I remember 2021 as something of an annus horribilis for our family. It was one of those years when, just as we thought we had got through one thing, something else arrived.

My children got COVID, and not long afterwards we went back into lockdown. When they finally returned to school after Easter, my son broke his leg and ended up back at home being homeschooled again.

Then my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died shortly afterwards.

Before I knew it, we were into the school summer holidays. September arrived, my daughter started nursery, and she began building her immune system in the good old-fashioned way by bringing home what felt like every bug going.

When I looked back over that year, I realised I had probably had about nine weeks of genuinely uninterrupted working time.

Nine weeks and it was brutal!

For someone used to being organised, productive and able to make things happen, it was a lesson I would never have chosen, but one I have never forgotten.

It taught me that there are seasons when no amount of planning, efficiency or determination will make life behave according to your diary. It also showed me how quickly you start trying to compensate when things go off course.

You work later, squeeze things into the gaps and tell yourself you will catch up next week.

The harder lesson was realising that you cannot keep absorbing every disruption without something eventually giving.

So when I talk about what happens when demanding work collides with sick children, this is not theoretical for me. It comes from hard-won experience.

Most years will not look like my 2021, thankfully, but you do not need a year like that to recognise the feeling.

There are few messages that can derail a working parent’s day quite as quickly as:

“Your child has a temperature. Can you come and collect them?”

You look at your diary and immediately start doing the logistical equivalent of triage.

Which meeting can move? What absolutely cannot? Can your partner leave work, if you have one? Who stayed home last time? Is there any chance you can still get that important piece of work done later?

If you have young children, especially at this time of year, you probably know how quickly one day can turn into three, then five.

It is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain unless you are living it.

It is not that you resent caring for your children. Of course you want to be there when they need you. But your work matters too.

I think that is the bit we do not always talk about honestly enough.

When your job carries real responsibility

Stepping away from work isn’t always emotionally simple.

• Other people depend on you. 
• Your team may need decisions from you. 
• Clients are expecting things. 
• There are deadlines that do not magically disappear because somebody develops a fever.

If you are ambitious and conscientious, and you are used to being someone who delivers, cancelling at the last minute can feel heavier than it sounds.

You might know, rationally, that you are doing exactly what you need to do. Your child is ill, and they need you.

Still, the thoughts come.

• “I’ve already moved this meeting once.”
• “What will people think?”
• “I can’t let the team down.”
• “I’ve taken more time off for the children than my partner has.”
• “Maybe I can still do that call while they’re watching television. I’ll catch up tonight.”

Sometimes there is another thought underneath all of that too:

“I should be better at managing this.”

Let me tell you, that thought is deeply unhelpful.

Your child is ill. Your plans have changed. This is not a personal failure, and it is not evidence that you need to become even better at organising your life.

Sometimes there is simply nothing to manage.

No amount of organisation can make a four-year-old’s immune system consult your Outlook calendar first.

When being the person who always makes things work becomes part of the problem

A lot of the women I work with are the people others rely on. That is one reason they have successful careers.

They are good at thinking ahead, solving problems and noticing what needs doing. They take responsibility and often keep things moving when others get stuck.

Those qualities are hugely valuable at work, but they can become exhausting when we apply them to every part of our lives.

When something goes wrong, the instinct is often not:

“What does not need to happen today?”

It is: “How can I absorb this without anything else being affected?”

That is an important distinction.

• We move meetings around. 
• We answer emails while sitting beside an unwell child. 
• We log back on after bedtime. 
• We miss the exercise we had planned.
•  We stay up later than we should and tell ourselves it is only for a day or two.

Sometimes that is fine.

Life is not always neat, and there will be periods where you simply do what you need to do. The problem is when absorbing every disruption becomes your default way of coping.

Winter with small children has a way of showing you how unsustainable that can become.

At some point, the question stops being: “Can I keep making this work?”

The better question is: “Does my life have enough capacity to cope with ordinary life when it happens?”

A life that only works under perfect conditions is not sustainable

I think this is one of the most useful ways to think about sustainable high performance.

We are often taught to see efficiency as a good thing. We become better at managing our time, fitting more in, using every spare hour and making everything work.

But efficiency can become fragility. I know that has been the case in my own life. I have used my efficiency to fill every hour and spare moment.

In organisations, we would not call a system resilient if one unexpected absence brought everything to a halt. We would build in contingency, spread responsibility and create enough capacity to absorb the unexpected.

Yet many working parents are trying to run their lives with almost no margin at all.

The week works beautifully as long as nobody gets ill, childcare runs exactly to plan, work does not suddenly become more demanding, everyone sleeps, the trains behave, your partner’s week does not go off the rails, and you stay healthy and energetic throughout.

That is a lot of variables that all have to go your way.

Sod’s law being what it is, the week you most need everything to run smoothly is often the week somebody gets sick.

If your life only works when all of those variables line up, it is probably not as sustainable as it looks.

Winter bugs have a habit of exposing that.

How can working parents build more resilience into their lives?

You cannot stop your children getting ill. You cannot plan your way out of every disrupted night or every call from nursery.

I do not think the answer is to become even better at coping.

So how do we build more resilience into our lives, rather than constantly asking more resilience of ourselves?

You cannot prevent every sick day, but you can make them less destabilising by deciding what genuinely matters, sharing responsibility where possible, protecting your own recovery and creating a little more margin in your normal week.

Here are a few places to start.

1. Be honest about what genuinely has to happen

When your day suddenly falls apart, everything can feel important. For the record, it isn’t.

There may be one decision that really does need you, one meeting that genuinely cannot move or one deadline that matters.

Deal with those if you can, and let the rest shift.

This is not about lowering your standards. It is about prioritising properly when circumstances change.

Good leadership is not doing everything regardless of what is happening around you. It is knowing what matters most now.

2. Don’t automatically repay every parenting disruption with your own wellbeing

This is such an easy pattern to fall into.

You lose half a day because your child is ill, so without even really deciding, you plan to reclaim those hours between 8pm and midnight.

Sometimes that is the right choice, but sometimes it is simply guilt dressed up as productivity.

A sick child often means you are already running on less sleep and carrying more emotional load. If you then remove the little recovery time you had, one difficult day can easily become several.

It is worth asking yourself:

Does this genuinely need doing tonight, or am I uncomfortable with letting something wait?

3. Talk to your partner before the next crisis (if you have one)

The middle of a sick day is not the best time to work out who is responsible.

If you have a partner, try to have the conversation before you need it.

• Whose diary tends to be more flexible on which days? 
• Which commitments genuinely cannot move? 
• How will you split consecutive sick days? 
• What happens if one of you has something important at work? 
• Is there any backup support you can call on?

It does not need to become a rigid rota. The point is simply to avoid one person becoming the automatic default every time.

If you are parenting solo, the questions are different but just as important. Who could be part of your backup plan, if anyone? Is there a family member, friend, neighbour or trusted childcare option who could help in an emergency? What flexibility do you have at work if you are the only person who can respond?

There will not always be a perfect answer, and some parents simply do not have much support around them. This is not about creating an ideal system. It is about thinking through what is realistically available before you are trying to solve it with a feverish child beside you.

For many women, the bigger issue is not just the hours spent at home. It is carrying the mental load of deciding what happens next, keeping track of symptoms, speaking to nursery, rearranging plans and making all the calls.

Where that responsibility can be shared, it should be.

4. Notice what the disruption is revealing

A sick child does not just create the pressure. Quite often, it reveals how much pressure was already there.

Many working parents are overfunctioning long before the nursery calls. We carry too much, compensate for gaps, make ourselves available, keep things moving and quietly absorb more than is sustainable.

Most of the time, we get away with it because nothing has gone wrong yet.

Then one unexpected event lands and suddenly there is nowhere for the pressure to go.

That is not a criticism. It is simply a sign that life may already have been asking too much of you.

It can be useful to notice what the disruption is showing you.

• Are you routinely operating with very little margin? 
• Are evenings regularly being used to finish the working day? 
• Are you carrying work someone else could own? 
• Are you the person who is always stepping in, fixing, remembering or holding everything together?

None of this means you have failed to organise your life properly.

It may simply mean you have become so used to functioning at full stretch that it has started to feel normal.

The sick day is often just the moment that makes it visible.

I am not suggesting most working parents can suddenly create huge empty spaces in their diaries. That would be unrealistic, but even a little more margin can make a difference.

Consider this a friendly reminder that capacity is not wasted potential. Often, it is what allows you to keep performing well when real life inevitably interrupts the plan.

5. Notice the story you are attaching to the situation

For ambitious women, a sick child can very quickly become tangled up with bigger fears.

• They’ll think I’m not committed.
• This is why mothers get overlooked.
• Everyone else seems to manage.
• I’m letting people down.

It can help to ground yourself in the facts.

Your child is ill and you need to respond.

That does not say anything about your ambition, competence or commitment.

If you work in an organisation where occasionally caring for your child genuinely affects how people see your leadership potential, that tells us something important about the culture too.

What about trying to stay well in the first place?

Prevention is never perfect.

If you have children at nursery or school, there is only so much you can do about the bugs that come home.

Still, there are things that can help you feel a little more prepared.

I recorded a whole episode of the Wisdom for Working Mums podcast with Lottie Strutt, a Functional Medicine-trained Nutritional Therapist and Physiotherapist who specialises in children’s health.

You can listen here:

Navigating Cold and Flu Season: Insights for Working Mums on Keeping Kids Well

We talk about practical ways to support children’s health through the winter and some of the things that can make cold and flu season feel a little less chaotic.

One small thing I also use with my own children as part of our winter routine is this children’s probiotic.

This isn’t an advert, and I’m not an affiliate. It is simply something we use in our family and I am happy to share it.

As always, what is appropriate for one child may not be appropriate for another, so do check with a suitably qualified health professional if you are unsure about supplements for your child.

Your children will get ill. That doesn’t mean your career has to shrink.

This is the tension so many working parents live with.

We are often made to feel as though there are only two options: take your career seriously and feel guilty about your family, or put family first and quietly lower your professional ambitions.

I do not think those are the only choices.

Your children can matter enormously to you. Your career can matter enormously to you too.

The challenge is not deciding which one you care about more.

It is building a way of working and living that has enough flexibility to hold both.

Some weeks, work will ask more of you. Other weeks, somebody small will wake up with a temperature and everything else will need to move.

Neither one says anything about how committed you are to the other.

For me, this is part of what sustainable success really means.

It is not becoming so good at juggling that nothing ever gets dropped, or proving that you can absorb every disruption without anyone noticing.

It is building enough resilience into your life that when real life turns up, everything does not have to fall apart.

I learnt that the hard way in 2021.

While I hope never to have another year quite like it, it changed the way I think about capacity, resilience and what it actually means to build a successful working life around a family.

Winter bugs are predictable but the exact day they arrive isn’t.

Maybe the aim is not to make ourselves endlessly more resilient so we can absorb whatever life throws at us.

Maybe it is to build enough support, flexibility and margin around us that when life inevitably interrupts the plan, we have somewhere for it to go.