Putting The Career First - A Generational Challenge?

I work in a team of 9, all women (3 of us are web people, 4 are the ‘communications team’ and the other two are our bosses). I’m the youngest in the team (27), one of the other web girls is a couple of years older, but the rest are all over 40. I think of them as ‘the older generation’ not because of their age but because they all have children - not small children either, they’re all at least secondary school age or above.

Anyway, myself and the other younger woman were chatting a while ago about the fact that the rest of the team can be quite hard work because they always put their children first. We both work full time and don’t have kids, so when we’re at work, we’re at work and that’s it. It feels like the rest of the team are constantly at the mercy of their children e.g. when their kids are sick, they need a day or a morning off. They mostly work part time anyway so that they can see more of their kids. They’re often late in because of the school run. when they arrive, we get half an hour of distracting chatter about what their kids did last night.

What i find interesting is that, as I say, most of these women work part time (now i think about it, all but two do). Their husbands are the breadwinners, they just seem to do this for something to do. My other colleague and I however see this as our careers, whereas you sometimes get the feeling the others don’t care. All this can be really frustrating when you’re trying to work on a project and they’re missing deadlines because they had to take the kids to the doctor or you can’t get hold of them on a Friday when the customer wants a decision because that’s their day off, or you have to do twice as much work to cover their absence etc…

So, I was wondering, is this a generational thing? I’m not saying it’s wrong to put your family first: when I have children, of course they will be more important than my job, I’d be foolish to think otherwise, but all the same, it seems very unprofessional on their parts. I’d like to think I’d still be dedicated to my job, much as I love my kids.

Does anyone else have any experience of this? I’m quite curious to hear about this from the opposite perspective - people who work and have kids - is it difficult working with people like me who don’t?