Tough Work + Parenting ... How?!

The wisdom of others

Apr 03, 2026

Article voiceover

0:00

-11:19

The majority of teachers and doctors and nurses and social workers and others doing tough, meaningful work will spend years doing so alongside parenting children or caring for their own parents or others. We can’t think about how people do Great Work without considering the extraordinary challenge of caring at work while also caring at home. That goes for those of us who aren’t looking after someone ourselves but who have colleagues who are parents and carers, too.

woman in white shirt carrying girl in blue shirt — Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

And, when women still shoulder a disproportionate share of home and caring responsibilities, let’s remember that the majority of people in professions such as teaching, medicine, nursing, and social work are women. No surprise that recent US research shows that women face a markedly higher risk of poor work-life integration and of burnout than do men, nor that the work-life integration thing’s especially bad for women in my line of work, medicine. This should matter to all of us. Not to mention the many good dad colleagues I’ve had who’ve struggled to balance work with family responsibilities.

And many Great Work readers do work that involves caring for and about people: this adds a tension one mother described to me as “How do I do right by both?”

This is an unusual topic for me. Overwhelm and exhaustion from tough work, the loneliness of imposter syndrome, worrying you’ve screwed something serious up—all these I know well. And I have a couple of wonderful nieces, and there’s a boy I’ve known since he was a baby who has become an important part of my life.

But I have to rely on others to learn about how it’s possible to stay afloat, and even thrive, while parenting or caring for others outside of work.

So I’ve spent time the last few months trying to learn more about how parents and carers do it: reading about it, studying the research, and asking generous parents and others doing tough jobs while caring for a parent to talk to me about what’s worked for them.

And I’m hoping that, if this is a topic you know more about than I do, you’ll consider replying, or commenting below, with your own thoughts about this, with your suggestions and ideas. I’m probably not going to tell any parents anything new here. But you might.

So here are some of the ideas that have kept coming up in conversations with parents and other carers.

If you have a partner, you have to share responsibilities fairly.

Especially the mental responsibilities, the cognitive burden. Pretty much every partnered parent who’s discussed this with me has said that the support of their co-parent is critical. If you make a list of everything that needs doing, are both of you shouldering your share—not just the caring responsibilities but all the other stuff that has to be done to keep the home in good shape, healthy food on the table, the clothes clean, and the bills paid? Are you modeling, to your children, truly shared parenting and household management?

This is a topic about which a fair bit has been written. There’s a wonderful book by Eve Rodsky called Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) that turns this into a thoughtful game, identifying, agreeing on the importance of, and sharing out equitably all the things we have to do, in a non-threatening way that’s designed to improve relationships.

Do you have a support network?

Sharing responsibilities isn’t an option if you’re a single parent or carer. One single mother with a tough job talked to me about how important a support network—friends, neighbors, colleagues—has been for her, and the importance of being brazen about asking for help. And going out of your way to do favors for others, because what goes around comes around. The message: cultivate your support network. It’s vital.

Boundaries.

This matters to those of us without caring responsibilities too, but it was a message I got most clearly from middle school teacher Sarah Wendel, about whom I wrote in a previous article. Boundaries about how much you give, and what you reveal of yourself at work—and boundaries and routines that allow you to switch off at work. Sarah has an unwinding routine after she leaves school before picking up the kids and becoming a mother again. And she has rules about leaving her computer at work and not checking work email in the evening—so she’s able to be undistracted with her family.

How do you organize your time?

Laura Vanderkam’s a prolific writer and mother of five children who examined, in meticulous, half-hour-by-half-hour detail, how 143 high-earning women with at least one child living at home organized their time—and wrote about it in her book I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time. Their earnings are well above the income of many who do the most meaningful work. But much of what she found may be helpful to anyone with caring responsibilities.

One of the themes was a lot of intentional time management (with plenty of flexibility), thinking not just about how days fit together but also weeks: if there are going to be a few days in the week when mothers weren’t going to see so much of their children, they compensated for that elsewhere in the week. And many worked what Vanderkam calls split shifts, working during the day, then a chunk of time with the children, and then a bit more work late at night. Split shifts are familiar to many Great Work-reading parents.

Another great point from I Know How She Does It was that having too many routines can be counterproductive: for example, those who kept on top of the housework every day ended up doing more of it. And, as several parents with tough jobs have emphasized to me, you have to lower your standards for things that don’t, at the end of the day, matter all that much.

Having breaks.

One strategy critical to several who have shared their wisdom with me has been planning time off every so often, with the children, going away somewhere, even just for a few days, so you can spend time together away from responsibilities, work, and organized kid activities. I heard this a number of times: easier to organize than a big vacation, and maybe just as important.

Part-time work.

For many people with caring responsibilities this is unavoidable, and often welcome.

But can you afford it? Vanderkam makes the point that part-time work typically involves a pay cut—yet people who work part-time often end up working the same hours (taking into account evenings and weekends) as someone without caring responsibilities who’s working more traditional hours.

Do you work somewhere where, instead of—or as well as—taking a pay cut to go part-time, you could have more flexibility with your working hours, or have your work measured not by your hours but by what you get done? One working mother who’d requested flexibility and initially been told “no” pointed out the importance of knowing your rights: where she was working this turned out to be something to which, as a parent, she was entitled.

I’ve been disarmed by how grateful the parents and carers whom I’ve asked about this have been by my wanting to understand it better. Clearly, we should all be talking about this more.

a man pushing a man in a wheelchair — Photo by Catgirlmutant on Unsplash

If you’re a parent, or have other caring responsibilities, I’m in awe of you, and I’d love to know what’s been most important to making it work. As would other Great Work readers.

You can comment on this article: there’s a comment button at the bottom.

There’s a chat function on Substack (which hosts Great Work) where you could comment and see what others have said: click here.

Or reply (if you’re reading this as an email), or email me at adam at adamsandell.com. Everything comes straight to me. I’d love to hear from you. And (of course) I wouldn’t use anything you tell me without your permission.

RSVP!

Could you help me out?

I’ve been getting fantastic feedback about the Great Work book from early readers. But it won’t get published unless I can show that people are interested in this stuff. It makes more of a difference than you may realize if you’re willing to ❤️ this article below. And if you’ve found something useful here, it’s a huge help if you share it with others, or encourage people to sign up.

Thanks so much!