, learning to delegate and knowing one’s limitations can foster a realistic and sustainable approach,” she said. (Dr. Radhika Vaishnav, PhD, Integrated Biomedical Sciences – Physiology of Aging.)

These stories are not exceptional; most people in academia are currently navigating or will at some point be faced with parenting and/or caregiving responsibilities whether they are authors, librarians, peer reviewers or editors and others in academia. But is academia designed to support caregivers and parents?

Not yet.

Think about it. Academia is currently designed around an idealized figure, whether it is a faculty member juggling lab work with teaching responsibilities and research or editors managing journals alongside leadership responsibilities, administration, and more, or peer reviewers accommodating unpaid peer reviews into their already full schedules. The system is designed for someone whose time is elastic, whose availability is expected, and whose intellectual labor can be separated from the rest of their life; it is designed for someone whose availability is uninterrupted, not someone who is navigating the challenges of a regular life.

Caregiving is not just an occasional disruption or an unplanned leave; it is something that people need to navigate in parallel with their scholarly work. In fact, there is no clear boundary between “care time” and “work time”; the two coexist, often uncomfortably, within the same hours.

Parenting is no different. From childbirth through toddlerhood and adolescence, parents need to be emotionally present; days are shaped by school schedules and extracurricular activities. For those in global academic roles, caregiving and parenting responsibilities and challenges are further compounded by the expectation of availability across time zones, often outside standard working hours.

The conflict is constant. A meeting overlaps with a school performance; a deadline coincides with a child’s moment of significance. Attending one means missing the other, and either choice carries guilt. There is no compensatory mechanism that can make one feel less guilty or more efficient.

Caregivers are thus expected to perform as though they can give 100 percent to parenting and caregiving and 100 percent to academic work simultaneously. When this proves impossible, as it inevitably does, the shortfall is internalized as personal failure rather than understood as the outcome of structural design. The dominant emotional response is not exhaustion, but guilt.

This raises a more uncomfortable question: are academic ecosystems designed for those living regular lives? Or are time constraints seen as low work commitment? Such judgments may never have been explicitly stated, but are we expecting uninterrupted availability and penalizing those who are constrained? It is not surprising, then, that burnout and chronic stress are so widespread across academia, not only among authors, but among faculty, peer reviewers, editors, and administrators. Many are effectively being asked to work as though they live uninterrupted lives, even when their actual lives are defined by care responsibilities, competing demands, and fragmented time. The strain does not come from lack of dedication, but from the persistent mismatch between how academic work is designed and how academic lives are actually lived.

Designing for real lives does not mean lowering standards or introducing special favors; it means aligning publishing systems with how scholarly work is actually produced.

Here’s a radical thought: Can we consider decoupling scholarly value from continuous output? Usually those with regular publications to their name, more peer reviews, and editorial activity are acknowledged for their academic commitment. Tenure, reviewer reputation, and editorial prestige all value regularity because it is easier to measure and hence rewarded, but isn’t meaningful scholarship in fact more episodic? So why can’t academia measure time in modular units allowing for contributions to be cumulative rather than continuous? AI could play a part, not by increasing efficiency alone, but by helping systems recognize and remember contributions over time. This I believe would force us to answer a fundamental question: are we interested in measuring activity because it is useful or in recognizing contribution because it is meaningful?

AI, as we know it, is already being introduced to accelerate screening, formatting checks, language polishing, and reviewer matching. Used well, these tools can remove layers of administrative friction that currently consume human time without adding intellectual value. Time saved must not simply translate into expectations of doing more. Yet so many equate AI with more work. It should instead also be understood as time that enables people to sustain lives beyond work to include caregiving, parenting, and the full range of human responsibility that academic systems have long treated as peripheral.

Whether the community chooses to use this moment to redesign for real lives, or simply to demand more from the same people, will determine who is able to participate and who quietly disappears.