After the first few weeks of a child’s life, working parents have at least 18 more years to juggle work and child rearing.

If there is a riddle that affluent, working parents can’t seem to solve, it is how to balance the many interests competing for their time: work, children, spouses, their own needs and wants.

Even though 70 percent of mothers and 93 percent of fathers have jobs, Americans’ attitudes about working parents — mothers as caregivers, fathers as breadwinners — have been remarkably slow to change.