Released On 20 July 2026
Steph's blog: How Do You Measure Fairness When Your Children Are Different?
How equity, not equality, shapes "fair" parenting choices.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
— To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
In the 1980s and 1990s, "equality" was the rallying cry. More recently, we've adopted the more nuanced concept of "equity". The distinction matters in the workplace: equality means treating everyone the same, while equity recognises that different people need different support to have the same opportunity to succeed.
That distinction feels relatively straightforward when you're thinking about recruitment or workplace adjustments. It becomes much harder when you're thinking about your own children.
Any parent of more than one child will have wrestled with questions of fairness. Do you give each child the same financial support, or do you help the one who needs it most? Do you spend exactly the same amount of time with each grandchild, even if one lives twenty miles away and the other next door?
One of my daughters has significant disabilities. Without ever keeping score, I know I spend far more hours on her than I do on her older sister. Hospital appointments, endless forms, conversations with professionals, chasing equipment, navigating services—it all adds up. If fairness were simply a timesheet, she would win comfortably.
But time isn't the whole story. My eldest and I can wander around Kew Gardens for an afternoon, talking about whatever seven-year-olds talk about. My youngest hasn't been outside hospital grounds since last winter. Our adventures are laps of hospital corridors and any patch of accessible green space we can find. They are different experiences, but they are no less full of love.
This summer I'm planning to take my eldest to Spain for a few days. Even typing that sentence fills me with guilt. One daughter gets sandcastles and sunshine. The other can't come. No amount of reasoning changes that fact. My rational brain tells me this is equitable: one child is physically able to travel, the other currently isn't. My emotional brain asks whether love can ever feel fair when it looks so different.
Then I turn the question around. Is it fair for my eldest to miss out on experiences simply because her sister cannot have them? That doesn't feel right either.
Perhaps that's the trap. We often think fairness has to produce identical outcomes. But sometimes life simply doesn't allow that. Sometimes the fairest decision still leaves everyone with something to grieve.
Oddly enough, I find this easier to understand at work. Good employers don't insist that every employee has exactly the same working arrangements. They provide what each individual needs to do their best work—a flexible schedule for one person, specialist equipment for another, quieter working space for someone else. Nobody expects equality of treatment to mean identical treatment.
Yet as parents we often hold ourselves to a harsher standard. We expect ourselves to make two very different childhoods somehow look the same. I'm not sure that's possible.
Perhaps the hardest lesson parenting has taught me is that fairness isn't about keeping score. It's about making every decision with love, even when the decisions are different, and accepting that guilt is sometimes the price of doing the right thing.
Steph juggles a full time job in sustainable finance, 2 wonderful daughters aged 6 and 3 (the younger one is disabled and has a genetic lung disease), and a supportive husband. She lives in south London and works in the City.
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