My dad would often work long ass hours, from morning to midnight-type of long hours. I'd barely see him. I'd wake up and he'd go off to work. I'd be going to bed and he'd barely be coming home. Mom might be working, might not be, depending on the economy and whether or not the Cold War era industries have come and gone or not. But mom would usually be there when I came home. She fed me and made me go do my homework before I can do anything else.
It was weird for me because when I spoke to my peers (in elementary school and such) their fathers would generally come home right before dinner and they'd talk and stuff. Not my dad. I'd be lucky enough to say hi before he went to work. Heck, he even worked weekends for pretty much my entire life. I remember thinking how much it sucks because he never took the family everywhere but eventually I grew up and realized he worked those long ass hours for the family, to provide for us everything that we needed - provided it was something that was actually needed.
On a side note - one of the "tricks" we (as in my brothers and my friends) used to do as kids to get things was to say it's for "school".
Using Korea as a comparison regarding the greater East-Asian Confucian child rearing concept, I see a lot of similarities with my childhood as I do with pretty much all of my students. They go to school, go home to study/go to academies to study eat dinner and sleep. Rinse and repeat most every day.
Many of my male workers don't immediately go home after work, usually they do after school classes and further still they would probably go out with their friends for dinner somewhere and get home at around nine or ten, on most weekdays. I'd ask them how often they'd talk to their kids and the fathers would respond, "Oh once in awhile, usually I'd punish them if they did anything wrong." Mothers would generally arrive home at about six, which is when students normally also walk through the door (after after school activities and such), to make sure the kids are well fed.
I've noticed that kids here have a certain sort of limited freedom if they're not at school or at academies studying. They go to noraebangs or pc bangs with their friends, they'd walk around the neighborhood and more or less raise themselves. Actually, a better way to say it would be that the society as a whole would raise children. Teachers here are often seen as second parents. In a way, they're tasked in raising the kids because they'd see teachers more often than they their own parents because of all the time spent in school.
And here I thought I was the only one.
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