Keeping up with current tech is part of your job, so do it on the clock. Senior developers are absolutely expected to spend time on experiments and exploratory projects; it's how they can safely and confidently propose and lead major refactors and improvements.

Understanding the potential risks and complications with a project supports your ability to properly scope, staff, and mentor.

Answer here is simple: put your family first.

Tech has managed to convince so many young people that they’re not supposed to have a life outside of work. I fell for this too when I entered tech, working insane overtime, doing “hackathons” where we just worked all weekend, and spending every remaining moment trying to “stay ahead of the curve”.

This is a trap, and it’s not necessary. I worked this way for years until it completely burned me out and I realized that the things that really mattered were being neglected because some tech bros made me feel like work needed to be my life.

Once I rejected this my life simply became better. I put my 40 hours in and I did my best in those hours, but I took back the other 40-50 hours a week I was working and invested it back into my family.

Today my relationship with my wife and kids is better than it had ever been, I am happier and better rested, and my career has skyrocketed as a result. Turns out when you find balance in your life the quality of what you do improves pretty radically, and maybe your attitude and work relationships improve with it.

I’m an EM for a very large corporation today, I make better money and am healthier and happier than I ever was when I was trying to make work consume my every waking moment. I spend a lot of my time with my direct reports today trying to reinforce that they can clock out at the end of the day and it’ll be fine.

Don’t worry about your career, put that time and energy into your family and your friends. Later-in-life you will thank you for it.

I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:

1. The biggest thing was just to recalibrate my expectations. I talked with other dev parents who all said that, until the kids are able to play a bit more independently (eg 6 or so), you just have to accept that your self enrichment time is going to be limited.
2. For my off hours learning, I stick to mainly portable skills. Ways of thinking about technical debt, etc. Things that are both widely applicable, and can be learned more passively.
3. I try to carve out time to learn during work hours. I’m lucky in that the company I work for allows for a lot of independence, so my team actually instituted an “investment day” where we work on whatever we want, with the only goal being that you should try to do something that you’ll learn from.

Yeah, kids are exhausting. I have way less time for personal projects.

First, don't be afraid to take time off when your kids need you. Kids get sick, kids have bad days. Family comes first. If you're responsible about communication, your job can handle you taking time off when needed. Don't let your job add to your stress more than necessary.

Then, you have to learn to redefine productivity and impact. I used to focus on more tangible measures of accomplishment like the number of commits, number of bugs fixed, and so on. But after a while I realized that nobody cared about those things when it came time for performance review. In fact, sometimes I got more kudos for a little side project I spent less than a day on, than work that took me months.

So, I learned to focus on what has the highest impact. I don't overload myself with tasks so that I have lots of time to mentor, to do cleanup work, and to think about the big picture. If my "regular" tasks are going to take all of my time, that's too much - I ask my manager what's the highest priority and I push some things back. The "big picture" thinking allows me to sometimes make some great insights and do work that wasn't asked for, but makes a big difference.

If you do that, you also have plenty of time to learn new things on the job. Rather than personal projects, do side projects related to your work. Try rewriting something in a new language you wanted to learn. Try out a new library or framework. It's okay if some of them are throwaway - turn them into a useful proof-of-concept or demo. It's an opportunity for you to learn and to do something useful for work.

And don't forget to enjoy your kids and take lots of pictures and videos! Oh, and write down all of the funny things they say. They're only young once.

A) daycare, B) 4 days a week for work, 1 day a week for work-related learning/projects/ideas. YMMV depending on your employer

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn't try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn't work much overtime, I didn't do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn't even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm... that's not true -- I've seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you'll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it's really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I'm a "senior director" level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.

Things will get better the moment your youngest becomes more independent, and sleeps well at night.