the myth of the working parent: why we need to stop pretending it’s working

Yesterday was Mother’s Day.

Today, we return to a world where working parents are still expected to juggle it all.

So let's talk about the myth of the working parent.

For many of us, especially women, the message has been consistent since childhood: you can have it all. A meaningful career. A family. A fulfilling personal life. We were told to dream big, aim high, and break glass ceilings. What no one told us is that you can have it all, just not at the same time.

I’ll never forget the moment I realized that. Or rather, the moment I was told—point blank—that I couldn’t.

I had just interviewed for what I thought was my dream job at the Privy Council Office, Canada’s hub for federal decision-making. The role was perfectly aligned with my skills, education, and passion: I would be the lead Analyst responsible for the public health file, supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

At the time, my first daughter Vaughn was two, and my partner and I were considering having a second. I hadn’t really thought about timing, I just knew it would be later. Though I was assured the team respected 'work-life balance,' the undercurrent was clear: this role would demand more. Much more.

Emails well outside core hours could be managed remotely through my BlackBerry (hello, 2016), which meant technically I could be home for dinner. But realistically, leaving at 5 p.m. would mean missing key meetings and face time with senior officials. It would mean that I would need to play catch-up with secondhand information. My presence, or realistically my absence, would be noticed.

Then came the real clincher. A candid conversation with a team analyst who had led on the Health file. She’d been in the unit just a year and already knew the score leading on the recently legislation passed to legalize cannabis. She told me, bluntly: if you’re thinking of having another child, this is probably not the place for you.

That sentence settled it. I called the hiring manager to let her know I was turning down the job. She was understanding. Then she dropped a truth bomb of her own: We were raised to believe we could have it all. And we can, but just not at the same time.

I hung up the phone was both grateful and enraged because she was right.

As a geriatric millennial (thank you for the term Bennett (BJ) Jensen ), I had absorbed a deeply held belief that I could be anything. Thanks to the women who came before me—my grandmothers, my mom, my aunts—who had fought hard during the women's liberation movement, the workplace was no longer off-limits for women. The world was supposed to be our oyster.

On top of that, my parents certainly did everything they could to prepare me for it: family vacations, cultural exchanges, academic enrichment, and helping to support me for both Queen’s and the London School of Economics. I had every advantage. I knew how privileged I was.

The workplace became a place where I could "lean in", not just figuratively, but to the things I was genuinely good at: people. Emotional intelligence, compassion, relationship building. These weren’t just soft skills. They were my superpowers. They helped me build high-performing teams and lead through complexity. I rose quickly through the ranks, stepping into leadership roles early in my career.

Somewhere along the way, the boundaries began to blur. The public service is a system where the work never ends and the machine will take everything you give it. There’s always more to do and while it is filled with brilliant, mission-driven people, the system itself struggles to give back. It does not naturally replenish. Without intentional, caring leadership, the needs of working parents, especially mothers, are easily sidelined.

When I look at organizations in both the public and private sectors, they say they support working parents. They say they value flexibility, inclusion, and balance. But when it’s time to walk the talk, do they put their money where their mouth is? In my experience: no.

As an executive in the federal public service, I had virtually no options to downshift beyond sick leave in seasons when my family needed more. Part-time roles didn’t exist. Job-sharing arrangements were nowhere to be found. Yes, there was always the elusive “special assignment,” but those came with reputational risk and in a world where credibility and perception matter, I wasn’t willing to gamble my future on a side door.

So what now? Do we just accept that working parenthood comes with an invisible tax on our time, ambition, and mental health? One that women disproportionally are still baring the burden of?

I don’t think so. And I’m not alone.

Shonda Rhimes commencement speech at Dartmouth from 2014 makes its rounds on social media at least once a year. In her speech answered the question she gets asked all the time, how do you do it all?:

"For once, I’m going to answer that question with 100% honesty here for you now, because it’s just us, because it’s our fireside chat, because somebody has to tell you the truth. “Shonda, how do you do it all?” The answer is this: I don’t. Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life. If I am killing it on a scandal strip for work, I am probably missing baths and story time at home. If I am at home sewing my kids’ Halloween costumes, I’m probably blowing off a rewrite I was supposed to turn in… If I am succeeding at one, I am inevitably failing at the other. That is the trade-off. That is the Faustian bargain one makes with the devil that comes with being a powerful working woman who is also a powerful mother. You never feel 100% okay, you never get your sea legs, you’re always a little nauseous, something is always lost, something is always missing."

I appreciate the candour from someone like Shonda Rhimes, but can we really accept this as the norm?

Because here’s the truth: it’s not working. Not for most parents. Not for most workplaces. And certainly not for our collective future.

It’s time to stop pretending.

That’s why voices like Jessica Weisz at Rulebreaker matter so much. When I took her course last fall, it was a game changer. It gave me language for things I’d only felt: the friction, the guilt, the unspoken compromises. It helped me realize the problem isn’t our ambition or our parenting. The problem is the system.

And we don’t have to keep playing by the same rules.

Jess is one of the leaders reimagining what work could look like for parents. She’s challenging the assumptions, questioning the structures, and building a new narrative, one where caregiving isn’t penalized. It’s prioritized.

So here we are, the day after Mother’s Day. Instead of settling for flowers and pancakes once a year, what if we focused on the systems that shape our daily lives? What if we told the truth about how broken things really are?

Because we can have it all, but not without change.

That change starts by telling the truth; by naming the cost; by rejecting the myth; and by building something better for those of us here now, and for those still to come.

The Haudenosaunee principle of Seven Generations teaches us to consider the impact of our choices far beyond ourselves, honouring the people who came before and protecting those who come after.

If we applied that wisdom to our workplaces, our policies, our leadership, imagine what we might create.