Dad Perfectly Explains The Chaos Of Kid’s School Schedules With Hilarious Drawing

You might think that once all the kids are in school full-time, you’ll get some sort of time back — time to pick up the house, run some errands, meal prep, and binge some Real Housewives. While this may be true to some extent, one dad pointed out the most annoying and frustrating time suck of having kids back in school — pick up and drop off.

While displaying a hilarious (yet effective!) stick figure drawing, comedian and dad Dustin Nickerson explains that the never-ending task of picking up and dropping off kids at school has to be one of the worst parts of being a parent. Not to mention being their personal driver for every single other one of their extracurriculars you have to take them to.

“I have three children that go to three different schools,” Nickerson says during an episode of his brilliantly named parenting podcast, Don’t Make Me Come Back There. Nickerson cohosts the podcast with his wife, Melissa. “Elementary, middle and high school.”

Nickerson holds up a poster board with stick figures representing his kids on one side of the drawing and their respective schools on the other.

“Look, they each get progressively less happy as they get older,” he jokes. “That was Melissa's artistic choice.”

He then goes into the mundane and monotonous routine of dropping off one kid and school and picking them up, and then dropping off another and picking them up, so and so forth. All the while, Nickerson draws dark lines back and forth between his stick figure drawings and the schools.

But wait! There’s more! Kids don’t just come home from school, have a snack, and watch some cartoons or TRL like in our days. Oh no, they have after school activities.

“Each one of these kids also has an after school activity in a different location than the school,” he says while continuing to draw countless more lines back and forth on the poster board.

“At bare minimum, that is 24 one-way trips.”

“Five times a week,” Melissa adds.

Nickerson quips, “You're an Amazon driver, but the package hates you.”

For those asking why these parents don’t just put their kids on the school bus, it’s never that easy. Most areas have a lack of available drivers plus with weird kid’s schedules there is no way that the school bus could be effective for every single parent.

Thousands of parents resonated with Nickerson’s driving dilemma, commenting on the clip with their own woes.

“Me cruising down the same stretch of road no less than eight times a day, and the kids have the audacity to complain about the music I’m playing,” one user joked.

“Don’t forget about the late start & early out days & never on the same days for all your kids,” another said.

One TikTok user pointed out another grating moment that every parent will go through with the precious “package.”

“The package also forgot it’s most important content right inside the door of the warehouse and it can not be delivered without it,” they wrote.

Nickerson may be speaking in a bit of hyperbole for comedic purposes, he’s not far off when it comes to the perils of driving kids around.

A 2023 study found that almost two-thirds (65%) of parents spend at least 30 minutes driving every day, with 12% spending more than three hours each day behind the wheel.

Though about 25% of parents say they use their car mostly to commute to work every day, the top reason parents use their car is to drive their child to activities such as sports practice or music lessons (46%).