About
Welcome! I’m Christina Spark 👋🏼
I’m a mum, writer and podcaster. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, then spent fifteen years solving strategy problems in business, the last eleven of them at Google. In 2025 I walked away from a successful career because I realised the hardest strategy problems I’d ever face weren’t at work. They were at home.
Like me, Australian families are drowning in them: five-figure childcare bills, the worst housing affordability on record and career decisions with six-figure consequences. All of it faced while emotionally overwhelmed and overloaded with conflicting information.
When you become a parent, everyone tells you about the love. But nobody tells you about the decisions.
Wave after wave of high stakes decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that compound quietly over decades. The ones that determine a family’s financial future and happiness. All front-loaded in the first five years when we are most emotional, time poor and sleep deprived:
Should I hire postpartum support or ask my mother-in-law to move in?
Nanny, daycare or is one of us staying home?
If I take three years off now, what does that cost me later?
Do we buy, rent, or rent-vest?
Private school or a house deposit?
What am I willing to trade off to be the parent I want to be?
These decisions can’t just be solved with parental intuition alone — the world has become too complex for that. These are strategy problems that require data and analysis. So that’s what I do here. I use the frameworks I honed in business to help parents reach the best decision for them. It's built on a framework I call DRIVE — Data, Reversibility, Insurance, Values, Economics — which is also the spine of the book I'm writing.
This is not parenting advice
I cover the big decisions the way a strategist would, so you walk away with more clarity and confidence in your own decision-making. There is never a right or wrong answer, just a more informed and values-aligned one.
At some point in the first five years of parenthood you’ll face a decision worth tens of thousands of dollars and several years of your life. Better to meet it with the data, the numbers and a framework ready than to make it emotionally, on the brink of exhaustion.
I went for the book that would give me the strategies. It didn’t exist, so I’m writing it. The ones that would have saved me money, time and a lot of unnecessary guilt. I hope it does the same for you.
The podcast
Every essay, read aloud, for anyone who’d rather listen. There are some earlier conversation episodes in the archive too.
Media and speaking
I’m available to comment on childcare economics and regulation, and on how parents can assess a centre themselves. I read income statements for a living — I can explain why labour is the only meaningful cost lever in a childcare business, and what that means for the room your child is in.
For workplaces and parent groups, I run sessions on any of the first-five-years decisions. Preparing for postpartum and returning to work are the two most employers underestimate.
Enquiries: myfamilystrategist@gmail.com
For media
Christina Spark spent fifteen years in audit and commercial strategy, including eleven years at Google, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in Canada. She writes My Family Strategist, a weekly newsletter applying business frameworks to the financial and operational decisions of the first five years of parenthood. She is based in Sydney.
Not perfect parents. Intentional ones.
— Christina
