Families & Careers

You leave the office at 6pm. By the time you get home — after the traffic, the matatu, the picking up groceries — it is 7:30. Your children need dinner. Homework needs checking. Someone has to wash the school uniforms for tomorrow. The house needs tidying. Someone needs to remember that the water bill is due, that the youngest has a dental appointment on Thursday, and that your mother-in-law's birthday is this weekend. By the time you sit down, it is 10pm. You have not rested. You have not had a single thought that belongs to you. And tomorrow, it starts again.

This is what researchers call "the second shift" — the full-time job of running a household that happens after your actual job. And in most homes, across Kenya and across Africa, this second shift falls disproportionately on women. Even in households where both partners work full-time jobs, studies consistently show that women do roughly 15 extra hours of unpaid domestic work per week. That is two extra working days. Every single week. Over a year, it adds up to an extra month of work that nobody pays you for and nobody thanks you for.

But here is the part that people miss when they talk about housework: it is not really about the physical tasks. Yes, cooking and cleaning take time. But the truly exhausting part is the mental load — the constant planning, tracking, remembering, and anticipating that keeps a household from falling apart. Someone has to know that the cooking gas is running low. Someone has to remember that the school needs a signed permission slip by Friday. Someone has to notice that the child has been unusually quiet this week and might need a conversation. That "someone" is almost always the same person, and they are carrying this invisible workload on top of whatever their actual job demands of them.

Why This Is Not Just a "Chores" Problem

This is a health problem. The exhaustion from carrying two full-time roles — professional and domestic — is one of the main reasons talented women step back from their careers in their mid-30s. They are not leaving because they lack ambition. They are leaving because they are drowning. They take the less demanding role, decline the promotion that requires travel, switch to part-time. Each decision makes sense in the moment — it is a survival response — but over time, it creates a pattern of career stagnation that companies explain away as "women choosing family." The women did not choose. They were forced into a decision that their male colleagues never had to make because someone else was handling their second shift.

What Actually Needs to Change

The solution is not "help more around the house." Helping implies that the domestic work belongs to one person and the other is being generous by assisting. The solution is shared ownership — where both partners are equally responsible for knowing what needs to be done, planning how it gets done, and carrying the mental weight of making sure it happens.

This requires a conversation that many couples avoid because it feels transactional or uncomfortable. But here is a practical starting point: sit down together and list every single task that keeps your household running — from paying bills to buying soap to scheduling doctor visits. Write them all down. Then look at who is currently responsible for each one. In most cases, the imbalance becomes immediately visible. You cannot fix what you cannot see.

For organisations: if you are wondering why your female employees are disengaged, underperforming, or leaving — consider that they may be working a 16-hour day while their male colleagues work 8. Flexible hours, remote work options, and genuine (not performative) parental support policies are not perks. They are the minimum required to keep talented people from burning out before they reach 40.

You are on a work call and your child walks into the room. You panic. You mute. You wave them away. You apologise to the meeting, even though nobody said anything wrong. You spend the rest of the call distracted, not by your child, but by the shame of being "caught" being a parent at work. As if having a family is somehow unprofessional.

This is a pattern that millions of working parents live with: the constant effort to hide the most important part of their life because the workplace treats it as a liability. You do not mention that you need to leave early for a school pickup. You do not say "my child is sick" when you take a day off — you say "I am not feeling well," because illness is an acceptable excuse but parenthood is not. You schedule meetings over lunch because that is the only time that works, even though it means you will not eat. You miss the school concert again. And every time you hide your family life, you send yourself a quiet message: who you are is not okay here.

This costs you more than you realise. The energy spent pretending you are not a parent — the guilt, the code-switching, the logistical gymnastics — is enormous. It is a form of emotional labour that sits on top of your actual work. And it does not just affect you. When senior leaders hide their parenting responsibilities, they accidentally create a culture where junior employees believe they must do the same. The young mother in your team who sees you never mentioning your children? She concludes that she needs to choose between being visible as a parent and being taken seriously as a professional. And that is a false choice that costs organisations their best people.

What "Parenting Loudly" Looks Like

"Parenting loudly" does not mean turning every meeting into a story about your kids. It means not hiding. It means saying, simply and without apology: "I need to leave at 4:30 for school pickup. I will be online again after 8pm." It means normalising the reality that the majority of your workforce has families, and those families have needs that do not pause between 8am and 5pm.

When leaders parent loudly, it gives permission. A male executive who says "I am taking the afternoon off for my daughter's sports day" does more for workplace culture than any diversity policy. It says: being a present parent is compatible with being a respected professional. And it especially matters for men, because when only women adjust their schedules for family, it reinforces the idea that children are a women's responsibility — which, as we discussed in the previous article, is exactly the thinking that creates the second shift.

The Fear Behind the Hiding

Of course, the reason people hide is fear. Fear of being seen as less committed. Fear of being passed over for promotion. Fear that "family-friendly" is code for "not serious about career." And this fear is not irrational — in many workplaces, it is confirmed daily. The manager who rolls their eyes when someone mentions a school run. The whispered comments about the woman who "always leaves early." The unspoken rule that the last person to leave the office is the most dedicated. These signals are real, and they shape behaviour.

But the cost of conforming to a culture that denies your reality is severe. Over time, the suppression creates resentment — toward the organisation, toward the partner who does not share the burden equally, and toward yourself for accepting conditions you know are unsustainable. The most common outcome is quiet disengagement: showing up physically but checking out emotionally, doing the minimum, counting the days to the weekend. That is not loyalty. That is survival. And no organisation benefits from a workforce that is merely surviving.

If you are a parent who has been hiding: you do not owe anyone an apology for having a family. Your children exist whether you mention them or not. The question is whether you are going to spend your career pretending otherwise, or whether you are going to insist on working somewhere that treats the whole person — not just the employee — as worthy of respect.

Before your first child, you probably thought about the financial cost of raising a family — diapers, school fees, food, clothes. What nobody prepared you for was the career cost. The missed promotions. The stalled salary growth. The gap on your CV that interviewers ask about with thinly veiled suspicion. The job you loved that suddenly became impossible because childcare collapsed and there was no backup plan.

Economists have a term for this: the "motherhood penalty." And despite the neutral language, it is not particularly subtle. Research across multiple countries shows that women's earnings drop significantly after having children — by as much as 30% over ten years. Men's earnings, by contrast, often increase after becoming fathers. The gap is not explained by women working fewer hours (though many do). It is explained by the way workplaces treat mothers versus fathers. Mothers are assumed to be less committed, less available, less hungry for advancement. Fathers are assumed to be more stable, more motivated, more deserving of a raise because they now have a family to support.

This is not conspiracy theory. It is documented in hiring studies where identical CVs are sent to employers — one mentioning membership in a parent-teacher association (signalling motherhood) and one mentioning a neighbourhood association. The "mother" CV receives significantly fewer callbacks. The "father" CV receives more callbacks than the childless man. Motherhood is treated as a risk. Fatherhood is treated as proof of maturity.

How This Plays Out in East Africa

In the Kenyan context, the motherhood penalty is amplified by several factors. Maternity leave, while legally guaranteed, is often weaponised — women return to find their projects reassigned, their roles restructured, or their desks given to someone else. The message is clear: you left, and we moved on without you. Paternity leave is either nonexistent or so short as to be symbolic (two weeks in most companies). This means the entire disruption of a new baby falls on one partner's career, while the other's continues uninterrupted.

And then there is the cost that nobody talks about: the internal cost. The guilt of dropping your child at daycare at 7am and picking them up at 6pm, knowing that someone else is watching their milestones. The exhaustion of breastfeeding through the night and then performing in a morning meeting as if you slept eight hours. The impossibility of being excellent at everything simultaneously, and the crushing feeling that you are failing at all of it.

What Can Be Done

For individuals: know that the penalty exists so you can plan around it. Negotiate maternity terms before you need them, not during. Build a return-to-work plan while on leave so the transition is on your terms. Resist the urge to "prove yourself" by overworking immediately after returning — this sets an unsustainable baseline.

For couples: treat the career impact of children as a shared cost. If one partner's career slows down so the other's can accelerate, that needs to be discussed explicitly and compensated for — whether through financial arrangements, shared domestic load, or agreed timelines for when the other partner's career gets priority focus.

For organisations: the motherhood penalty is not inevitable. Companies that offer genuine flexible work, provide quality on-site or subsidised childcare, normalise paternity leave, and evaluate performance on results rather than hours will retain talent that competitors lose. It is not charity. It is competitive advantage. The company that helps its best people raise their children without destroying their careers will outperform the company that pretends children do not exist.

You have had this argument before. Maybe not as a screaming fight, but as a simmering, recurring tension that surfaces every few weeks. "I do everything around here." "You do not help enough." "I asked you to do one thing and you forgot." "You do not even notice what needs to be done." It is the argument that sits underneath most domestic conflict, and it is rarely actually about the dishes or the laundry. It is about fairness. It is about the feeling that one person is carrying the household while the other person is... present but not fully participating.

And here is what makes this particularly difficult: both partners usually feel like they are doing more than the other appreciates. The person who handles the domestic logistics genuinely cannot understand how their partner does not see the constant invisible work. The partner who does not handle the logistics genuinely does not see it — because invisible work is, by definition, invisible. It is the thinking, planning, scheduling, and anticipating that keeps everything running but produces no visible output. You cannot point to "remembered to buy more cooking gas" the way you can point to "fixed the kitchen tap."

The Scorekeeping Trap

Most couples try to solve this by keeping score. "I did this, you did that." But scorekeeping almost never works, because the two partners are usually counting different things. One counts physical tasks completed. The other counts emotional and cognitive labour. And both feel unjustly under-credited because they are measuring on different scales. The solution is not better scorekeeping. The solution is building a system that makes the invisible work visible.

A Practical Approach That Actually Works

Here is an exercise that has saved many relationships (and it sounds boring, which is exactly why it works — it takes the emotion out of a deeply emotional topic):

• List everything. Sit down together and write down every single task that keeps your household running. Everything. From "pay rent" to "notice when toilet paper is running low." Most couples discover 80-100+ tasks when they are honest about it.
• Include the invisible tasks. Things like: "remember birthdays of extended family," "monitor children's emotional state," "plan meals for the week," "coordinate with the house help," "respond to school WhatsApp group." These tasks take real time and real energy, and they are usually invisible to the partner who does not do them.
• Assign ownership, not "help." Each task gets one owner. Not "I will help you with cooking." One person owns cooking on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The other owns Tuesday, Thursday. Ownership means you do not need to be asked or reminded. You just handle it the way you handle your responsibilities at work — because it is your job.
• Review monthly. Sit down once a month — with tea, not anger — and ask: what is working? What is not? Does anything need to shift? This is not a performance review. It is maintenance. Relationships, like cars, break down when you never do maintenance.

The Cultural Layer

In many Kenyan and East African homes, there is an added layer: cultural expectations about gender roles. "Cooking is a woman's job." "A man should not be doing laundry." These beliefs are deeply ingrained and they are reinforced by family, community, and sometimes religion. And challenging them does not mean rejecting your culture. It means evolving it. Because the reality is that most households today need two incomes to survive, and if both partners are working full-time but only one partner is running the home, the mathematics of that arrangement will eventually collapse into burnout, resentment, or both.

Fairness at home is not about being identical. It is about being equitable. Some partners are better at certain things. Some genuinely prefer certain tasks. But the starting point must be an honest acknowledgement that the current distribution exists and an agreement to examine whether it is working for both people — not just one. The relationship that survives is the one where both people feel seen, where both people's time is treated as equally valuable, and where the answer to "who is responsible for this?" is never assumed — it is agreed upon.

You spent months preparing for the baby. The hospital bag. The nursery. The name. What nobody prepared you for was the return to work. That first morning when you hand your child to someone else, get dressed in clothes that do not quite fit anymore, and walk into an office that moved on without you. Your desk looks the same. Everything else feels different.

The return to work after maternity leave is one of the most difficult professional transitions that exists, and yet most organisations treat it as a non-event. "Welcome back. Here is your laptop. Your password expired — IT will sort it. Catch up on the email backlog." As if you simply went on holiday for three months rather than going through one of the most physically and emotionally intense experiences a human being can have.

Your body is not the same. Your hormones are still adjusting. If you are breastfeeding, you are managing a feeding schedule that does not align with a meeting schedule. Your sleep is disrupted in ways that would be classified as a form of torture if they were imposed by anyone other than a newborn. And on top of all of this, you are expected to perform at the same level as someone who slept eight hours, ate three meals, and spent their morning commute listening to a podcast instead of expressing breastmilk in a bathroom stall.

The Emotional Whiplash

What nobody talks about is the emotional complexity. Many new mothers feel a confusing mix of guilt, relief, grief, and anxiety on their first day back. Guilt for leaving the baby. Relief at having adult conversations again (and then guilt about the relief). Grief for the version of themselves that existed before — the one who stayed late without a second thought, who took on extra projects for fun, who did not check their phone every twenty minutes for updates from the nanny. And anxiety — constant, low-level anxiety — about whether the baby is okay, whether the caretaker is trustworthy, whether you are making the right choice.

This is not weakness. This is the biological reality of a brain that has been rewired by pregnancy and birth to prioritise the survival of a small human. Your brain is literally wired to be alert to your child's needs, and you are asking it to focus on quarterly targets instead. The internal conflict is real, and it takes time and support to navigate it.

What Would Actually Help

For the returning parent:

• Lower the bar for the first month. You are not going to be at 100% immediately, and pretending otherwise sets you up for shame and frustration. Aim for 70%. It will still be more than most people's 100%.
• Find other parents in your workplace. Not for commiseration, but for normalisation. Hearing "I felt exactly the same way" is medicine.
• Negotiate a re-entry plan. If your employer does not offer one, create your own. Week 1: catch up and reconnect. Week 2-3: resume primary responsibilities. Week 4+: full capacity. Having a plan reduces the overwhelm of "everything at once."
• Protect your pumping time. If you are breastfeeding, this is non-negotiable. Block it in your calendar. It is not a break. It is a medical requirement.

For managers: the single most impactful thing you can do for a returning parent is check in privately during their first week. Not to assess performance — to ask how they are doing. "How is the transition going? Is there anything you need?" That small gesture communicates: we see you as a whole person, not just a headcount. And it dramatically increases the chance that this talented person stays rather than leaving three months later because they felt invisible during the hardest transition of their career.

Your mother calls during your lunch break. She needs to go to the hospital for her check-up. Your sister cannot take her. The appointment is at 2pm — right when you have a meeting you cannot miss. Meanwhile, your teenager needs school fees paid by Friday, your youngest has a cough that will not go away, and your father-in-law's medication needs refilling. You are forty-two years old, and you are simultaneously raising children and caring for ageing parents. You are exhausted. You are broke. And nobody seems to notice.

Welcome to what experts call the "sandwich generation" — adults squeezed between the demands of their children below them and the needs of their ageing parents above them. In East Africa, this is not a niche demographic. It is the majority of working adults between 35 and 55. Unlike in some Western countries where elderly care is institutionalised (retirement homes, state pensions, social care systems), in Kenya and across much of Africa, caring for ageing parents is a family responsibility. There is no opt-out. Your parents raised you, often at great sacrifice, and the cultural expectation is that you will care for them in return. This is not wrong. It is deeply human. But it is also deeply exhausting when combined with raising your own children and maintaining a career.

The Financial Squeeze

The numbers tell a brutal story. You are paying school fees for your children, medication for your parents, rent for your family, and sometimes rent for a parent who lives elsewhere. Your siblings may or may not contribute — and the negotiations around who pays what for a parent's care are some of the most stressful family conversations that exist. Someone always feels they are paying too much. Someone always feels they are being judged for paying too little. And the parent, caught in the middle, often feels like a burden — which adds a layer of emotional pain to an already painful situation.

Many sandwich generation adults are quietly depleting their own savings, postponing retirement planning, and borrowing to cover immediate needs. They are solving today's crisis at tomorrow's expense. It is not that they do not know this. It is that there is no alternative. You cannot tell your mother "I will take you to the doctor next month when I have more money." The need is now.

The Emotional Weight

Beyond the money, there is an emotional burden that rarely gets discussed. Watching your parents age — watching the person who was your protector become someone who needs protecting — is a grief that does not have a name. You grieve while they are still alive. You grieve the loss of their independence, the dimming of their memory, the role reversal that nobody prepared you for. And you process all of this while simultaneously being the strong one for your children, the productive one at work, and the reliable sibling in your family WhatsApp group.

Many sandwich generation adults describe a feeling of being "needed by everyone but supported by no one." They are the central node in every relationship — the one everyone calls, the one who organises, the one who pays, the one who shows up. But nobody asks them how they are doing. Nobody notices that they are running on empty.

Surviving the Squeeze

There is no magic solution. But there are strategies that help:

• Hold a family meeting. Not a WhatsApp chat — an actual meeting. With an agenda. Who is responsible for what in caring for your parents? What are the costs? How will they be shared? This conversation is uncomfortable. Have it anyway.
• Accept help imperfectly. If a sibling offers to help but does it differently from how you would, let it go. Done imperfectly by someone else is better than done perfectly by you alone until you collapse.
• Protect one thing for yourself. One hour a week that is yours. A walk. A prayer. A conversation with a friend. One thing that is not for your children, not for your parents, not for your employer. Just for you. Guard it fiercely.
• Talk about it at work. If your employer does not know you are a caretaker, they cannot accommodate your needs. You do not need to share everything, but saying "I have elder care responsibilities" opens the door to flexibility that might already exist.

You are not failing. You are doing something incredibly difficult that previous generations never had to do at the same scale. Your parents did not have 45-minute commutes, demanding corporate jobs, and children in competitive school systems all at the same time. The load you are carrying is genuinely new. Give yourself credit for still standing under it.

Your child does not care about your job title. They do not care about your salary, your promotion timeline, or the size of your office. What they care about — what they will remember twenty years from now — is whether you were there. Not just physically present. Actually there. Looking at them instead of your phone. Listening to their story about school even when it takes forever and involves five characters you cannot keep track of. Sitting on the floor and playing, even when your back hurts and your mind is on the report due tomorrow.

This is not a guilt trip. Working parents already carry enough guilt to sink a ship. This is an invitation to rethink what "being there" actually means — because it might be less than you think, and it might be different from what you fear.

Research on child development is surprisingly consistent on this point: what matters most is not the quantity of time you spend with your children. It is the quality of the attention you give them during the time you have. A parent who works long hours but spends thirty fully present minutes with their child at bedtime — phone away, television off, genuinely engaged — is doing more for that child's emotional development than a parent who is physically home all day but emotionally unavailable.

How Children Experience Your Work Stress

Children are remarkably perceptive. They may not understand what you do at work, but they can feel when you come home tense. They notice when you are irritable for no apparent reason. They notice when you are looking at your phone during dinner. And the conclusion they draw is not "my parent is stressed" — because children do not have that framework. The conclusion they draw is "I am not important enough to pay attention to." That is not what you intend. But it is what they feel.

This is why explaining work to your children — in age-appropriate ways — matters more than most parents realise. Not the details of your job, but the emotional reality. "Mummy had a hard day at work. I am feeling tired, but it is not because of you. I just need ten minutes to rest, and then I would love to hear about your day." That kind of honesty does two things: it prevents the child from absorbing your stress as their fault, and it teaches them that feelings are things you can name and talk about, not things you hide until they explode.

The Rituals That Matter

You do not need to be a perfect parent. You do not need to be home at 4pm every day. What your children need are reliable rituals of connection — small, predictable moments where they know they have your full attention. It could be:

• Bedtime check-in. Five minutes where you ask about their day — not "how was school?" (which always gets "fine"), but "what made you laugh today?" or "was there a moment today that felt hard?"
• Weekend one-on-one. If you have multiple children, thirty minutes alone with each one does more than an entire day with all of them together. Children need to feel individually seen.
• Transition rituals. When you walk through the door, take two minutes before engaging with the household. Change your shoes. Wash your hands. Breathe. This marks the shift from "work you" to "home you" and prevents the first interaction of the evening from being contaminated by whatever happened at the office.

What Your Children Will Remember

When your children are adults, they will not remember whether you were home at 5pm or 7pm. They will remember whether they felt safe around you. They will remember whether you listened. They will remember whether you were kind when you were tired. They will remember the bedtime stories, the Saturday morning walks, the way you explained something difficult without making them feel stupid. They will remember the warmth of your presence, not the hours of your schedule.

So if you are reading this with guilt sitting on your chest — let some of it go. You do not have to be everything. You just have to be present when you are there. Put the phone down. Look your child in the eyes. Ask them what they dreamed about. That is enough. That is more than enough. That is what they actually need.