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The morning a child runs a fever and a work deadline falls on the same day. The moment a call from daycare empties your head of whatever the meeting was about. The hour after bedtime when you open your laptop and the tension of the workday comes back, and sleep recedes.
The experience of work and parenting interfering with each other is ordinary. It is also, it turns out, one of the better-studied phenomena in organizational psychology. Researchers have been systematically asking why it happens, how much it happens, and what reduces it for more than 40 years. The academic framework they work within is called work-family spillover: the transfer of moods, behaviors, and demands from work roles into family roles and vice versa, studied in organizational psychology for over 40 years.