How to survive work during the baby and toddler years

Key takeaways

• Keep regularly connecting with your employer about what you need to support you at this time. Remember, what works now may not work six months from now.
• Consider what flexible work arrangements will work for you at this time. 
• Find your tribe. It will help you enormously. 

Most family-friendly programs focus on supporting new parents, which is excellent. However, parenthood also involves ongoing transition points as children grow from babies and toddlers to school-aged children and adolescents.  

With each new phase comes a new set of joys and challenges. Without effective ongoing support, you can be just as vulnerable as new parents to the conflict between work and family roles.  

Beyond the first year  

During the baby and toddler years, you may experience a raft of challenges including:  

• Sleep deprivation and fatigue due to babies waking during the night or requiring night feeds. 

• Breastfeeding challenges – there is a lot of pressure on mothers to breastfeed. This is challenging for some, and returning to work can represent an additional barrier to breastfeeding. 

• Settling babies into new care arrangements. 

• Sick children – babies and toddlers average 8-10 colds per year (this has escalated since the pandemic). Parents can also experience more periods of sickness during this period. 

• Stress and feelings of guilt relating to arriving late / leaving early, and also for leaving their young children in the care of someone else. 

• Workplace discrimination or negative comments from supervisors or co-workers. 

• Loss of confidence and questioning their career. 

• Job insecurity or feeling like they want to quit. 

• Caring for children with additional needs. 

• Juggling baby/toddler and older children. 

• Financial stress. 

Keep connecting 

When you think you’ve got your baby’s latest routine and rhythms down pat, they change the goalposts with another development leap, leaving you scratching your head and re-evaluating your parenting prowess. These early years are a time of remarkable growth and change. What works one day (or one minute) doesn’t the next. Having regular conversations with your employer about your requirements will help you manage your workload and stay feeling connected to the workplace.  

It’s important to intentionally carve out time to have these conversations regularly with your employer. Remember, things change all the time – if you keep the conversation going, chances are you have mechanisms to make adjustments.  

Keep it flexible 

Map out what flexibility arrangements will help you during this time in your life (remember, nothing you have previously agreed to has to be set in stone). You may be battling daycare illnesses, so working from home for a few weeks makes sense. Perhaps you’re experiencing extreme fatigue from sleepless nights – you'll need to let your employer know, and request accommodations. Remember, fatigue can affect your ability to your job, particularly if it requires operating heavy machinery, being on the road or being rostered on for lengthy shifts. 

Remember, you can always make adjustments (it’s the definition of flexible). It’s important to take the time to assess what’s going to help you at this point in time, and – again – have the chat with your manager.  

Finding support  

Communication is essential to building healthy work relationships, as is connection. Just like finding your tribe in high school became incredibly beneficial to surviving that period, so is finding a network of working parents you can count on.  

You can form a group from your peers with similar-aged kids via your postnatal parent group, searching for parents in your local community on Facebook (e.g. Mama Tribe, Dads Group Inc) or via a service like MeetUp or Peanut. Or there might be other parents in your workplace you could connect with.   

Support groups can help with advocacy, career and parenting advice, opportunities, and networking. Even if most of the communication happens over WhatsApp they, at the very least, help working parents know they are not alone in their challenges.