Maybe It's Not the Kids. Maybe It's the Environment

The Assumption Hidden in the Question

When someone asks if you're "surviving" the school holidays, the implication is clear: your children are a burden you're carrying on top of your real life. The holidays become something to get through, your kids become obstacles, and the juggle of parenting and professional life becomes a source of shame or exhaustion that requires explaining.

I understand where the question comes from. For many working parents, the school holiday period is genuinely hard. Childcare gaps, inflexible workplaces, unsupportive leaders, and a lack of team cohesion can make two weeks feel like two months. But here's the thing, that difficulty isn't coming from the children. It's coming from the environment. Add financial pressure to the lack of workplace flexibility and it’s like we have created the perfect storm.

Our kids are creative, curious, and genuinely wonderful company. They love spending time together, they love being part of family life, and they bring an energy to our home that I find grounding rather than draining. Are they occasionally chaotic? Of course. They're kids. But chaotic and burdensome are two very different things, and I think it's worth pausing to examine why we so readily conflate them.

What a Supportive Environment Actually Looks Like

I'll be honest, I'm acutely aware that my experience of the school holidays as a working parent is not universal, and the reason it works for me comes down to two things: my board and our team.

My board is genuinely supportive of flexibility. Not in a performative, "we-support-flexibility-in-theory" way, but in practice. They encourage me to make it work in whatever way works best for the ‘whole’ version of me, not just the CEO version, and there's an implicit trust that the work will get done, because it always does. That kind of leadership-level endorsement changes everything. It removes the guilt. It removes the need to over-explain or over-compensate. It creates space to me to perform at my best, not just the appearance of availability.

Then there's our team, and this is where the magic really happens.

We are a genuinely diverse group, working parents with school-aged kids, empty nesters, grandparents, and a graduate just starting out. On paper, we have very little in common when it comes to the rhythms of our personal lives. In practice, we operate on what I'd describe as a "reason or season" model: we share the load based on who needs what and when, without keeping score. During school holidays, some team members step up. During other peaks in the year, a family event, a health matter, a personal commitment and the load shifts again. It's not complicated. It just requires trust, communication, and a genuine commitment to collective success over individual optics.

Why the Juggle Isn't the Issue

The narrative around working parents often frames the juggle as an inherent problem, something to be solved or optimised away. I'd argue the juggle is actually just life, and life has always required us to hold multiple things at once.

What makes the juggle untenable isn't the number of things you're holding. It's the absence of a structure that helps you hold them. Without flexibility, every school holiday becomes a logistics crisis. Without a team that genuinely shares the load, every personal commitment becomes a source of professional anxiety. Without leadership that models and endorses a whole-person approach to work, the cultural pressure to appear always-on and never-distracted becomes crushing.

When those structural supports exist, as they do for me, the juggle becomes unremarkable. It stops being a topic of conversation, let alone a cause for concern. You just... get on with it.

That's what I mean when I say the problem isn't the children. The problem has never been the children.

What Needs to Change

If you lead a team or an organisation, I want to ask you something directly: does the culture you've built make flexibility feel safe?

Not just possible, but genuinely, psychologically safe? Because there's a significant difference between a workplace that technically allows flexible arrangements and one where people actually feel comfortable using them. If your working parents are coming back from school holidays looking apologetic, if they're over-explaining their whereabouts, if they're visibly stressed in a way that has nothing to do with their workload, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

Here's what genuinely supportive environments tend to have in common:

• Leadership that models flexibility, not just endorses it in policy documents
• Teams that operate with collective accountability, rather than individual heroism
• A culture where personal context is normalised, not hidden or treated as weakness
• Trust as the operating principle, with outcomes as the measure of performance, not hours logged or appearances maintained
• Honest, ongoing conversations about capacity, not just performance

None of this is radical. But it does require intention, and it requires leaders who are willing to examine the cultural assumptions baked into the way their workplaces actually function, not just the way they're designed to function on paper.

Reframing the Conversation

I want to be clear: I'm not suggesting that every working parent who finds school holidays difficult simply needs a better attitude. The structural challenges are real. Childcare costs in NZ remain among the highest in the OECD. Flexible work, despite post-pandemic progress, is still inconsistently offered and inconsistently safe to use. And the mental load carried disproportionately by working mothers remains a genuine and systemic issue that flexibility alone cannot solve.

But within those structural challenges, culture still matters enormously. The questions we ask each other matter. The way we frame children and school holidays in our workplaces matters. When we ask a working parent if they're "over" their kids, we are, however unintentionally, reinforcing the idea that their children are a professional liability. That framing has consequences: for how people feel about their work, for how they feel about their families, and for whether they feel able to bring their whole selves into a professional environment without shame.

Our children are not a liability. They are a privilege. I refuse to perform exhaustion about them to make anyone more comfortable.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you're reading this as a leader, or simply someone with influence over the culture of your workplace, I'd invite you to reflect honestly on this: when one of your team members mentions school holidays or parenting commitments, what's the instinctive response, in your head, if not out loud?

If the answer involves anything adjacent to inconvenience, disruption, or relief that it's their problem and not yours, that's a starting point for a different kind of conversation.

The juggle of working parenthood isn't going away. Children are not going to become less present, less needy, or less wonderful. What can change is the environment we build around the people navigating that juggle, the policies, the team cultures, the leadership behaviours, and the quiet, daily signals we send about what we value and who we trust.

Maybe it's not the children making this hard. Maybe it never was.

Reflect on the environment you lead or work in. Ask whether it genuinely supports flexibility and a whole team approach, not in theory, but in practice, in culture, and in the questions you ask the working parents around you. If you feel like you would be missing some kind of benefit because you don’t have children or they didn’t have this in your day, take a moment to reflect. Your time will come and I hope those around you have a slightly different approach and level of empathy.

A conversation or moment of reflection post this round of school holidays might be the most useful thing you do this week.