ListenA Life Defined by Caregiving
I have been a child and youth care (CYC) worker since 2009. For the past fifteen years I have worked in community centre after-school programs, group homes, youth mental health treatment centres, homeless shelters, and supportive housing units. I have worked frontline—casual shifts, overnights, holidays, weekends, rotating schedules, and even mandated overtime. In 2025, I became a program supervisor, and so still relatively new in the broader scope of my CYC career.
Yet my most important role is not listed on my résumé: I am a mother to two young sons in elementary school. I am a caregiver at work, and I am a caregiver at home. This article reflects on the emotional, structural, and relational tensions of dual caregiving—being both a CYC professional and a parent—and how these roles shape, challenge, and sustain one another over time.
Motherhood and Practice: Shaping Each Other
Motherhood has shaped my practice, and my practice has shaped my parenting. My life revolves around children and youth routines, relationships, responsibilities in both spaces. I have teared up at work watching a young person master a skill they once resisted. I also become emotional when asked about my sons or moments I missed with them. I have been told, more than once, “I wish you were my mom.” I have received countless hugs from children and youth who needed connection. These moments fill my cup even as they sometimes break my heart. Each child only gets eighteen years to be a child, and now, as a parent, I see how quickly those years pass.
Becoming a mother made me more patient at work. I developed a deeper tolerance for emotional dysregulation and a clearer understanding of behaviour often reflecting exhaustion, hunger, overstimulation, or unmet needs. I frequently say, “Let’s have a snack before we have a conversation.” I say it at work, and I say it at home.
This dual perspective—learning patience at home and applying it at work—shaped how I now observe growth, both in staff and the youth in my care.
Observing Growth: Youth, Staff, and My Children
As a supervisor, I watch staff interactions much like I watch my own children play: curious, attentive, noticing moments of growth. The way a child plays this year isn’t how they’ll play next year. The same is true for staff learning relational practice. I notice small breakthroughs when a staff member connects with a youth who’s been resistant, or handling a challenging situation with calm instead of frustration. And I notice moments of uncertainty too.
Being a mom helps me see how important patience, encouragement, and simply being present really are. The skills I practice with my children make me a better supervisor, and the patience I build supervising staff informs how I support my kids’ development. Growth takes time, relationships take work and showing up consistently with care makes all the difference.
The Emotional Labour of Dual Caregiving
This patience comes with sustained emotional labour. What often appears as calm professionalism masks the mental load of day-to-day responsibilities: remembering appointments, managing homework, cooking meals, and navigating bedtimes and bathtimes. Compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and ongoing exposure to young people’s stories are not abstract concepts—they accumulate over years. We receive training on these realities but living in them is something different.
I bring calm, empathy, and problem-solving skills to the young people in my care, then return home to offer that same energy to my children. Some days I feel guilty about the screen time they receive so I can have a few moments to myself. How often have I left work thinking, I should have said that differently? How often do my children ask for one more bedtime story while I wonder who read to the children at work that day? A song comes on the radio and reminds me of a former youth. A name in the news prompts the same reflection: If only we had reached them earlier. You do not stay long in this field without witnessing loss, suicide, addiction, and incarceration—lives that unfold with immense hardship.
This mental load follows me into every space, and sometimes the most visible symbol of that divided attention is in my hands: my phone.
Divided Attention: The Phone as Symbol
My children sometimes see me as distracted. They ask, “Are you working?” or “Get off your phone.” I explain its work, but the explanation only goes so far when home time feels like it should fully belong to them. I have stood in Costco responding to a staff member in crisis and tried to play a board game at home while managing a safety concern. In those moments, both roles demand my full attention, and I feel the constant tension of trying to be fully present in both spaces.
Early in my career, I left my phone in a locker and checked it discreetly during breaks to see pictures of their day and reassure myself that, even on the hardest shifts, I was providing a good life for them. Today, staff use phones to document notes, communicate discreetly, and manage crises without escalating situations in front of youth. I continue to integrate my personal and professional life, including volunteering with my provincial CYC association, a commitment I embrace out of passion and dedication to the field.
The phone has become a physical symbol of divided caregiving, forcing the question: who receives my full attention, and what message does partial presence send to my children and to the youth in my care? It reminds me daily that the boundaries between professional responsibility and personal connection are constantly shifting, and that being fully present in either space requires conscious effort, reflection, and care.
Shift Work, Career, and Family Realities
Shift work shaped my parenting in ways I did not anticipate. I often left for work while my children slept and returned home to find them asleep again, standing quietly beside the crib with tears in my eyes. Day shifts on the weekend felt especially heavy, knowing society frames weekends as family time. Broken sleep—from overnight shifts or toddlers climbing into bed needing one more cuddle—left me feeling exhausted in every part of my life: at work, at home, and in between. Coffee became a lifeline, a small strategy for managing two demanding roles. Social isolation followed; while peers gathered on weekends or evenings, I worked. Connection with other adults—family, friends, colleagues—was essential. I poured so much into others’ cups; I needed spaces where someone poured into mine.
Career, financial pressures, and family responsibilities intertwined with these personal challenges. Supervisors rarely asked how I was balancing dual caregiving, and while my return from maternity leave—one full year with each son—was acknowledged, the ongoing realities of parenting alongside CYC work went largely unexamined. I stayed in shift work for practical childcare reasons, even as it limited career advancement. I sometimes used annual leave to attend weekend or weeknight sports events or birthday parties, and I once imagined volunteering regularly at my sons’ school, but practical limits required occasional field trips instead.
Financial pressures added another layer. I juggled multiple jobs at once to manage casual and permanent roles, worked overtime to afford family trips or birthday celebrations, and pushed through illness to preserve sick days for when my children might need me most. Rising costs, delayed government funding, and structural constraints intensified these pressures. Our systems depend on CYC workers showing up—through snowstorms, summer breaks, across shifting schedules, and using annual leave when childcare fails—yet rarely pause to consider who is caring for the caregivers at home. Many families manage through opposite-shift parenting, careful scheduling, and quiet sacrifice. But at what cost?
There is a particular grief in creating meaningful experiences for other children while missing irreplaceable moments with my own. After full days of emotional regulation, behaviour support, and activity planning, I returned home, often depleted. I wanted to rest yet also be fully present and intentional. At work, I rarely forgot themed days or celebrations because I was part of a team; at home, I sometimes forgot special school days or realized too late that my child needed a specific outfit or prop. The guilt is heavy precisely because I understand how much those moments matter. Now, as my children outgrow certain stages, I quietly reflect: what could I have done differently?
I was born into circumstances that allowed stability; the children and youth I work with did not choose the cards they were dealt. Some have no contact with their biological parents. Many have experienced multiple placements and adults meant to care for them. Sometimes I have been one more face in a long line of helpers. There are youth whose names I no longer remember, and others whose birthdays, favourite artists, or shared Dairy Queen outings I still recall. Two youths attended my wedding in 2013; I gave them flowers from my bouquet. Years later, I still remember their names. It is both grounding and eye-opening to recognize the depth and limits of our impact—and to realize my children benefit from stability and nurture that some youth I serve did not consistently receive.
Navigating two identities
I move between identifying as a CYC professional and a mother. Some days I feel steadier as a CYC professional, others as a mother. Most days I navigate both simultaneously. If our field is grounded in relational practice, should that not extend to the people doing the work? What might change if supervision included open conversations about parenting strain and caregiver fatigue? What would it mean to design workplaces that assume workers have families and responsibilities beyond their shifts?
These questions linger, not as abstract policy concerns, but as daily realities shaping who remains in this field and who quietly steps away. I also recognize this is my experience as a mother in Canada; someone in another context, or a father, may experience it differently.
Supporting those who care
Years ago, colleagues nicknamed me “Mudder,” a Newfoundland and Labrador term for mom. Now, as a supervisor, I am sometimes called a “mother hen,” checking in on staff and youth even when I am off shift. That care is my strength, and my vulnerability. Perhaps the goal is not to be the best mother, or the best CYC worker in isolation, but to recognize that both identities coexist. This work is, at its heart, about relationships, and relationships require sustaining.
My hope in naming these tensions—the grief, divided attention, financial strain, and emotional labour, is to invite a broader conversation. Caregivers need care. Without deliberate support, burnout is inevitable, and both the young people we serve and our own children at home experience the consequences. Sustainability is not about loving either role less; it is about ensuring we can continue loving both well. Supporting the caregivers sustains the profession, ensuring that the youth we serve and the children we raise at home both thrive.
