The Feedback From Your Kids in the Back Seat: What Kids Learn From Watching Their Parents Work

If you're a working mom, there's a good chance one of your kids has already told you what your job takes out of you. More than half of the working parents in my doctoral research described a conversation like that. What follows is what those kids are picking up on, and what you can do about it.

I never had one epiphany about how my work was shaping my family, only an accumulation of observations. Once I started paying attention, I could look back across my corporate years and see the signals that had placed my daughters at the edges of my day, including car rides during school drop-offs and pickups spent on work calls, hushing the little ones in the background. One of my daughters finally said it out loud: "Mom, we're only kids." It caught my attention, though I wasn't sure yet what to make of it or how seriously to take what she was saying.

The mothers who paved the way for me had been trying to tell me for years. One mentor told me to tell my boss that I was a mom first. Another called it living under the expectations of others. A third told me that if I stayed in corporate, I could buy back my time, paying others to care for my kids and keep my house.

Some of that is perfectly fine, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. I knew then that the structure wasn't built for us, least of all for dual-income households where both parents are juggling. We had been conditioned to accept it. I suspected it was not the only option.

These comments, and many more, lit up one realization for me after another. Once I could see that something needed advocacy and change, I started to wonder who would do that work. That was when I asked myself, if not me, then who? I took a big risk, left corporate and a big compensation package behind, and set out on a deliberate path to bring a voice to the people doing the work and, by chance, began to understand what their children learn from witnessing it.

What my research found about children of working parents

For my doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania, I interviewed 35 working parents as experts on their own working lives.

My questions centered on the parents' work, and the children's perspectives kept arriving in the conversations anyway. Twenty of the 35 parents (57%) described a moment when one of their children called out the demands of the parent's work. References to what their children had observed came up 37 times without a direct prompt from me.

Adults learn to explain away the missed dinner and the late-night working sessions. But children say what they see.

One mother told me her 9-year-old asked her at bedtime, "Do you work two jobs?" Then came the harder question: "If you had to choose between working or spending time with your kids, what would you choose?" She told me, "Did it stab me through the heart that my daughter asked that question? Yes."

Another mother still carries what her 10-year-old stepdaughter said to her husband after a work emergency interrupted their summer break: "Daddy, she cares more about work than us." Twenty years later, she said, "That has stayed with me."

Why kids are the first to see broken work structures

Workplaces still operate on assumptions from the industrial era: that presence equals productivity, and that more hours mean more output. Those ideas fit factory work, where output could be predicted from man-hours. They fit poorly with the knowledge work most of us have done since Peter Drucker named it in The Landmarks of Tomorrow in 1959, and they leave little room for the families waiting at home.

When a working parent struggles inside that structure, the usual conclusion is that she needs better time management. When a structure reliably exhausts the people inside it, the exhaustion is a design outcome. Our children are absorbing that design as normal, and they will carry it into their own careers unless we catalyze change.

What working moms can do now

Changing the structures is the work of organizations, researchers, and lawmakers. In the meantime, here are steps you can take right now:

1. Write your non-negotiables before the week begins

Choose two or three specific commitments your family can count on, such as dinner together on Tuesdays and Thursdays or no calls during school drop-off. A commitment written in advance is easier to notice when it breaks.

2. Ask your children what they see

At dinner, ask what they think your job asks of you. Listen without correcting them. Their answers will tell you what they are learning.

3. Find out who controls your schedule

Some boundaries you can set yourself. Others belong to your manager or your company's policies. Knowing the difference gives visibility to where you can negotiate and seek support.

One father in my study gave me the definition of success I think about often: "Success to me is being able to spend time with my kids at the end of the day without feeling completely exhausted from the workday." It is a modest thing to want, and our children are watching to see whether we get it, and learning whether they can expect it too.

Work With Sovera

If you are a working mom navigating a new role, a career transition, or a decision about how you want to live and work, Sovera’s ICF-certified executive coaches can help you build boundaries you can keep. Book a coaching conversation. Or, if you prefer a six-week group program to change how your work and life fit together, the next public cohort of Entirely You™ opens in January 2027. It begins with writing the non-negotiables described above. Learn more about Entirely You.

Related article by Annie Graziani:

What I Know Now About Work and Life and What It Cost to Learn It