What I Wish My Childless Colleagues Understood — An Open Letter
Dear colleague who doesn’t have kids (yet, or ever, or by choice, or by circumstance — all valid, all respected),
I need to tell you some things. Not because you’re doing anything wrong. Most of you are wonderful. But because there’s a gap between your world and mine that’s roughly the width of a pack-and-play, and I think if I could just explain what’s on this side of it, we’d understand each other better.
This is not a guilt trip. This is a bridge.
Here’s the thing: I used to be you.
I don’t mean that in a condescending, “you’ll understand when you have kids” way. I mean it literally. Three years ago, I was the one suggesting post-work drinks. I was the one who stayed late because the project was interesting and I had nowhere urgent to be. I was the one who looked at my coworker rushing out at 5:01 PM with a vaguely judgmental thought I’d never say out loud: Must be nice to have a hard stop.
I get it. I was there. I remember the view from that side perfectly.
And now I’m on this side, and the view is so different that sometimes I feel like we’re working in the same office but living on different planets. We sit in the same meetings, eat in the same break room, and experience the workday in ways so fundamentally different that neither of us fully grasps what the other is dealing with.
So here’s my attempt to explain. Not all of it — that would take a book, and I don’t have time to write a book because someone is going to wake up screaming in approximately four hours. But the parts that matter most. The parts I wish someone had told me back when I was on your side.
When I Leave at 5, I’m Not Leaving Early
I know what it looks like. The meeting’s still going, or the Slack channel is still buzzing, or the team is deep in a problem, and I’m packing up my bag with that apologetic half-smile and saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to run — daycare closes at 5:30.”
I know what it might look like to you: that I’m clocking out while you’re still grinding. That I have some sort of built-in excuse to leave whenever I want. That parenthood is a get-out-of-work-free card.
Here’s what’s actually happening: I am leaving work to go to my other job.
Not metaphorically. The thing I’m driving to is not leisure. It is not relaxation. It is not “me time.” It is the pickup line at a daycare where, if I am more than fifteen minutes late, they charge me a dollar a minute and also look at me with the specific disappointed expression that only early childhood educators have perfected. It is wrestling a thrashing toddler into a car seat while she screams about wanting the red cup (the red cup is at home, this information does not help). It is the start of a four-hour shift of dinner, bath, tantrum management, stories, bedtime negotiations, and cleanup that will end approximately at 8:30 PM, at which point I will sit on the couch in the dark and stare at the wall for ten minutes before opening my laptop to finish the work I left at 5.
I’m not leaving early. I’m leaving on time for the first time in my career, and it’s because I literally have to, and it costs me something every single day.
The guilt of walking out while you’re all still there? I feel it. Every time. It sits in my chest like a small, hot stone. I used to be the person who stayed. I used to be the person who was seen staying. I know how this game works, and I know that “leaves at 5” is sometimes code for “not committed,” and I need you to know that the opposite is true. I am so committed to this job that I wake up at 5 AM to get a head start before the baby wakes up. I work during nap time on weekends. I answer emails at 9 PM after bedtime. I am doing the same amount of work — I’m just doing it in a wildly different shape.
I’m Not “Lucky” to Have an Excuse to Skip Things
I’ve heard this one more times than I can count: “Oh, you’re so lucky you have a built-in reason to skip the offsite!” or “I wish I had an excuse to leave the team dinner early!”
I know you’re joking. Mostly. But let me describe what I’m going home to instead of the team dinner:
Last Thursday, when you all went to that new Korean place downtown and had, by all accounts, an amazing time — I spent the evening cleaning liquid Tylenol off a screaming toddler who had an ear infection and kept pulling at her ear and saying “owie” in a voice that made me want to rip my own heart out. I gave her a bath she didn’t want. I held her for forty-five minutes while she alternated between crying and that horrible hitching breathing that kids do after they’ve been crying for too long. I got her to sleep at 9:15. I sat on the bathroom floor for five minutes, not doing anything, just sitting. Then I heated up leftover pasta and ate it standing at the counter because I was too tired to sit at the table.
I saw your Instagram stories from the dinner. It looked really fun. I’m glad you went. I genuinely mean that.
But I wasn’t lucky to miss it. I missed it because I had no choice, and I missed it while doing something much harder than eating Korean food, and I will keep missing things — happy hours, team dinners, conferences, the spontaneous “we’re all going to grab a drink” moments that are actually where half of workplace bonding happens — and every single time, I will feel the gap between us get a little wider.
That gap is the thing I’m most afraid of, professionally. Not that I can’t do the work. I can do the work. But the relationships, the casual trust, the “we’ve hung out enough that I know you as a person” stuff — that’s what I’m losing. And I can’t get it back by working harder. I can only get it back by being there, and I can’t be there, because there is a very small person who needs me to be somewhere else.
The “Must Be Nice to Work from Home” Thing
If you are about to say to a parent who works from home, “Must be nice to just be home with your kid all day!” — I am begging you, with every fiber of my sleep-deprived being, to reconsider.
Working from home with a child is not “being home with your kid.” It is trying to do your job while a tiny chaos agent destroys your house in the background. It is being on a video call while your toddler walks in holding a toilet brush and announcing “I CLEAN!” at full volume. It is muting yourself seventeen times per meeting. It is the daycare pickup being five minutes away instead of thirty, which sounds like a perk until you realize it means you work until 5:25, sprint to the car, and lose exactly zero of the evening chaos.
Working from home as a parent means your colleagues think you’re “home relaxing” and your kid thinks you’re “home playing,” and neither of those things is happening, and you’re disappointing both audiences simultaneously.
When I’m on camera and my background is my living room, I am not lounging. I am sitting at a desk I built from an IKEA table in the corner of a room that smells faintly of Goldfish crackers and desperation. The baby is at daycare. The house is still a mess from this morning. There is a sippy cup on my desk that I keep meaning to bring to the kitchen. I am not living the remote work dream. I am living the remote work reality, and the reality includes a lot more Cheerios on the floor than the LinkedIn posts suggest.
My Brain Is Split. Always.
This is maybe the hardest thing to explain, and the thing that affects my work the most, and the thing I most want you to understand.
When I am at work, I am never only at work.
There is a background process running in my brain at all times — a low-level, persistent, never-fully-quiet thread that is thinking about my kid. Not in an obsessive way. Not in a way I can control. It’s more like… a browser tab that won’t close. It’s always there, always using resources, always pulling a fraction of my attention away from whatever I’m supposed to be focused on.
In any given meeting, some part of my brain is wondering: Did I pack enough snacks? Did I sign the daycare permission slip? Is that cough getting worse? Should I call the pediatrician? When is the next well-child visit? Did my partner remember to pick up the prescription? Is it pajama day at school tomorrow or regular clothes? Why did she cry at drop-off this morning — is she getting enough sleep? Am I giving her enough attention? Am I giving her too much screen time? Am I —
You see what I mean. It doesn’t stop. It’s not a choice. It’s a fundamental rewiring of how my brain works now. Parenthood installed a permanent monitoring system in my head, and there’s no off switch and no pause button and no “do not disturb” mode.
This means I might ask you to repeat something. I might zone out for a moment. I might take slightly longer to context-switch from the thing I was thinking about (the kid) to the thing I’m supposed to be thinking about (the Q2 roadmap). It’s not that I don’t care about the Q2 roadmap. It’s that my brain is running two operating systems at once and sometimes one of them lags.
I’m not less intelligent than I was before kids. I’m not less capable. I am less available, cognitively, in any single moment — because I’m running a process you can’t see and I can’t quit.
Please Don’t Say “I’m Tired Too”
This is delicate. I want to be careful here because I mean it with genuine respect: your tiredness is real. Your stress is real. Your burnout is valid. You do not need to have children to be exhausted, and I would never, ever claim that parents have a monopoly on being tired.
But.
When I say “I’m exhausted” and you say “Oh, me too — I binge-watched that show until 2 AM” — there is a difference, and the difference is choice.
You chose to stay up. You could have gone to bed. You had the option. The option existed.
I did not choose to be up at 2 AM. I was up because a 14-month-old was screaming and there was no one else to handle it and “just let her cry” is not an option when the crying has escalated to the point where she’s gagging. I was up because this is my life now, every night, for an indefinite period, with no control over when it ends.
The tiredness of parenthood isn’t worse than your tiredness. It’s differently structured. It’s compulsory. It accumulates over months. It doesn’t resolve with one good night’s sleep, because there is no one good night’s sleep. There is just the next night, and the one after that, and the uncertain hope that someday this kid will sleep through.
I’m not asking you to rank our respective exhaustions. I’m asking you to hear me when I say “I’m tired” and understand that what I’m describing is something a little different from what you experienced after staying up late by choice. That’s all.
The Things You Do That Mean Everything
Okay. Enough of the hard stuff. I also want to tell you about the things you do — some of you, some of the time — that absolutely save me. Because this letter isn’t just a list of complaints. It’s also a love letter to the childless colleagues who get it, who try to get it, who extend grace without being asked.
When you schedule meetings during core hours without me having to ask. You have no idea what this means. Every meeting that’s at 9 AM instead of 8 AM, or 2 PM instead of 5 PM, is a meeting I can attend without a logistical crisis. You probably didn’t even think about it. It might have been accidental. It changed my whole day.
When you say “go, we’ve got this” without making it weird. The daycare calls. The fever spike. The school says she threw up and someone needs to come. I start packing up with that familiar guilt-panic and you just… wave me off. “Go. Handle it. We’ll cover the meeting.” No big discussion. No tracking of favors owed. Just human decency. It makes me want to cry every time, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
When you ask about my kid like you actually care. Not the performative “How’s the little one?” on Monday morning. The real kind. The “Hey, how did the ear infection turn out?” because you remembered I mentioned it last week. The “Did she like the birthday party?” because you saw a photo and actually looked at it. You don’t have to care about my kid. The fact that some of you do, a little, makes me feel less like I’m living a double life.
When you don’t judge the Cheerio on my blazer. Or the spit-up stain I didn’t notice. Or the time I showed up to the client meeting with a Bluey sticker on my laptop. You just… let it go. Maybe you even smiled. That’s solidarity, and I felt it.
When you treat my flexibility as a work style, not a perk. I work weird hours. I’m online at 6 AM and offline at 5 PM and back online at 9 PM. My calendar has blocks that say “school pickup” and “pediatrician.” When you treat these things as neutral facts about how I work — the same way you’d treat someone who goes to the gym at lunch or takes a long break on Fridays — you are normalizing something that desperately needs to be normalized. Thank you.
What I Want You to Know (The Real Version)
I don’t want special treatment. I really, truly don’t. I don’t want lower expectations or easier assignments or a pass on quality. I’m a professional and I want to be treated like one.
What I want is for the playing field to be understood as uneven — not so you can feel sorry for me, but so that when I perform at the same level as you while running a background process that’s using 30% of my RAM, you understand that this is actually me performing above my current capacity. Not below yours.
I want you to know that when I say no to the happy hour, I’m not choosing to exclude myself. I’m choosing my kid, which is not the same thing, and it hurts every time.
I want you to know that I think about work-you more than you probably realize. I worry about being a burden. I worry about being the one who “always has a thing.” I worry that you think I’m using my kid as an excuse when the truth is my kid is my reason — my reason for working this hard, in this way, with this impossible schedule that would make no sense to anyone who hasn’t tried it.
I want you to know that I am genuinely happy for your freedom. Your weekends in wine country. Your spontaneous Tuesday night concerts. Your ability to work late on something that excites you without checking a clock. I remember that life. It was wonderful. I don’t resent you for having it. Some days I miss it so much it physically aches, but I chose this, and I’d choose it again, and those two things can be true at the same time.
And I want you to know that this is temporary. Not parenthood — that’s forever. But the brutally hard part, the baby-and-toddler years where every single day is a logistics puzzle wrapped in an emotional tornado? That part has an expiration date. In a few years, my kid will be in school full-day. She’ll sleep through the night reliably. She’ll make her own breakfast (badly, but still). And I’ll be back at happy hour, I promise. Save me a seat.
The Bridge Goes Both Ways
I should say this too, because honesty goes in both directions: I know I’ve been a bad colleague sometimes.
I’ve been distracted in meetings. I’ve dropped balls. I’ve been short with people because I was running on fumes and didn’t have the bandwidth for patience. I’ve talked about my kid too much and bored you — I saw your eyes glaze over and I kept going because I was so deep in parent-world that I forgot not everyone lives there.
I’ve probably made you feel like your life is less important because it doesn’t include kids. It’s not. Your life is whole and complete and valid exactly as it is, with or without children, and if I’ve ever implied otherwise — even accidentally, even with a well-meaning “you’ll understand someday” — I’m sorry. That was thoughtless. Your understanding doesn’t require you to reproduce.
I’ve leaned on you without always saying thank you. When you covered my meeting, when you answered the client email I missed, when you stayed late because I couldn’t — I noticed, even if I didn’t always say so. I owe you more acknowledgment than I’ve given.
The gap between us isn’t a wall. It’s a gap. And gaps can be bridged from either side. I’m trying to cross from mine. I hope this letter helps you see what it looks like over here — the beautiful, exhausting, Cheerio-dusted mess of it.
In Summary (For the Skimmers — I Get It, You’re Busy)
- When I leave at 5, I’m going to my second job, not the beach.
- My brain is permanently split between work and a tiny human. I can’t fix this.
- I’m not “lucky” to miss team events. I’m gutted every time.
- Your tiredness is real. Mine is just structured differently (compulsory, cumulative, indefinite).
- The small kindnesses — flexible scheduling, no-judgment grace, genuine interest — mean more than you know.
- I don’t want special treatment. I want understanding.
- This season is temporary. Save me a seat at happy hour.
- I’m sorry for the ways I’ve been a bad colleague too.
This letter was hard to write. Not because the feelings are complicated — they’re actually pretty simple. I’m tired. I’m trying. I want to be seen for the full picture, not just the half that shows up at the office.
If you’re a working parent who wants to forward this to a coworker (maybe with a “no pressure, just if you’re curious” caveat), go ahead. And if you’re the childless colleague who just read this whole thing — thank you. Seriously. The fact that you cared enough to read it means you’re already one of the good ones.
Diapers & Desks is the community for working parents of kids 0-5. We’re building a space where the full truth of working parenthood gets said out loud. If this letter resonated — whether you’re the parent who wrote it or the colleague who received it — come join us. We could use more bridge-builders.