Balancing motherhood and the demands of a broadcasting career

For nearly two decades I have parked a microphone between finishing school lunches and reading bedtime stories. The truth is that juggling live television with the small hands of a child is rarely the polished image the viewers see at home. The countdown to a studio transmission runs in one corner of my mind while the school bell counts down in another, and somewhere between the two I am usually reheating a casserole or signing a permission slip in the back of a taxi.

If you are reading this in Sydney or Perth, Brisbane or Melbourne, you already know that working parenthood here carries its own particular weather. School terms begin in late January, the long summer break stretches across the Christmas‑New Year chaos, and many of our studios sit a hefty drive from the suburbs where our children actually live. The cost of childcare in the big capitals is among the highest in the world, and the expectation to be both present and professionally relentless rarely lets up. Balancing motherhood with a demanding broadcasting schedule is not a tidy puzzle with a single answer. It is something closer to a craft, learned slowly and rebuilt every term.

Rethinking what balance really looks like

The first shift I had to make was releasing the picture of a tidy, evenly weighted scale. There is no morning where the mother, the broadcaster, the writer and the household manager all get exactly the same slice. Real life moves in seasons, and parenting through a career on screen is no different from farming through drought or working retail through the Boxing Day rush. Some weeks the work is enormous and the children get the brushed‑hair, cereal‑for‑dinner version of me. Other weeks I block out a long stretch, turn down a conference, and lean fully into the school pick‑up lane in track pants and thongs.

That is not failure. It is architecture. Once you accept that the scale will tip in different directions at different times, the guilt that so many Australian working mums carry starts to lose its grip. The job is to design the season, not to perform perfect symmetry, and to be honest with your producers about which slice of the year you can truly give.

Planning production weeks around school life

No amount of mindset work replaces a practical schedule. Early in my broadcasting life I learned to lay out my weeks in two layers: the studio calls and the school calendar. Australian schools publish their term dates a year in advance, and a useful habit is to print them on the back of every assignment sheet. When you know that Term 2 finishes on a Friday and the children are off until the Tuesday of Term 3, you can plan a taping break or a lighter presenting slate around it.

Commutes in cities like Sydney and Melbourne can swallow an hour each way, so block‑scheduling becomes essential. If you can batch your studio days into two or three long blocks rather than five scattered starts, you free up the rest of the week for school drop‑off, swimming carnival volunteering and the quiet cups of tea that hold a morning together. The listening skills I honed through a decade of interviewing turned out to be just as useful in the school playground as they were at the other end of a microphone.

Building your reliable village of help

I used to think asking for help was an admission of weakness. It took me years to understand that a demanding broadcasting schedule and a primary‑school child simply cannot be carried by one person, and that building a village is not just a luxury, it is a professional requirement. In Australia we are lucky to have access to a mixed economy of support: grandparents who can do school pick‑up two afternoons a week, a trusted nanny‑share with another mum from the school gate, after‑care programs run through the local council, and the rising number of subsidised childcare hours that take the edge off the bill.

It helps enormously to name what each person actually does. Grandparents do swimming lessons and weekend breakfasts. The nanny does the morning rush. Your partner handles the parent‑teacher interviews. You handle the bedtime routine and the school holiday rosters. If you are building a small team from scratch, knowing what your underlying skill is will tell you which tasks to delegate and which to hold close. No working broadcaster I know runs a tight schedule on goodwill alone, and the mums who thrive longest are the ones who treat their support network with the same professionalism they bring to a green room.

Protecting yourself from burnout

Burnout does not usually arrive as a crash. It creeps in as a slower week, a sharper email, a child you snap at over a missing sock. In broadcasting, where the applause of a successful show can mask the empty tank underneath, the warning signs are easy to ignore. I wrote about the moment I hit the wall because I wish someone had warned me earlier. The combination of early starts in pyjamas and late nights in full hair is gruelling on the body, and the cognitive load of parenting a child through homework while editing a script in your head is something no wellness app fully captures.

The protective habits that have actually worked for me are unglamorous. I drink a glass of water before my morning coffee. I keep a real lunch break, even on remote filming days, and sit somewhere that is not the lounge where I work. I book a non‑negotiable evening a week where the work laptop stays in the bag, and I am ruthless about the school sport commitment on Saturdays, because our junior rugby and netball seasons in Australia are short and the children will not remember the work email but they will remember whether you were on the sideline. These are not luxuries. They are scaffolding.

Stealing back micro-moments of presence

Once the bigger structures are in place, the real parenting happens in the small gaps. The walk from the school gate to the car. The ten minutes between leaving the studio and bedtime. The Saturday morning pancakes before anyone is looking at a screen. In a career that runs on tight schedules, presence is rarely a long, uninterrupted affair. It is the ability to fully arrive in a micro‑moment that makes the difference, and a working mum learns to treasure that skill because she has so few of them to spend.

One quiet habit that helps me reset each season is to set an intention visually. I keep a small board above my desk where I pin the names of three projects I want to pour my energy into, alongside the three people I want to protect from my tiredness. I recently wrote about vision boards that genuinely motivate, because the supermarket cut‑outs version rarely survives contact with a real broadcasting diary. A working mum's version has to hold both the career ambition and the family reality, and the best ones I have made treated those as partners rather than rivals.

Redefining ambition for the long game

The hardest shift, and the most liberating, is letting your career ambition change shape as your children change shape. The pace I kept in my thirties was unsustainable once I was also packing a primary‑school lunchbox. Rather than fight that, I started saying yes to projects that matched the season of my family life and no to ones that would require a fourth late night each week. Some opportunities I declined in my children's early years came back, better funded and more flexible, a decade later. Others disappeared forever, and I learned to grieve them as you would an old friend.

What replaced the old pace was a different kind of ambition, one built around longevity, craft and a quieter kind of influence. The corporate speaking I do now, the books I write and the work I run through This Girl Is On Fire all allow me to set my own travel and recording windows around my family's anchor points. Australian broadcasters are uniquely well placed for this kind of portfolio career because our industry is small enough that a thoughtful exit is rarely a final one. A working mum who steps sideways rather than off can come back stronger, with a richer well of stories to draw from and a house that is still standing when she walks through the door.

Practical anchors for the working mum

A short set of schedule habits that hold the calendar up:

• Print the school term dates and tape them inside your work diary so the calendar lives in one place, not two.
• Block two or three studio days together and protect the other weekdays for school‑hour work.
• Build a Term 4 taping break into every year so Christmas does not quietly eat your leave.
• Treat the morning commute from a Sydney or Melbourne suburb as paid thinking time, with a podcast and a flask of tea.

A short set of family‑side habits that hold the people up:

• Pay for one or two regular hours of help each week, even if the floorboards are not yet varnished.
• Book a non‑negotiable evening with no work calls and treat it like a meeting with the most important client of all.
• Walk the school pick‑up lane whenever you can, even on the days you are rushing back to a studio.
• Make a seasonal vision board that holds both the career goal and the family reality, side by side.