Washing clothes, buying groceries, cooking every day are all things that must be done, but it can be done by another person (nanny, au pair, or even grand parents) without taking away (much) from your relationship with your children.
Just imagine the difference between the mood of a parent who cooked, cleaned, washed that day vs the parent who is relaxed as all those things were done by outside (paid) help. Same person in two totally different mood and energy level by the dinner comes. Also keep in mind that these things have to be done every single day, so while it might be okay to work through this backlog every day for a week, I'm sure your mood would change after you've done it for 10 years (assuming multiple children).
I heard once and I think it's true, that kids don't need 24 with their parents, they need the 2-3 hours (changing as the kids age) with them every day, but after that they get bored of daddy or mommy and want to do something with their friends or alone.
If you can afford outside help, it can actually make the time you spend with your children more delightful, you may bond more, and in the end have a better relationship with them also in the long term.
It can obviously go wrong, if you look at your children when they are 14 and you have no idea who they are because they went to the nannies directly, but it doesn't mean it can be done right.
By that, I mean that the actions of learning how to clean up after oneself, cook, do laundry are things that I do with the kid, and kid takes a certain measure of delight at learning how to do "real" stuff. Sure, we read books and do puzzles and that sort of thing, but there is an appeal to the child at being able to help, being included, and being able to effect change in the world.
I find people who outsource all their menial labor to too often become insufferable and divorced from reality. Organizations suffer, too, from the immaturity of being run by people who can start things but don't have to maintain or finish them; who can just say "get this done" and not have to think about the ramifications. Creativity is actually at its best slightly constrained -- and children do best when they learn to do useful things with their parents, rather than being simple pets for entertainment.
Obviously there are many different cultural approaches to raising children and one of my biases is that I come from a culture that wants kids to both have plenty of outdoor playtime and also contribute materially to the wellbeing of the family (clean up after themselves to some extent, help with home upkeep, etc).
And with cleaning, yes, that one is a chore.
What I like to do is grab recipes off meal kit websites and buy the ingredients myself.
Put another way, taking care of a young child is 16+ hours a day job, 7 days a week job. Even if there are two parents to share this load, at least one of them also has to have a regular dayjob. A small child puts a lot of physical and mental strain on the parents.
Now women have to work so that they can have a lower middle class life. Daycare has risen because of this - not because of grandparents not watching their grandchildren.
Another reason we didn't have daycare was child labor. The history of child labor in, say, Britain is quite fascinating. Children were employed as domestic servants, coal miners, sales-kids, prostitutes, and more. In 1802, 1803 some regulations were passed; eventually children under age 9 were forbidden to work in factories and kids aged 9-16 were limited to 12 hours a day (60 hrs a week -- the Cotton Mills Acts).
It is quite fascinating to me to look at modern attitudes toward productivity and childhood. For almost all of human history the vast majority of children worked, from shepherding or scaring the birds away from the crops (which certainly could be more playful) to dirty and dangerous jobs. And now we talk about daycare or look nostalgically at a false past in which moms spent hours a day playing with kids. Time surveys indicate that even working parents now spend at least twice as much time with their children now as in 1965 [1]. Part of this is "productivity" -- we view spending time with our children as an important and productive thing to do, and in fact an economic investment. The kid is not earning us money now -- we need to invest time and effort into ensuring a return in the future. It's intriguing the stories we tell ourselves and how they affect our behavior.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
I'm quite sure that psychology studies show that children need to bond with their parents (biological or adoptive). I imagine there's a fine line with that outsourcing and it's hard to draw, as a thought experiment I'd guess if they spend 80% of the time with their nanny, they're not going to bond as well with their parents.
But you can have someone clean your flat/house, someone do the gardening, someone doing your taxes. Have someone cook for you. And thus have more time for your kids and still have more free time.
An excellent analogy is I spent some time in a minor leadership position in a boy scout troop and beyond a certain age the kids do all the work, the adults are there to explain "and that's why the wood lot area is fenced off", "and that is the correct archery range safety procedure", "and no that is not a safe way to maintain a campfire" and so on and so forth. As the actual troop leader often said, if the adults are sweating something is not being done correctly; the kids should be doing all the work and the adults are mere safety advisor guests of the kids.
Some kids in some subcultures are able to safely with minimal adult supervision, for example, whittle wood sticks into smaller theoretically artistic sticks at age 8 whereas others STILL cannot responsibly whittle at age 24.
I spent a lot of time as a dad parenting at a laptop on the deck occasionally saying "no, there's a buried gas line there, dig for fossils over there" and the kids would make their own "discoveries" underground.
Its kinda like being in management where some folks (or kids) need near hand-over-hand supervision sometimes, yet others you just kinda check on every day or so. Ideally by the time the kids are adults (16, 18, 21, ..., ?) the parents shouldn't be doing much other than occasional management checkins and providing of advice.
There's a big difference between leading and enabling the kids while knowing exactly what they're doing in a safety sense, vs not being involved at all.
For example I know next to nothing about welding (well, I know a little but I'm no certified nuclear boiler welder...) so I was quite happy to have one of the boy scout dads who's all certified up in welding teach that badge "in my place". He teaches older apprentices how to weld gas pipelines so he's certainly qualified to teach... All I really did as his partner was make sure everyone stayed hydrated LOL.
For little kids a lot of parenting is you just need a parent figure at the park to occasionally say "no" and redirect. "Yeah I see the league has a ball game at the diamond so you can't play there, but no you're not playing baseball in the busiest street in the city get back on the grass now"
A better analogy is something like you're claiming if a bank hires a security manager who enforces security policies then the bank is not providing actual "uniformed dude standing at attention" security. Yet some kind of manager role may be the most important time/money the bank can spend WRT security...
When they're younger toddlers they need a lot of parenting until they discover lego or whatever, but that's a rather short phase in their lives.
