In this case, children.   Sydney mother-of-two Melissa Blackley is so obsessed with work that she doesn’t know what her children eat for lunch and hasn’t cooked dinner in two years.  Her and her partner, John Anderson, are both high-powered sales executives and are so focused on work that neither of them knows what time their children go to school. Mr Anderson said he only has "a pretty good idea" of the school’s location.  Both of them work at least 12 hours a day.

"Our jobs are incredibly important to us and an extension of that is having a BlackBerry which distracts me when I am home,"

"I find work exciting and engaging. It’s easy to drift off and do work rather than playing dominos."

The couple maintain their relationship largely by email.  Each day they run a "dutch auction" to decide which parent will take their children to their extra-curricular activities, like music lessons.

Ms Blackley outsourced much of the responsibility of raising her children to her 69-year-old mother, who quit her own job at her daughter’s behest just months after India was born. Grandma arrives at the family’s Randwick home at 6am every weekday to look after the children.

"I asked her (to resign from work) because like many mums I was concerned about my baby going into childcare,"

Ms Blackley said.

A few observations I would make about this:

• why have children if you’re going to spend so little time with them?  I mean, whats the point?
• I wonder how the children feel about their place in their parents’ list of life priorities
• I’m surprised her mother didn’t tell her to take a hike when asked to quite her job and care for the grandchildren – my mum would have told me to get real and get my priorities right – and that she’d done her fill of child raising with my brother, sister and me, and it is up to me and my wife to raise our own kids
• I’m amazed she’d think that asking her mum to do this was a reasonable thing to do.

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