Work-family guilt

Work-family guilt happens where:

• Work takes up so much energy that it feels like there is little left to go into parenting
• Parents feel like they are ‘bad’ parents
• Children are disappointed because of how work interferes with their interactions with their parents.

(criteria according to Foucreault et al (2022)).  Guilt then functions to increase stress, which further reduces energy and resources of parents to parent.  Aarntzen et al (2018) report that mothers are more likely to experience role incompatibility between work and home, and mothers are more likely to feel guilty for this difficulty balancing work and home and are more likely not be judged harshly for their ‘parenting’ in terms of balancing work and home.  Key impacts are negative consequences for parent wellbeing, and women often step back from their careers to put more into family and less into work.

Whilst most the research emphasises that mums and dads feel greatest guilt about work impacting on parenting, there’s also evidence that they feel guilt about parenting impacting on work (Aarntzen et al, 2018).  I couldn’t find any research that looked specifically at how raising neurodiverse children impacted on work-family guilt, but I can guess from conversations with parents that supporting our children’s needs can interfere with our capacity to work, potentially creating guilt about not inputting enough to work.

What to do about it:

Whilst there’s a broader argument to be made here about how employers can help support parents navigate family-work commitments and guilt by becoming more family friendly (Liang et al, 2025), I’m going to concentrate below on a couple of things that are potentially within our power to start doing now.  The research shows that reducing work-family guilt comes in how we talk to ourselves.

1. Justification: Aarntzen et al (2018) show that cognitive justification decreases guilt. In other words, after recognising feelings of guilt, parents then went on to reappraise their thought.  Aarntzen et al (2018) use the example of a parent who identified their guilt and then immediately stated that it was financially important to work.  I’m going to speculate here that a key part of this process is to recognise the difference between the ideal image of parenting and the reality of parenting.  Part of this process might also involve tuning in to what our children want from us too – sometimes what we think they want isn’t what they want or need.  Laura Markham in Calm Parents (2015) talks about ‘special daily time’ with kids as ‘preventative maintenance’ – she suggests that just 10 minutes a day is a good way to check in with your child (individually) and make them feel special.  I really like this as an idea.  What I have found in trying to implement it is that it has to be led by my children (and as such it can be inconsistent!).  Often my kids want to decompress post-school, sometimes to be left alone entirely until (if they are ready to) they want to engage with activities they instigate.  So maybe Markham’s ‘preventative maintenance’ is something of an ideal, and what this looks like in ‘real life’ will be child-led, and subject to change day-by-day.  Sometimes kids will really need us and if work and home overlap this can be hugely tricky to navigate.  Here then the difference between the ‘ideal’ and the ’real’ comes back into play.  How can we best manage expectations here?  And this includes managing our kids’ expectations, work expectations of us, and our own expectations of ourselves.  Where, if anywhere, do we need to shift our thinking from ‘ideal’ to ‘real’ in our expectations?
2. Self-compassion: according to Liang et al, (2025), self-compassion mitigates burnout. Kristen Neff has many resources to support fostering your self-compassion.  Essentially, with self-compassion we stop being so mean to ourselves and extend ourselves kindness and understanding.  We would never speak to our friends in the way that we speak to ourselves sometimes.  The other side to self-compassion Neff explains is to be fierce about recognising and defending our boundaries so we are able to take care of our own needs to (see https://self-compassion.org/blog/self-compassion-eases-work-stress-and-burnout/)

If you would like support to manage work-family guilt and build your self-compassion, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.  We support you to support your families.