Parenting, Productivity, and the Strain in Between

Hi friends,

I know, I know… it’s been a while. Well, I’ve had a wobble. A long lasting wobble. Having reflected on it I think I have identified the cause. So, I’ve written about it. Something different. Something personal.

1. The Myth of Balance

We are told a lie, and it is told so often we mistake it for truth: you can have it all. A thriving career. A rich, loving relationship. A vibrant social life. Healthy children. A calm mind. Eight hours of sleep. A toned body. The list grows longer with every self-help book, every podcast, every TED talk that promises hacks for balance.

The lie is seductive because it promises mastery — the sense that if only you managed your time more carefully, if only you learned to “time-block” or “habit-stack,” then life would glide into place. You would wake at 5 a.m., write your journal, prepare a healthy breakfast for your children, send them off with laughter ringing in the hallway, then dive into hours of focused work, surfacing only to exercise, connect with your partner, and tuck everyone into bed before drifting off with a novel in hand.

Anyone who has raised young children whilst holding down a demanding job knows the fantasy collapses under scrutiny. Balance is not a calm yoga pose on a sunlit mat. It is chaos disguised as order, a juggling act where the balls are always at risk of crashing to the floor.

Something always gives. Usually not in spectacular ways — no grand disasters, just small fractures. A forgotten packed lunch. A partner who feels invisible. A bedtime story read with one eye on your inbox. The myth of balance conceals a more brutal truth: we are not balancing, we are bruising.

2. The Daily Collision of Demands

A demanding job consumes more than time; it consumes headspace. You carry instructions and client demands in your head the way others carry songs. They loop, they intrude, they replay themselves when you are brushing your teeth or loading the dishwasher.

Now add a child to this mental load — in my case, a now four-year-old whose energy outpaces mine by a factor of ten. The result is a constant collision. Mornings can begin as a logistical war zone: making breakfast while skimming overnight emails; negotiating with a toddler about socks while simultaneously drafting mental notes for a client meeting. One half of your brain is at home, the other already in the office.

By the time you arrive at work — physically or virtually — you are already depleted. Yet the expectation is that you perform at the highest level, as though you did not just wage a domestic battle before 8a.m. And when you finally clock off, if such a thing even exists, you step back into parenting mode, a role that allows no off switch.

This constant switching is exhausting not because either role is unwelcome, but because each demands totality. A child does not want half a parent; a client does not want half a solicitor. And so you are split, stretched thin across two worlds that refuse to stop colliding.

The guilt is relentless. At work, you feel guilty for leaving early or for missing opportunities because family came first. At home, you feel guilty for being distracted, your phone lighting up with urgent messages while your child wants to play. Guilt becomes the invisible tax of parenthood in a demanding profession.

3. Parenting and Productivity

Children rewire your understanding of productivity. Before parenthood, productivity meant output: documents drafted, hours billed, meetings completed, targets met. It was a clean metric, measurable and comforting.

After children, productivity becomes entangled with survival. Some days, the greatest achievement is not a well-reasoned advice note but getting through the day without tears — theirs or yours. The unit of measurement shifts from hours worked to moments endured or cherished.

And yet, paradoxically, children sharpen productivity. Time shrinks, so you learn to prioritise with ruthless clarity. A two-hour block while your child naps can yield more work than an entire pre-parenthood day. Distractions that once seemed irresistible — idle scrolling, small talk (not for me) — evaporate in the face of necessity.

But children also destroy the very conditions productivity relies upon. Deep work, that fragile state of flow I have written about before, depends on uninterrupted stretches of time. Toddlers know nothing of uninterrupted time. They operate in bursts, in needs, in sudden tears that arrive just when you think you can finally concentrate. Flow shatters on the sharp edges of parental interruption.

The paradox is painful: children make you more productive, but they also make productivity more elusive. You oscillate between brilliance and chaos, often within the same hour.

4. The Silent Cost: Relationships Under Strain

Here lies the subject we avoid. We speak of tiredness, of busyness, of juggling. But we rarely speak of what this dual life does to the relationship that underpins it all.

When the day finally ends, when the child is asleep and the emails have been triaged, what remains for your partner? Often, nothing. The reservoir of patience is empty. The muscles of empathy are fatigued. What your partner receives (or gives) are scraps — a distracted nod, a half-listened conversation, a body present but a mind elsewhere.

Romance becomes logistics: Who is doing drop-off tomorrow? Did you pay the nursery bill? We need milk. Intimacy gives way to exhaustion. The evenings that once held possibility collapse into parallel scrolling — two people in the same room, living separate digital lives.

The resentment is insidious. One partner feels unseen in their burden, the other feels accused of neglect. Arguments flare not over grand betrayals but over who did more, who gave less, whose exhaustion is greater.

You begin to inhabit different worlds of coping. One escapes into work, finding refuge in its order. The other withdraws into silence, nursing their fatigue privately. Slowly, imperceptibly, the partnership risks becoming a functional household rather than a shared life.

And yet, neither of you are villains. Both are fighting battles that feel insurmountable. The tragedy is not in malice, but in depletion.

5. The Coping Strategies (and Why Many Fail)

Modern culture offers solutions: wake earlier, share calendars, outsource chores, install productivity apps. All of these help at the margins, but none resolve the deeper truth: there is not enough time, not enough energy, to meet every demand fully.

What productivity books rarely admit is that marriage or partnership does not thrive on efficiency. You cannot schedule intimacy into a 30-minute slot between calls. Connection resists time-blocking. Love does not respond to hacks.

Even therapy, though valuable, cannot conjure extra hours. What it can offer is honesty. It can give permission to say, “I am drowning.” To admit resentment before it calcifies. To see that the enemy is not your partner but the circumstances pressing against you both.

The strategies that endure are rarely clever. They are simple, and they are hard: choosing, consciously, to protect time for one another even when you feel too tired to care. Choosing forgiveness for the shortfalls. Choosing to believe that effort matters, even when results are imperfect.

6. Reframing Success

If there is any way through, it is in reframing success itself.

Success is not being present at every bedtime. Success is being present often enough that your child knows you are there, that you can be counted on. Success is not a flawless partnership; it is a partnership that survives the storm, held together not by ease but by persistence.

In professional life, success ceases to be measured solely by hours or volume. It becomes about quality — the ability to deliver under constraints, the discernment to choose what matters most. Productivity is not about doing more, but about doing enough of the right things, and accepting that some things will remain undone.

This reframing is painful. It requires abandoning the fantasy of balance and embracing the reality of trade-offs. But perhaps this honesty is itself liberating. To say: I cannot have it all. I can only choose what matters most in this moment, and let the rest fall away.

7. Living with the Tension

There is no neat conclusion, no three-step formula that resolves the tension between parenting, productivity, and partnership. It is not a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be lived.

The strain will always exist. But so will the moments that redeem it: a child’s laughter that erases the day’s frustrations, the pride in seeing them grow, the occasional evening where connection with your partner feels possible again. These moments remind you why you endure the exhaustion.

Perfection is impossible. Imperfection is survivable. The work is to keep showing up — as a parent, as a partner, as a professional — even when you falter, even when you fail.

If balance is a myth, then maybe endurance is the truth. To endure the strain together, to forgive the lapses, to believe that love can survive the mess — this is the real work of parenting while building a career.

And perhaps that is enough.

As always, thanks for reading.