The guilt that lives in every parent who is also building something

I will tell you exactly when I first felt it.

My son was four. We were at the kitchen table, and he was asking me to play. Not loudly, not urgently — just persistently, in that way that four-year-olds have perfected. I was on my laptop, working on the first prototype of what would eventually become Nuri Tales. An app, I should say, that is explicitly about being present with your children.

I said “five more minutes” three times. She stopped asking.

I kept working. And for the rest of that afternoon — even after I closed the laptop, even when we did eventually play — there was this low hum in the background. The guilt.

What makes this kind of guilt different

There are different flavours of parenting guilt, and I have come to think this one — the guilt of the parent who is also building something — has its own specific texture.

It is not the guilt of neglect. That is a different, heavier thing. This guilt comes from the collision of two genuine loves. You love your child. You also love the thing you are making — or the work you are doing, or the career you are building. And most days, one of them is getting less than it deserves.

What makes it harder is that both loves are real. This is not a case of selfishness versus responsibility. It is responsibility versus responsibility, and neither side releases you.

What the research actually says about time

Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina conducting longitudinal family studies, found something that will either comfort or unsettle you: the amount of time parents spend with children aged three to eleven shows surprisingly little relationship with behavioural and emotional outcomes.

The critical factor is not duration. It is quality of engagement. A distracted parent present for eight hours is neurologically and relationally different from a parent who is fully attentive for two. Children register this distinction at the level of their attachment systems. They are not counting minutes. They are reading presence.

“Your child does not need all of you all of the time. They need enough of you, present enough, warm enough, often enough.”

What I have learned to do with it

I want to be honest: I have not solved it. I do not think it is the kind of thing that gets solved. But I have learned a few things about living with it more honestly.

Why I built the thing I was distracted building

I still believe Nuri Tales is worth building. And I still believe that afternoon at the kitchen table mattered — not because it was perfect, but because I repaired it. We did eventually play. And later, I told him a story about a mother bear who got so caught up in her project that she forgot to notice her cub. And the cub understood. And they made up.

He was four. He probably does not remember it. But I think it counted.

The guilt is not going anywhere. But it does not have to be the whole story. Showing up warmly, repairing mistakes, and pursuing work that matters — that is not a compromise. According to the research, it is sufficient. It is, in fact, everything.