There’s this dad who lives around the corner from me (literally around the corner- I can see his house from our living room window).
He takes his daughter to school every morning, just like I take E.
He is late, if not every morning, at minimum four days out of five.
And not just “quick-the-door-is-closing-run-for-it” late.
Twenty minutes late. At minimum.
I usually see him walking to school, with a resigned expression on his face and his daughter in a wagon, at the laneway, which is about halfway between our houses and the school, and is where a friend of mine lives, so we usually end up standing around and chatting for a few minutes. The key here is we have already dropped off our kids and nattered to other parents at school and walked halfway back and stood around nattering and THEN he appears.
The other day another two mums were there and he trundled past. So we all talked about him afterwards, because it turns out ALL of us have noticed him and we’re all equally befuddled by it.
Does he not care?
Does he wake up every morning determined to do better and things go pear-shaped?
Does his daughter refuse to cooperate?
What does his wife think?
It’s the consistency that gets to us. If he took whatever their morning routine was and pushed everything twenty minutes earlier, they wouldn’t be late.
“One day they wanted to go to the book fair before school started,” said another mum, who lives two houses down from him. “That day they got to school on time.”
I think I’m both fascinated and appalled by his lateness because it’s the sort of thing I just would NOT be able to do. If parenting is about picking your battles and what matters to you, being late is one of my bugbears. I cannot stand being late, for anything. If our routine made us late, I would change it after one day.
I’m sure that dad probably has aspects of his parenting that wouldn’t be a big deal for me but are a huge deal for him. We all have our priorities. But I probably won’t get to find out what they are because, let’s be honest here, I wouldn’t be able to cope being friends with him. His approach to time management is just too different from mine.
What are your parenting bugbears that you know wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal to someone else?
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Res Cogitatae 
I’m trying to think of the things that get under my skin as a parent, and I can’t think of any specific to that because my brain isn’t working from lack of coffee. BUT I also worried about being late that I will often show up ridiculously early. Like school pick up. I sit outside for a half hour or more, working outside the school just because I go through a dozen what ifs about leaving on time.
No idea what this guy’s issue is, but one of my acquaintances was consistently late to drop off her kid at JK because she was a single mom and had to drop off her older child (whose school started at exactly the same time) first. She prioritized her older child because she figured it didn’t matter as much if her younger kid missed a little bit of school. She could have hired someone to do one of the drop offs, but, as a single mom, she didn’t have much extra money. Sometime routines really can’t be changed all that easily.
Oh I know there can be many different circumstances. I think I just find him so interesting because he’s ALWAYS late. He picks up his daughter for lunch a few days a week and they are never, ever on time getting back to the school (the wagon wheels are loud enough on the sidewalk that if I’m working at home I hear them). And he is late getting there in the afternoon too (although not as late because I suspect the school is less tolerant at that point). No other kids; he clearly works from home.