Entrepreneurs and their children: at home, but not there

“Dad, are you home now or are you still at work?”

The question came from the children’s room while he was sitting on the sofa with his laptop on his knees. It was half past seven in the evening, the day’s meetings were over, and he had just sent the last report of the day to his investors. Technically, he had been home for two hours. He had eaten dinner with the family, helped clear the table, even read a bedtime story. Yet his six-year-old daughter, with one simple question, had put her finger on something he could not put into words himself: he was there, and he wasn’t.

Almost every parent who runs their own business describes this scene to me in one form or another. Founders, managing directors, sole traders. People who do not close the office door at four, because the office comes home with them: in the phone, in the head, in the stomach. And people who often think about their children with a great deal of guilt and very little clarity about what, exactly, they ought to be doing differently.

In this post I will not write about balancing work and family as if it were a scheduling problem. I want to write about something else: the difference between being at home and being with your child. And about why that difference is not a verdict, but an opportunity.

Time is not the same as presence

When parents who work a lot talk about their children, the conversation almost always revolves around hours. How many hours a week I am at home. How many weekends I spent travelling. Whether I made it to the last nursery performance. Hours are tangible: they can be counted, compared with your partner, your neighbour, your own father.

Research suggests the picture is more complicated. In 2015 the sociologist Melissa Milkie and two colleagues published an analysis of a large American sample of families, looking at whether the amount of time mothers spend with their children is linked to the children’s behaviour, emotional wellbeing and school achievement. For children aged 3 to 11, they found almost no such link. With adolescents the picture was somewhat different — more shared time was associated with less risky behaviour — but even there the effect was not large. The authors highlighted something that takes weight off parents’ shoulders: what matters more than the number of hours is what that time is like and what state the parent is in while spending it with the child. Parental stress and exhaustion were, in fact, more closely linked to children’s wellbeing than the sheer amount of time.

This is not permission to not see your child all week. It is, however, an important message for everyone tormented by the feeling that they are never there enough. The question is not only “How much am I at home?” but also “Where am I when I am at home?”

The phone at the table: what researchers noticed

In 2014 the paediatrician Jenny Radesky and her colleagues carried out a simple but telling study. Researchers sat in fast-food restaurants, watched adults eating with children and noted in detail what happened when the adult picked up a phone. Most of those observed used a device during the meal, some of them almost the entire time. When they were absorbed in it, they responded to the children more slowly, more harshly or not at all — and the children often escalated their behaviour to get attention.

Later, Brandon McDaniel and Jenny Radesky used the term technoference for this — technology interfering in a relationship. In a study of families with young children, they found that parents who reported more such interruptions also reported more behavioural problems in their children. The link probably runs both ways: harder behaviour from a child means more stress for the parent, and stress pushes them towards the phone, where they can breathe out for a moment. This is not research that proves the phone causes problems. It is research that shows a loop that is very easy to get caught in.

For a founder, the phone is something different from what it is for most people. It is not just a distraction. It is an extension of the company: in it lives the conversation with a client that might fall through, the alert that the server is down, the message from a co-founder who needs an answer now. That is why the simple advice “put your phone down” is not enough. A founder does not hold it out of boredom, but out of a sense of responsibility — and often out of anxiety. If you are curious about when a habit turns into something more, I wrote about it in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem?

How a child sees it

Children do not understand cash flow, submission deadlines or what it means when a funding round slips by three months. But they understand something else, and very precisely: whether a parent is reachable. A small child reads faces, tone of voice and whether the parent looks up when called. A school-age child notices which promises are kept and which are not. A teenager works out very quickly what really matters to a parent — by what cannot interrupt them.

Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and tested experimentally by Mary Ainsworth, says that a child needs a secure base: an adult they can return to when frightened and from whom they can set out again to explore. A secure base does not require a parent to be present all the time. It requires the child to have experienced often enough that the parent responds when they truly need them. I described how these patterns pass from one generation to the next in Attachment and parenting: how the pattern passes to a child.

Children of entrepreneurs often develop a very finely tuned radar for a parent’s mood. They know when it has been a “bad day at the company” and they adjust — they go quiet, behave well, do not ask for anything. Parents sometimes experience this as a relief: the child is independent, sensible, no trouble. But behind that independence there can also be a child’s conclusion that their needs matter less than the company’s. Such a conclusion is not conscious, and the child will not say it out loud. It shows up later — in how hard they find it to ask for help, or how hard they work to be noticed.

Why it is so hard for a founder to be at home

Most of the founders I have spoken with do not neglect their children because they do not care. Quite the opposite: they often work so hard precisely because of the family. For security, for the future, so their children will have more than they had. So why is it so hard to put work down when they finally get home?

Because the company never ends. An employee has working hours and a manager who decides when enough is enough. A founder has only their own judgement — and under pressure, that judgement is always biased in the company’s favour. There is always one more message you could send, one more figure you could check.

Because your nervous system is still at the office. When you spend all day solving crises, your body sets itself to alertness. That alertness does not switch off when you unlock the front door. The psychologist Sabine Sonnentag has done a great deal of research on psychological detachment from work — the ability to stop thinking about work in your free time. She finds that the very people who need it most, because they are under the most strain, find it the hardest. I will write separately about why entrepreneurs rest so badly in Always “on”: why entrepreneurs can’t rest.

Because at work it is clear what success looks like, and at home it isn’t. At work, feedback arrives quickly: sales go up or down, the client signs or doesn’t. Home is different. Playing with Lego has no metrics, a child’s anger does not respond to arguments, progress is invisible and slow. For someone used to efficiency, parenting can be strangely frustrating — and work becomes a refuge where they feel competent.

Because guilt does not help. When a founder finally realises how absent they have been, they are often flooded with guilt. But guilt is not a good motivator for closeness. A parent who is with their child out of guilt is often tense, tries too hard, or gives up quickly when the child does not respond the way they expected. Curiosity helps more than guilt: what is going on in me when I am at home, and what does my child need?

A conversation that opens more than a promise

Parents who work a lot tend to cover their absence with promises. “We’ll go on a trip this weekend.” “Once this project is wrapped up, things will be different.” Children learn about promises quickly — and about how rarely they come true. What helps more than a promise is honesty, adjusted to the child’s age. Such a conversation might sound like this (a composite, not a real person):

“You’re angry because I wasn’t at your match yesterday.”
“You’re never there.”
“It’s true, I’ve been around much less this year than I’d like. That isn’t because I don’t care about you. But I know it hurt when you looked for me in the stands.”
“Yeah. Everyone else had someone.”
“I can’t fix that after the fact. But we can look together at which matches are left this season, and the ones I promise to come to, I really will.”

The parent in this conversation does not deny the child’s feeling, does not explain how important the meeting was, and does not promise it will never happen again. They accept the child’s anger as justified, take responsibility and offer something small that they can actually deliver. This is the heart of what in therapy we call repair.

Repair: what parents most underestimate

In the 1970s Edward Tronick, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, designed the famous “still face” experiment. A mother first plays with her baby as usual, then for a short time falls silent and looks at the child with a frozen, blank face. The baby almost immediately starts trying to win her back: smiling, pointing, calling out. When that does not work, the baby becomes restless, turns away and eventually cries. When the mother comes back to life, the child settles again after a short while.

The experiment is often quoted as proof of how harmful parental absence is. But Tronick drew another, perhaps more important conclusion from his research: in everyday interactions between parents and children, mismatch is the rule, not the exception. Parents keep slightly missing their child — noticing too late, misreading, being somewhere else in their thoughts. What gives a child a sense of safety is not the absence of these misses, but the fact that they are followed by reconnection. A child who repeatedly experiences a broken thread being tied together again learns that the relationship can withstand strain.

For parents who work a lot, this is an enormously important message. You cannot always be there. But you can always come back — and when you come back, you can notice what happened. Donald Winnicott wrote about the “good enough mother”, who does not satisfy her child perfectly but adapts enough for the child to grow. The same applies to fathers, and to every parent who runs a company. A good enough parent is not perfect. A good enough parent repairs.

Exercise: ten minutes with the world on hold

This exercise is not meant as a new project with measurable goals. It is a small experiment you can try tonight. It takes ten to fifteen minutes.

1. Choose a time and say it out loud. “I’ve got fifteen minutes just for you now.” A child used to a half-present parent needs to hear that this time is different.
2. Put your phone in another room. Not face down on the table — in another room. A phone on the table is still a third person in the room, even when it is silent.
3. Let your child lead. Don’t suggest, correct or teach. Play the game they choose, or listen to what they want to tell you, even if it seems unimportant.
4. Notice what happens in you. When are you tempted to check the time? When do your thoughts drift to the company? Don’t judge yourself. Just notice, and come back to your child.
5. Write one sentence in the evening. What did you learn about your child that you didn’t know before? And what did you learn about yourself?

If you repeat this a few times a week, two things may happen. Your child will start to count on these moments — and that is good. And you may notice how strongly the company pulls you back, even when nothing is on fire. That, too, is valuable information.

The partner who carries the home

In many entrepreneurial families, one parent’s absence is only possible because the other carries more. Sometimes this arrangement is explicit; more often it simply happens: the company grows, one partner gradually takes on more and more at home, and one day both find themselves in roles that neither of them really chose.

Children see these roles. They see who knows their teacher’s name and who doesn’t. They see who is angry about the absence and who apologises for it. If there is tension between the parents over an unequal division of care, the child feels it — and often part of that tension lands on them. That is why a conversation about a founder’s children almost always becomes a conversation about the couple as well. I will write more about what a company does to a relationship in Partnership and a startup: when all the energy goes into the company.

It matters that the partner at home is not just “support” for the company, but a parent with their own needs and limits. A conversation about how the two of you will share the absence, and how you will make sure your child does not have only one reachable parent, is worth at least as much as any business meeting.

Where this view falls short

I want to be honest: the emphasis on quality over quantity can also be misused. Some parents take it as permission to see their child twice a month and let “quality time” cover the rest. It won’t. A child also needs presence that is frequent and predictable enough. A secure base cannot be built from exceptional moments alone. It is built from ordinary ones: breakfasts, the walk to school, evenings when nothing special happens.

The research on time I mentioned does not say that time is unimportant either. It says that time on its own is not enough to predict a child’s wellbeing. In adolescents, shared time, especially with both parents, was associated with less risky behaviour. A teenager who never has a parent around when something happens has fewer chances to tell them anything at all.

And one more limit: not every difficulty a child has is the result of a parent not being at home. Children have their own temperaments, their own challenges, their own paths. A parent who attributes every one of their child’s struggles to their own absence takes on guilt that is not theirs, and may overlook what the child really needs — sometimes the help of the school counselling service, a paediatrician or a child psychiatrist. If your child has been sleeping badly for a long time, is withdrawing, has outbursts that overwhelm them, or talks about it being better if they did not exist, seek professional help — start with your child’s GP or paediatrician.

When the pattern comes from far back

In conversations with founders it often turns out that absence is not only about the company. Many grew up with a parent who wasn’t there — a father who worked abroad, a mother who held two jobs, a parent who was at home but emotionally out of reach. Some promised themselves they would be different and now catch themselves in the same roles. Others learned that love means providing, and so they cannot understand why, despite everything the child has, the child misses them.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we pay a great deal of attention to patterns like these. Not to blame earlier generations, but because a pattern you can see is easier to change. One tool for this is the genogram — a family tree that records not only names and dates but also relationships, absences and recurring stories. A longer session devoted to exactly this is described on the page A Look into the Past.

And if you feel you simply have no time for something like this, read “I have no time for therapy”: what it looks like with a job, children and one free evening. My sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

What to remember

• Presence is not the same as time at home. A child feels whether you are reachable, not just whether you are in the same room.
• Research suggests that with younger children the quality of time and the parent’s wellbeing matter more than the number of hours alone — but predictable presence still counts.
• For a founder, the phone is not just a distraction but an extension of the company — which is why it is worth physically moving it away when you are with your child.
• Repair matters more than perfection: notice, name it, take responsibility and come back.
• Guilt rarely brings closeness. Curiosity about yourself and your child brings it more often.