Parenting in the Summer Feels Like a Baby Frog Glued to Your Back
Why working parents are burning out — and not talking about it
There’s a viral Instagram animation I can’t stop thinking about: a tired adult frog attempts to make dinner, sip coffee, type on a laptop, even sit on the toilet, all while a baby frog clings stubbornly to its back. It’s funny, yes, but it also perfectly captures the emotional and physical weight of parenting in the summer.
As a mother of three young boys with a demanding, full-time career and a husband whose job is somehow even more intense — I can tell you that summer doesn’t feel like a break. It feels like a pressure cooker.
When school ends, so does structure. Suddenly, I’m juggling conference calls while peeling oranges, answering Slack messages while diffusing arguments over toys, and negotiating deadlines with a child quite literally on my lap. Camps help, if you’re lucky enough to find one with space, hours that work, and a price tag that doesn’t make your eyes water. But most days, it’s just survival mode.
What makes it harder is the myth of the flexible summer. My feed is full of parents “working remotely” from dreamy destinations, laptops perched poolside in Mallorca, video calls from cabanas in Mykonos. And I wonder: Who’s watching their kids? Is there a magic secret I missed? Or is it just another illusion that leaves the rest of us questioning our own chaos?
Burnout isn’t simply fatigue, it’s the slow erosion of joy, identity, and patience. We’re expected to parent like we don’t have jobs, and work like we don’t have kids. Add the summer layer, and everything intensifies.
Hybrid and remote work were supposed to make things easier. But in many ways, they’ve blurred boundaries so much that we now live and work in the same overstimulated space with no off-switch. And for parents, especially mothers, the invisible labor compounds. We’re constantly context-switching from strategic thinking to snack duty, from budget planning to Band-Aid application.
We don’t need another list of productivity hacks. We need permission to admit that this is hard and systems that support, not penalize, that honesty. That frog on our back? It’s cute, but it’s heavy. And we’re carrying it through every meeting, every meal, every moment of summer.
Let’s stop romanticizing the illusion of balance and start having real conversations about flexibility, burnout, and the true cost of pretending we can do it all.
So this summer, let’s stop pretending. Let’s be honest about the mess, the magic, and the madness of it all. Let’s start building systems that support working parents not just in theory, but in practice.
Because that little frog on our back? He’s followed us into meetings, into deadlines, into the shower — even onto the toilet.
We’re doing our best to hold it all together. The least the workplace can do is meet us there, preferably before we run out of snacks.
