A family in the shadow of a career: the partners and children of people in senior roles

“Dad, are you coming to my recital?” “I will, if the meeting doesn’t run over.”

The meeting ran over. Not by much, just twenty minutes. By the time he arrived, the recital was finished and his daughter was standing outside the school holding a bunch of flowers someone else had given her. She said “it’s fine, honestly”, and he apologised, took her for ice cream and bought her a bigger one than usual. At home her mother, who had sat through the recital on her own and filmed a video nobody would ever watch, did the washing-up and said nothing. In a few years this evening will be a small fragment of family memory. Or it will be the evening that the daughter one day mentions in therapy: “It wasn’t a big deal. I just got used to not counting on him.”

A great deal is written about people in senior positions — about their decisions, responsibility, pressure and loneliness. Much less is written about the people who live with them. About the partner who holds everyday life together, and about the children who grow up with a parent who is at once very present (in the news, in other people’s conversations, in family pride) and very absent (at dinner, at the recital, on a Sunday afternoon). This piece is about them. And about what a family can do so that one person’s career does not become a shadow everyone lives in.

An absence nobody counts

When we talk about absence, we first think of hours. Of business trips, evening meetings, weekends when there is “just one more thing to finish”. Those hours are real and the family feels them. But in conversations with people who live alongside someone in a leadership role, I notice that what hurts more than physical absence is the other kind: when the person is at home, but not really there.

Back in the late 1980s, the researcher Rena Repetti followed air traffic controllers and looked at what happened at home after demanding shifts. On high-workload days they were more withdrawn with their spouses in the evening and less emotionally expressive — not angry, but quietly absent. She later described something similar in mothers of young children: after a stressful day at work they talked to their children less and sought them out less. None of this needs to be read as coldness. A nervous system that has been on watch over decisions all day needs rest, and it takes that rest where it is safe — at home. It just also takes it from the people who have been waiting all day for it.

In recent years the phone has joined in. In 2014 a team around the paediatrician Jenny Radesky observed adults eating with children in American fast food restaurants. Of 55 caregivers, 40 used a mobile device during the meal, some of them almost the whole time. When they were absorbed in the screen, they responded to the children more slowly and more harshly. The study is small and was not carried out among leaders. But anyone who lives with someone whose phone buzzes even during Sunday lunch knows exactly what it describes.

Psychologists call this spillover (when stress from one role carries into another in the same person) and crossover (when one person’s stress becomes another’s). In a diary study, Niall Bolger and colleagues showed that tension from work often appears at home as an argument — and that this happens somewhat differently for men and women. The name matters less than the point: a family is not a neutral space a leader returns to in the evening. It is a system that responds to their day before they have even opened the door.

The partner’s invisible load

When someone works a great deal, someone else is usually supporting them. Often it is the partner, and often in ways nobody notices — including the person who benefits. In the knowledge base I have described this as the mental load: not just the tasks, but planning them, keeping track of them and remembering them. Who knows when the dentist appointment is. Who notices that the youngest has been quiet for three days. Who tells grandma that lunch has been moved because “something came up again”.

In the families of people in demanding roles, though, there is another, quieter layer: emotional buffering. The partner carries not only the schedules, but the mood as well. They recognise when it has been a bad day and adjust the evening accordingly. They ask the children to be quiet because “Dad is tired”. They put their own worries aside because they seem small next to what the other person is carrying. In time they stop noticing they are doing it — it becomes part of who they are.

This load has a few features that make it hard to talk about:

• It is invisible from outside. Friends see success, a nice house, holidays. Complaining that your partner is never home sounds ungrateful.
• It is invisible at home, too. What works goes unnoticed. It only gets noticed when it stops working.
• It has no end to the working day. A job has hours, even if they are long. Making sure everything at home works out does not.
• It is easy to mistake for love. “I do it because I love him” is true. But love and exhaustion can live in the same person.

Partners of people in leadership positions sometimes tell me they feel like the “head of the home front”. They mean it as praise — that they are the ones without whom none of it would work. And it is true. But a home front that nobody sees starts, after a few years, to wonder whether it is still part of the story or only its backdrop.

Children and expectations

The children of people in prominent positions grow up in a particular atmosphere. On the one hand, they often have a lot: security, opportunities, a parent to be proud of. On the other, they carry something that cannot be seen from outside — a sense that they need to be worthy of what the parent has achieved.

The psychologist Suniya Luthar and her colleagues spent years studying adolescents from affluent backgrounds and found something that surprised people at the time: distress, especially anxiety, low mood and substance use, was more common among them than expected. She highlighted two key factors — pressure to achieve and a sense of distance from parents, not physical but emotional. Her research was not carried out specifically among the children of leaders, and it should not simply be transferred to them. But I recognise the pattern she describes from conversations: a child who has everything, except parents who have time for them when things are not going well.

The expectations are not always spoken. Often the child reads them on their own: from what gets celebrated at home and what does not, from when the parent has time for them and when not, from what gets talked about at dinner. If a parent lights up when the child talks about a competition and falls silent when the child says they were scared, the child learns which side of themselves is more welcome.

In family therapy, this is often where roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child come to the surface. One child takes on the role of the achiever who justifies the family. Another withdraws and is “good, because they don’t cause trouble”. A third starts causing trouble — and is often the only one who says out loud that something is wrong. When a teenager goes quiet or rebels, it is sometimes the only language they have left; I wrote about this in When a teenager goes quiet: how family therapy opens the conversation.

One more pattern deserves particular attention: a child who starts looking after the parent who stays at home. Who notices that mum is sad when dad is away again, and comforts her. Who becomes her confidant. We call this parentification, and although from outside it looks like maturity, it takes away part of a childhood.

Holidays, time off and the phone

For these families, holidays are often a test. On paper they are time together. In practice they reveal how hard it is to switch off — and how differently the members of a family experience the same day.

The leader feels they were present: they were at home all day and only checked the phone “twice”. The partner noticed that those two checks came at key moments — while presents were being opened and while playing with the children — and that after the second call they were somewhere else until the evening. The children remember the tone: that dad was angry on Christmas Eve because someone rang him, or that mum spent half the holiday in a room with her laptop.

Nobody in this story is lying. Each person is describing their own part of the truth. That is exactly why it is so hard to talk about: the one who works feels unfairly accused, because they really did try, and the others feel unheard, because they really did miss them. It helps to shift the conversation away from how much time someone was present towards what it was like to be together. The second question can be answered without a stopwatch.

I have written more about when the phone is just a habit and when it has become a pattern that is hard to stop in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem? For leaders, the phone is often a genuine work tool, and “completely switched off” is not a realistic goal. A realistic goal is that your family knows when you are truly theirs.

A short dialogue

This is how a conversation might sound in which a couple says out loud, for the first time, what both have known for a long time (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t know what more you want. I’m doing all of this for us.”
“I know. And it’s not that you work. It’s that with everything at home, I’m on my own.”
“You’re not on your own. I’m here.”
“Your body is here. But when I tell you Žiga is struggling at school, you look at your phone and say ‘mm’. And then I sort it out by myself.”
“…I didn’t know you felt like that.”
“Because I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to be one more thing you have to fix.”

That last sentence is often the heart of it. The partner keeps quiet so as not to be a burden. The leader does not ask, because they assume they would be told if something were wrong. Both are looking after each other — and it is precisely this care that keeps them apart.

The family as a system: why there is no culprit

When a family comes to therapy, it often has a story about the culprit ready. The leader is the one who is never there. Or the partner who “expects too much”. Or the teenager who “causes trouble”. In family therapy we look at it differently. The family as a system means that each member affects all the others, and that one person’s behaviour only makes sense in relation to everyone else.

If one parent works a lot, the other adapts. The children adapt to both. If one part shifts — say the leader starts coming home earlier — everything else has to shift too. And that can be surprisingly uncomfortable. A partner who has run the home alone for years may feel as if someone is intruding on their territory. The children do not quite know what to do with a dad who is suddenly around. I wrote more about why the whole family changes when one member changes in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we go a step further. Christian Gostečnik describes how a family unconsciously repeats patterns that the partners bring from their families of origin. A leader who works to the point of exhaustion may have grown up with parents for whom love was something you earned. A partner who puts up with everything without a word may have learnt early that their needs come second. Once this becomes visible, an argument about working hours turns into a conversation about something much older.

A look at the family tree helps here too. In the genogram I draw as part of the longer session A Look into the Past, it often turns out that the “absent father” or the “mother who held everything together” is not a new role in the family — that it goes back two or three generations.

Of course, the leader in this story is not just the one who is missing. They often feel like a guest at home who does not know the rules. Family jokes pass them by, the children take their problems to the other parent, decisions are made before they arrive. That can hurt, even if they never say so. What it is like at the top when the person leading is exhausted too is the subject of When the leader burns out: who helps the person at the top.

Where this does not apply

I want to be fair here, because it is easy to paint too dark a picture of leaders’ families.

Not every leader’s family is unhappy. Many families live with one or both parents in demanding careers and do well. Often because they have agreed on it openly, because the leader has clear boundaries, or because both partners see it as a shared project. Research on stress spillover describes averages, not destinies.

The career is not always to blame. Sometimes work is just a convenient reason. Someone who feels helpless at home, or does not know how to be close, may find in work a place where they know what they are doing. In that case, working less will not bring more closeness — only more empty time in which the discomfort is more visible. The question then lies elsewhere: what makes closeness at home so hard?

The partner is not necessarily the one who suffers. Sometimes the partner is happy with the arrangement and enjoys the independence. Sometimes both are in demanding roles, and the problem is not an “invisible load” but that nobody is carrying it.

When there is violence, the question is a different one. The power someone holds at work sometimes comes home too, as control, threats or fear. Then this is not a conversation about work–life balance. If you are experiencing violence, in Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence on 080 11 55, and in an emergency the police on 113.

An exercise for this week: an evening without a stopwatch

This is not about suddenly working less. It is about making the time you are at home a little more shared. Both partners can do the exercise, or each of you on your own.

1. Choose a threshold. Pick the point where your working day ends — the car park, the front door, the last call. Before it, take two minutes: a few deep breaths, a look out of the car window, a quick note of what is still open for tomorrow.
2. Say where you are. When you get home, instead of “fine”, say one sentence about how you really are: “I’m tired and I need ten minutes, then I’m all yours.” That way your family knows what to expect and does not have to guess.
3. Give the phone its own place. For one hour — over dinner, for example — leave the phone in an agreed spot outside the room where you eat. If you need to be reachable, say why, and only look at it when it rings.
4. Ask about something else. Do not ask your partner “anything happen?”, but “what’s been on your mind today?” Do not ask your child about marks, but about what made them laugh or what made them cross. And listen to the end without trying to fix it.
5. Check in at the end of the week. Take ten minutes and ask each other: when did we feel most together this week? When most alone? No blame, just observations.

If the exercise shows that the conversation is harder than you expected, that is not failure. It is a sign that more has built up between you than can be resolved in ten minutes.

When to seek help

Family therapy or couples therapy makes sense when conversations about work and family go round in circles, when one partner feels more and more resentment, or when the children show signs of distress — withdrawal, rebellion, trouble sleeping or at school. You do not have to wait for something to break. It is often easier while everything is still “fine” but no longer good.

Sometimes it makes sense for one person to come first: the partner who needs a space of their own, or the leader who does not know how to be different at home. Why people used to leading find it so hard to seek help is the subject of Why people used to leading find it so hard to start therapy.

Nor does everything have to be solvable without a change at work. Sometimes therapy reveals that a concrete decision is needed — a different division of work, a different role, a different agreement at home. Therapy does not make that decision for you. But it helps you make it together, with your eyes open.

I also work with English-speaking clients in Ljubljana, so if any of this sounds familiar, you are welcome to get in touch.

What to remember

• Absence is not just a matter of hours. A family often feels it more painfully when you are at home, but not really there.
• The partner often carries an invisible load: planning, remembering and softening the mood. What is not seen is not acknowledged — and what is not acknowledged turns into resentment.
• Children read the tone, not the schedule. From it they work out which side of themselves is welcome.
• A family is a system: when one person moves, everyone has to. So there is no culprit, only a pattern.
• A realistic goal is not a phone that is always off, but a family that knows when you are truly theirs.