Parenthood and career: the guilt that is never shared fairly

It is eight minutes to eight. The thermometer reads 38.4. The child is lying on the sofa; both parents are standing in the hall with their shoes already on, each with a phone in hand. For a few seconds nobody says anything. Then he says: “I’ve got a client presentation at nine.” She says: “I’ve got a meeting at half eight that I’ve been postponing for two weeks.”

Then what happens in a great many homes happens here too. One of them takes off their coat. The other goes to work. In the evening they talk about the child’s temperature, but not about how it was decided who would stay at home. The one who stayed home spends the whole day feeling they have let the team down. The one who went to work spends the whole day feeling they have let the child down. Both of them carry guilt. It just isn’t shared fairly — and they don’t talk about how it is shared.

A great deal has been written about mother’s guilt. This piece looks elsewhere: at the couple juggling two jobs and children together, at how guilt flows between them, and at fathers, who are rarely mentioned in this story.

Who stays at home when the child is ill

A sick child is a small event with a lot of weight. In a few minutes, between the front door and the car, a question gets settled that couples rarely open up in calmer times: whose job really counts for more. The answer is rarely spoken. It shows in who takes their coat off first.

Often that isn’t the person whose job matters less, but the one who finds it easier to step back — or the one who has already done so a few times and has come to be expected to. That is how a pattern sets without anyone ever deciding on it. There is more about how a quiet hierarchy between two jobs forms in a couple in Two careers, one home: whose job really counts for more.

Interestingly, on mornings like this both feel guilty, but each in a different direction. The one who stays home often feels guilty towards colleagues and towards their own ambitions. The one who goes feels guilty towards the child and towards their partner. Nobody leaves the hall without a load. That is exactly why it is so hard to talk about: each of them feels they are the one who paid more.

Guilt as an unspoken currency in a couple

In the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild followed working couples with young children and described their lives in the book The Second Shift. Drawing on time-use studies of the day, she calculated that employed women did roughly an extra month of work a year at home, if you add it up in twenty-four-hour days. Since then the balance has shifted in many countries, and fathers are more present at home. But Hochschild noticed something else that remains relevant: couples often told themselves stories about how work was divided that didn’t match what was actually happening. She called them family myths. The myth was needed so the relationship could carry on without open conflict.

In a couple like that, guilt becomes a kind of currency. Whoever feels more guilt feels they owe more — and so gives way more. Whoever feels less can go to work with an easier mind. Part of this imbalance isn’t in the hours but in the head. Sociologist Allison Daminger described what she called the cognitive dimension of household labour: anticipating what will be needed, deciding, keeping track of whether it has been done. Whoever carries it is at work even when they are at home, and at home even when they are at work. In the knowledge base we call this the mental load.

The mental load and guilt are closely linked. If you are the one who knows the child has a sports day tomorrow, you are also the one who will be to blame if the plimsolls aren’t in the bag. A partner who doesn’t know can’t be to blame. So guilt isn’t divided according to who missed what, but according to who was holding the list.

The fathers nobody talks about

When people write about parenthood and careers, they almost always write about mothers. There are good reasons for this: working mothers pay a more visible price. Sociologist Shelley Correll and colleagues ran an experiment in which evaluators assessed equivalent job applications and found that mothers were rated as less competent and less committed and were offered lower salaries. Fathers were not penalised — in some respects they were even at an advantage.

But that doesn’t mean fathers don’t feel torn. A meta-analysis by Kristen Shockley and colleagues, combining a large body of research, showed that differences between men and women in how they experience work–family conflict are small on average — much smaller than public conversation would suggest. Where a clearer difference does show up is guilt. A study of parents of young children by Jessica Borelli and colleagues found that mothers report more guilt than fathers about work getting in the way of family.

Why? Part of the answer lies in what society expects from whom. A mother who misses the nursery performance breaks the expectation that a mother is always there. A father who misses it often doesn’t face the same look from those around him. His guilt is therefore more private — and often lonelier. Many fathers who would like to be at home more don’t know what to do with that wish. At work they don’t mention it, because it would look as though they weren’t committed. At home they don’t mention it, because they feel their partner carries more and they have no right to complain.

If you are interested in how guilt works for mothers, I have written about it in Mother’s guilt: why the most devoted mothers are the ones who feel they do too little. Here I want to stress something else: as long as we only talk about mother’s guilt, father’s guilt stays invisible — and with it, the father’s chance to take on more.

Work as the third corner of a triangle

In systemic and relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we use the idea of a triangle. When there is tension between two people that they can’t hold on their own, they draw someone or something else into it. The third corner can be a child, a mother-in-law, alcohol — or work.

Work is particularly handy for this because it is socially acceptable. Nobody can reproach someone for being “at work”. When tension builds up in a couple that they can’t put into words, one of them may — almost imperceptibly — start staying at work longer and longer. Not because they have to be there, but because it is easier there than at home. The other senses it, and the guilt they could say to each other gets redirected towards the job: “You’re at work again.” Work becomes a lightning rod.

A workplace is also a system with its own rules of loyalty. In some teams, leaving at half three to collect a child is a silent sign that you aren’t “fully on board”. A person caught by that rule is torn between two systems that ask the same of them: complete belonging. When they come home from that tug-of-war, they often have no strength left to open the question with their partner of how to carry it together.

Triangles can also give rise to coalitions. A child who notices that one parent is always “the one who isn’t there” may bond more closely with the other. The parent who is at home more may — without realising it — find an ally in the child. The absent parent then comes home to a family in which they feel like a guest. And their guilt grows further.

How guilt passes to your partner

Psychologists who study stress in couples talk about stress crossover. Arnold Bakker, Evangelia Demerouti and Maureen Dollard showed in dual-earner couples that one partner’s job demands affect the other partner’s exhaustion through conflict between work and home. What happens in one person’s office shows up on the other in the evening.

Guilt is similar. Unspoken guilt rarely stays guilt. Because it is hard to carry, it turns into something more manageable: reproach, criticism, control. A mother who feels guilty for missing the parents’ evening may criticise her partner that night for not asking how it went. A father who feels guilty for missing dinner again may defend himself by explaining how important the project is. Both are defending themselves against a guilt that is actually shared.

This is how the evening after the morning with the temperature might go (a composite, not a real person):

“How was he today?”
“How do you think? I spent the whole day on the phone to work, watching him sleep.”
“I’d have stayed if it hadn’t been for the presentation.”
“There’s always a presentation.”
Silence. Then he says, more slowly: “I thought about him all day. And about you. I didn’t know whether to ring, because I felt I had no right to ask.”
She looks at him. “I thought you didn’t even remember.”

The key sentence in this conversation isn’t the reproach but the one that follows it. When he said that he had been carrying guilt too, she could hear something she hadn’t known: that she wasn’t alone. Guilt shared out loud is lighter than guilt each person carries alone.

Guilt you don’t need to carry

Not all guilt is the same. In the knowledge base, guilt is described as an emotion that warns us we have broken our own value or an agreement. That kind of guilt is useful: it tells us something needs putting right. If I promised to come to the performance and didn’t, the guilt is appropriate.

When it comes to balancing work and family, though, a lot of guilt doesn’t come from a broken agreement but from expectations we didn’t choose ourselves. From the image of motherhood our own mother had — or didn’t have, though we wished she had. From the image of a father who went to work and was never there. From the picture of a colleague who seems to manage everything. That kind of guilt has no addressee. It doesn’t say what to fix; it just gnaws.

The difference matters because it calls for a different response. Guilt that comes from a broken agreement is put right through action. Guilt that comes from inherited expectations first has to be recognised — and then, as a couple, you decide which expectations you want to carry forward. I have written about how parenthood changes the identity of both partners in Parenthood as a transition: who am I now that I am a mother or a father?

It helps to know that even a division that seems “natural” often isn’t. Researchers Sarah Allen and Alan Hawkins described a phenomenon they called maternal gatekeeping: beliefs and behaviours through which one parent — most often the mother — unintentionally limits how much room the other has in caring for the child and the home. This isn’t about blaming mothers. It is about the fact that when one parent is the one who knows how things are done properly, the other quickly steps back. And in stepping back, they also step away from the chance to carry guilt as an equal.

Agreement instead of habit

Most guilt builds up where decisions are made on the spot. Every time you have to judge in the hall, coat on your shoulders, whose job counts more today, someone feels defeated. Where the decision is made in advance, calmly, as an agreement between two adults, less guilt remains — because nobody has “lost”.

In Slovenia, legislation has also begun to address this question: since 2023 each parent has their own share of parental leave, part of which cannot be transferred to the other. The law can’t settle who stays at home when a child has a temperature. But it can show that care doesn’t divide itself — and that a fairer split takes an agreement.

Exercise: a map of guilt for two

Do this exercise together when you have an hour of calm — not in the evening when you are both exhausted. You will need paper and a pen.

1. Each of you writes down three situations from the past month when you felt guilty because of work or because of the children. No explanations, just the situation: “Tuesday, I didn’t pick her up from nursery.”
2. Next to each, write who the guilt is aimed at: the child, your partner, colleagues, yourself — or someone who isn’t even there (your own mother, father, people around you).
3. Read out what you have written. The one listening doesn’t defend or correct. They only say: “I didn’t know that.” or “I recognise that.”
4. Together, separate two kinds of guilt: the kind that points to a broken agreement, and the kind that comes from expectations you didn’t choose yourselves.
5. Pick one recurring situation and make an agreement for it — for example, an order for who stays at home with a sick child. Check in a month whether it works.

In this exercise, many couples hear for the first time that the other has been carrying guilt too — and that it was often aimed at the same child.

Where this view falls short

Everything I have written assumes two parents, two jobs and some room for agreement. I want to be clear about where this view doesn’t apply.

When no agreement is possible because there is no choice. A parent raising a child alone, or a couple for whom losing one salary would mean they couldn’t pay the mortgage, doesn’t have “two equal options”. For them guilt isn’t a matter of a poor split but of circumstances. That kind of guilt needs compassion and practical support, not just a better conversation.

When guilt points to a child’s real distress. Most parents who feel guilty are not harming their children. But if a child shows signs of distress over a longer period — withdrawing, sleeping badly, having difficulties at nursery or school — the guilt shouldn’t simply be soothed away. Then it is worth consulting the paediatrician, the school counselling service or a specialist in children’s mental health.

When guilt is only the surface of exhaustion. Sometimes guilt isn’t a message about the split but about a parent having reached the end of their strength. I have written about this in Parental burnout: always available and never enough. If sleeplessness, hopelessness or thoughts that it would be better if you weren’t here join in, turn to your GP or, in Slovenia, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours).

When the problem is at work, not at home. If your employer puts you at a disadvantage because you are a parent — for example, taking tasks away from you after you return from leave — that isn’t a question of guilt but possibly of discrimination. For legal advice, turn to your trade union, a lawyer or the Advocate of the Principle of Equality in Slovenia. What it is like to return to a team after parental leave is described in Back from parental leave: who you are now in the team and at home.

When beneath the guilt is a relationship that is limping. Sometimes an argument about who will collect the child isn’t an argument about the timetable but about one partner feeling alone in the couple. Then it helps not to work only on the schedule but on the relationship. You will find more in The couple after the baby: keeping your partnership alive through parenthood. Unspoken guilt has a way of turning, over time, into resentment.

What to remember

• When balancing work and children, both parents feel guilt — just often for different reasons and each on their own.
• Guilt in a couple is shared out by habit and expectation, not by agreement — and whoever holds the list also holds more of the guilt.
• Fathers feel torn more than is talked about; their guilt is often quiet and lonely.
• Work can become the third corner of a triangle — a place where tension the couple doesn’t voice goes to hide.
• Separate guilt that points to a broken agreement from guilt that comes from inherited expectations. Put the first right through action; decide about the second together.