The most magical place on earth
I had 90% of a nerd processor draft finished last week, on a piece called How to break your team spirit in three acts. But then I took our 15yo and her best friend to Disneyland for a few days over spring break, and as I sat down to finish the newsletter, my heart honestly wasn't in it anymore. Maybe another time.
But right now as I write this, I'm sitting by the pool with a mocktail while my kid and her friend are going on roller coasters in the park, and I'm thinking, maybe the world has had enough broken spirit for the time being. Or at least I have.
Parents of a feather
In nerd processor, I've written about my kids in a sort of ancillary way. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the impact on our kids of us having started Textio. Last year, I shared some data about how kids are using AI in school, research that was inspired by what I saw my own kids doing.
For the most part, though, I haven't written about my family in nerd processor. It's surprising, since I talk about working parenthood a lot on my LinkedIn. Given that nerd processor is the center of my professional identity, it's a noteworthy omission here.
Professionally, I gravitate to other working parents. It's not intentional (but what bias is intentional?). Of every executive I hired at Textio, 63% were parents when I hired them. Another 21% weren't parents when I hired them, but have become parents since. Only 17% didn't have kids when I hired them and, as far as I know, don't plan to.
The investors I chose for Textio were also mostly parents. The only two who didn't have kids when I chose to work with them have become parents since.
Having a high-ambition career as an involved parent is a lot harder than I thought it was before I became a parent. Especially for those of us who are not supported by a stay-at-home spouse. But of the execs I hired who were working parents, only 13% had stay-at-home spouses; the other 87% were either single parents or had households where both parents worked full-time.
The thing I find most striking in retrospect is not how many working parents I've surrounded myself with. The thing that is most surprising is how rarely we've talked about it.
Work-life-kid balance
The majority of my coaching clients have kids too. In fact, many of them talked about wanting support from a fellow parent with an ambitious career when selecting me as their coach.
Given this, it's striking to reflect that the challenges of working parenthood rarely come up in our conversations, at least not as a topic unto itself. Much more often, it's there as evergreen context in the background. People say things like:
"Sorry it's a little noisy, my kids are off school today"
"My schedule this week is packed, back-to-back work travel and pediatrician appointments"
"I had a customer dinner in New York since we were there for college visits anyway"
The complexity is implicit and ever-present, but my clients seem to treat it as a fact of life. Like writing your weekly newsletter while your kid is on a roller coaster, you fit it all in when you can.
Parent math
Given how hard working parenthood is, especially when we're ambitious for our careers and determined to be present as parents, why don't we talk about it more? For instance, my own coach is a parent and a grandparent, so she would certainly understand. But I can't recall a single conversation in our nine years of working together where I've explicitly talked about the struggle.
It's not that it's hasn't been difficult for me. It has been difficult and it still is. But in contrast to the other things I've wanted help with professionally, I've just taken this particular difficulty as a given. Ambitious and engaged working parents are like ducks: smoothly gliding across the water, but feet underneath paddling a mile a minute.
Maybe that's why we take comfort in knowing that the people around us understand, even if we stop short of talking about it. An unsolvable math problem: How do you get your presentation done and make it to your kid's volleyball game and finish the laundry and take a call from a coworker all in the same two-hour time span? How do you do all that and make it look easy?
The answer might need to be: We do what we need to do, but we stop making it look easy.
I see you, working parents.
Kieran
I’m a former founder and CEO who helps ambitious leaders operate like one, whether or not they have the title. My coaching clients include startup CEOs, C-suite execs, and ambitious leaders inside large organizations, all leading with founder-level clarity, urgency, and ownership. Ask me about becoming a client!
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