When you’re a parent, meeting your own basic needs — to eat, drink water, sleep, shower or use the toilet — can take some serious strategising. This is why parents act like it’s the end of the world when their kid doesn’t nap: it evaporates their hope for that day’s tiny scrap of self-care.

Now if you decide to get greedy and ask for, say, an entire minute of quiet in order to sort your scrambled thoughts or to bleed a few brain cells by scrolling social media and your children aren’t sleeping, then you’ll have to get creative in a way generations of parents have done.

Think of it as a game of hide-and-seek that your kids don’t know they’re playing. And enjoy every blissful second of solitude, because you know they’ll find you before long.

Here, some of the funniest parents on X (formerly Twitter) describe what it’s like to hide from your children — and why it was the best part of the day.

Sorry, can't. I'm hiding from my kids.

It’s not ‘hiding from your kids in a closet’, it’s creating bonding time for your spouse and child

Maybe the original Santa was just a dad who put on a disguise to hide from his family.

Not me hiding from my child’s preschool out for a walk