No matter what you do, you always feel that you are letting someone down. When you're at work you worry about your children. At home, you're thinking about work. The only conversations you have with your partner are extended planning sessions over who is doing what when. The only person you don't worry about letting down is yourself since you have no time to worry about yourself to worry that you are letting yourself down.
It's like you're on a pogo stick, and what you really want to do is put your foot down to steady yourself. But you can't – you have to keep jumping up and down as people hand you more and more stuff to do.

Every working parent has their collection of horror stories.

From uncaring bosses
'When my daughter was four I told my boss at the time that I needed to leave work fifteen minutes early on Tuesdays and Thursday so that I could pick her up from nursery. I was the only person with kids at the online advertising agency where I worked at the time, and my boss gave me a look straight out of Charles Dickens' 'Christmas Carol' when Bob Cratchit asks Ebenezer Scrooge for Christmas Day off. It didn't matter that I was the first one in every day and was happy to work late on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.'

To anally-retentive bosses
'A few years later, at another company, I was reprimanded by another boss for continually arriving ten minutes late to work. I was arriving late because I had to get my daughter ready for school, and kept missing my bus. The fact that I worked late most nights was not taken into account.'

Inappropriate sickness
'A couple of weeks ago, I was dropping my daughter off at school. I had an important meeting, which I had been preparing for all week with the head of IT. He was very busy and the meeting had been planned weeks previously. The moment we stepped out of the car, my daughter, who hadn't complained about feeling sick at all that morning (which was unusual since she complains every morning about feeling sick), immediately vomited up her breakfast. Needless to say, the meeting was rearranged.'

And finally those moments when you let your partner down
'Once, I had to work late on a project, and I couldn't get home in time to collect our daughter from school. It wouldn't have been so bad, but unfortunately it was my wife's last day at her then-job. So rather than going to her leaving drinks party she had to do the school pick-up instead. She was not impressed.'

If it's so hellish then why do it? Well, besides the obvious financial advantages, work also gives you a sense of self-worth. Unlike in the school playground, at work you are not your child's parent, you are your own person. You have goals and achievements and objectives. I love the thrill when I cross off that task at the bottom of my 'to do' list as much as anyone.

Work keeps us healthy. Its official, a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that out of 1,200 women ranging in ages from 15 to 54 the working mothers were less obese and in general healthier than their stay-at-home counter-parts.

Balancing the needs of work and family is difficult. There are always times when you feel that you are letting someone down. For all its negatives, though, work has a lot of positives as well, and I think the positive side of work makes us better parents. Just as it's important for our children to learn how to function without us, it's important for us to learn how to function without our kids. Work allows us to do this.

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