Before I tell you how much I hate the movement advocating a 9-to-5 school day, I want to share a quote I read this past week in the New York Times magazine.

“Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors,” said Mike Lanza in an Oct. 19 feature titled “The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play!” “How many of them took place with a grown-up around? I remember that when the grown-ups came over, we stopped playing and waited for them to go away. But moms nowadays never go away.”

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait for the school bell to ring so that I could get home and play. Mom didn’t work outside the home, but like most moms in the ’80s, she rarely participated in my play. She was there, but not. And I loved it.

The week before the New York Times feature, the Center for American Progress, a think-tank that according to its website is “dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans,” released a report advocating for a 9-to-5 school day. (So in this instance, by “improving the lives of all Americans,” we can assume they don’t mean the millions of American kids who are wriggling in their school desks right now.)

The Center for American Progress claims that a 9-to-5 school day would align better with parents’ work schedules and eliminate or lessen the need for costly childcare. They go on to suggest that “states should increase the minimum number of hours that students are required to be in school. If states raised the minimum length of a school day to eight hours, for instance, this policy change would naturally lead to school schedules more aligned with the typical workday.”

Eight hours of school? Can your 10-year-old self even imagine the awfulness?

Aside from the fact that my husband is in the military and the idea that his work schedule will ever align with family life is laughable (he nearly missed our first son’s birth), I do have sympathy for working parents who are balancing it all. I’m one myself. And when my husband is deployed, I’m also doing it alone. But increasing the time our children spend sitting at a desk, under adult supervision is not the answer.

A 5 o’clock dismissal would mean that some children, especially here in the north, would not be outside in the sun for days. Some would walk home after dark. A 5 o’clock dismissal would mean that after-school activities and sports would last until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. A 5 o’clock dismissal would mean all of us are essentially “working 9-to-5” from the time we enter kindergarten until we’re 65.

And a 5 o’clock dismissal would forever obliterate the notion that kids should spend the afternoon with friends, in free play and making their own memories. These days, we’re already only loosely hanging onto that notion, but this would be its end.

Besides, what working parent actually gets out of work at 5? What about the parents who can’t get to school until 6:30? Maybe we should keep schools open for dinner, too!

No, the answer is not more time at school. In fact, we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “how can we align our kids’ schedules to our own?” but “how can we be OK with having less control?”

Our parents’ parenting philosophy hinged on “so long as everyone is relatively OK at the end of the day, I’m a good parent.” Today, however, we’ve made the requirements for “good parent” include “eliminates all risk,” even if that means sticking kids behind a desk until we’re done with work.

By the time my oldest son was in fourth grade he was walking his younger brothers home from school, and not long after, he was watching them, too, until I got home. He was doing this four years before it would even be legal in states like Illinois, where, unbelievably, a child has to be older than 14 to stay home alone.

I don’t know what my boys did during those hours I was away, but I periodically received texts like, “Lindell got gum stuck to his neck” and “I accidentally gave them soda.” Of course, these will be among their favorite childhood memories.

Which is why, if there is any change to school schedules that I can get behind, it is this: Let’s have older kids start school later in the morning so they can help get younger siblings to school.