For the Ones in the Trenches

A love letter to the working parents in law.

I was a client once, sitting in a room with a firm we had hired, when a senior partner used the happy news of a colleague's new baby as an opening to complain. The team had been let down, apparently, because the new parent had taken the full parental leave they were entitled to. Then another dad on the team went on leave not long after, and this same partner, a man of a certain vintage, simply could not fathom it. Could not imagine wanting it. The whole thing curdled in about four seconds flat. I looked awkwardly over at my GC, also feeling the weirdness in the air, somebody did the nervous laugh you do when you are watching a person be diminished in real time and you have not yet worked out how to make it stop.

I have never forgotten it.

It handed me an uninvited window into what it must be like on the inside, day after day, for the people quietly trying to be present parents inside a profession that was never built for them. I do not think that moment is rare.

So this one is for you.

The system, plainly, was designed for a person who has someone at home doing all of it. Every single load of it. That is the quiet assumption baked into the billable hour, the face-time culture and the promotion calendars that peak precisely when your children are smallest and need you most.

It takes a village, except nobody has a village anymore, and the jobs are in the city where the rent and the mortgages have gone vertical and usually require both parents to work, meaning childcare costs too (which should be a tax deduction btw), so the maths simply does not math.

Millennial working parents, you’ve been gaslit. Yes, you can “have it all”, just not all at once and not inside this system as it currently stands.

A special word for the dads

There is a particular kind of bravery in being a millennial father who actually wants the leave, wants the pickups, wants to be a whole parent and not a weekend visitor in his own house and who wants all of that inside a culture where a certain flavour of senior partner still treats it as a punchline.

The guilt levels, as one of you put it to me quietly in the DMs, are through the roof.

You are getting sneered at from one direction for not being chained to your desk and guilted from another for not being at home. Mad respect to you, bro. You are some of the steadiest, quietest change agents in the whole building and most people will never clock it.

Every dad who takes his full leave in the face of the passive aggression makes it a fraction easier for the next one to do the same without flinching.

The motherhood tax

Then there is the motherhood tax, the thing we are all too polite to name on a performance review that everybody can nonetheless read straight off the org chart.

The wildly talented woman who should have made partner two cycles ago and somehow keeps not quite getting there, patient and brilliant and parked just below the line, while less capable people sail past because their year was not interrupted by the small matter of growing and keeping a human alive. I put the idea of the “motherhood tax” to my Instagram community this week and the response was not subtle. It is real and it does not survive five minutes of honest scrutiny.

I also ran a poll asking whether a traditional legal career is designed for parents and carers or for people without those responsibilities, and 75 per cent of you said non parents and carers, with the rest landing on neither. Not a single vote for parents. Not one for both.

Now, I am always alive to the possibility that my little corner of the internet skews progressive, loud and optimistic in the best way, so perhaps it is not a flawless cross-section of the profession in 2026. I have my suspicions though.

I think it sits a great deal closer to representative than anyone would like to admit.

Why this cannot hold

I keep coming back to the same conclusion. This is untenable. It is unsustainable and surely, it cannot hold. The people it is grinding down are not broken, the design is, and you do not fix a design flaw with another resilience workshop or a wellbeing app that offers you a four-minute meditation between school pickup and a document review. The fix is structural. It is leadership that carries genuinely different lived experience into the room, age diversity and background diversity and parent-shaped diversity at the equity level where the actual decisions get made, not merely on the diversity slide of the pitch deck.

That change is coming though.

I asked whether you think millennial leaders will be the change and 57 per cent said yes, another 30 per cent said maybe. The generation that got sold the lie, that chased the dangled golden carrot, that did everything by the book and watched the goalposts sprint off into the distance, are starting to walk into real power now, tired but clear-eyed and completely done pretending the old bargain was ever fair.

One of you, a female millennial partner, told me she feels a real responsibility to be part of this change precisely because she has seen how ugly it can get. Yes, she is also an eldest daughter…

Your permission slip

If you are somewhere that respects the whole of you, the parent and the professional in one body, then stay and build and become the leadership that repairs this from the inside. If you are somewhere that treats your family as a performance problem to be managed, you are allowed to leave. Take your talent. Take your judgment. Take your book of business, which is worth a great deal more than they have ever let on. One way loyalty to an institution that would replace you by Friday is not a trade worth making.

To the parents of the under-fives especially, in the thick of the sleepless beautiful gloriously chaotic years while the promotion cycle screams in your ear….. you will get there. Your littles will grow up and be so proud of the parent who went after it and refused to disappear. You are not behind. You are just carrying more than the person beside you and still keeping pace, which is the tidiest possible proof that you were never the problem.

I am child-free by choice, the self-described kooky aunty moose (what my niblings call me) in the corner with the colourful merch, loud opinions and a genuinely alarming amount of sleep. I get to watch you do this from a seat with a lot more rest in it and I do not take that for granted for a second. So take the hug. Even the ones out here trying to change the system need a Career Big Sis every now and then, and today that is me, and this is that hug.

Please take the virtual hug, then go and be the reason the next generation of working parents in law never has to read a briefing like this one.

I’m happy to babysit, but I don’t do nappies.

Mel

x

A quiet note before you go: I have written this in the shorthand of mums and dads and small kids because that is where most of the messages landed this week, but the maths does not care about the shape of your family. If you are two mums or two dads, if you are doing this solo, if the person you are racing home to is an ageing parent or a sibling or anyone at all who needs you, this letter is for you too. Swap mum and dad for primary and secondary carer, swap the toddlers for whoever it is you are carrying and the point holds exactly the same. The system was never built for carers of any description. My respect is identical for every last one of you.