Parents are told to treasure every moment: “It goes by in the blink of an eye!” Yet for many, the early months of parenthood do not feel fast so much as relentless: a blur of feedings, worries and appointments in which time seems to belong to everyone but the parents themselves.

How do we find balance when every minute is already spoken for? This is the question at the heart of my research. Over years of fieldwork in Toronto’s wealthiest and most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, I interviewed more than 200 people and surveyed over 1,000, among them first-time parents. I develop these findings in Timeless, my forthcoming book.

Parenthood eats everyone’s hours, but it takes different bites depending on the size of your bank account. What both rich and poor make clear is that time balance is not a matter of accumulating free hours. After all, no one can hoard more than 24 hours in one day.

Everyone has what I call a “temporal goldilocks zone”, where free time and obligated time is “just right”. New parents, thrown out of the goldilocks zone seemingly overnight, have a great deal to teach us about finding the way back in.

Five lessons are worth passing on:

1. Sync, don’t impose, schedules

New parents quickly discovered that a newborn cannot be scheduled into submission. The ones who fared best stop trying to impose a........

© The Conversation