WFH hacks for parents of young children!
With COVID-19, like many other families, not only were we left without childcare but we also paused all help. (In our case, our morning nanny, mother’s helper and cleaner). As a fellow mom put it, “I’m now the childcare, chef, launderer, housemaid and cleaner”. In addition, my 3 year old requires constant attention and can’t be left unattended beyond a few minutes, now always making us wonder where we went wrong and why our son is so “needy and clingy”. There have been many great posts about working from home that I’ve personally benefitted from, so I decided to build on these with a few recommendations for parents of young children based on what’s worked for me in the last few weeks.
Build in short periods of mindful presence (without digital distractions) through the day.
While it is difficult to juggle work, kids, cooking, cleaning, chores and yourselves, what I’ve found the most challenging with WFH is to respect the boundary between work and time with family. Before this pandemic, like most parents I spent 6–8.30pm with my son (on most days). Now with the additional responsibilities and constant juggling, I find myself way too exhausted to spend any quality time in the evening. During the day, I find myself running between conference calls and relieving my husband from his childcare duties. I also try to use every spare moment doing chores, incl. eating my lunch while unloading the dishwasher. Overwhelming and exhausting! My son picked up on my mental state very quickly, which only made him more clingy, yearning for more attention and reassurance.
With not much time to spare, I’ve found it effective to build in short periods of mindful check-ins with my son every hour or so — a cuddle or a game of hide & seek — to help stay connected. I’ve found that if I can pause, switch off, and be present for just 10 mins, that’s more comforting for him than longer stretches with digital distractions or a running checklist in mind.
Rejigger schedules, but not family traditions.
Along the same lines, I rejiggered my schedule to working from 6–8 am and then blocking 8–9.30 am everyday to eat breakfast with my son and play with him while my husband caught-up on his messages. Spending the hour and half with him in the morning made him more amenable to mommy being physically and emotionally unavailable (unless there’s an emergency… or a huge tantrum that overwhelms daddy).
On the contrary, holding your family rituals constant is even more important during these times of change. Young children can’t completely comprehend these changes, and find security and reassurance in these constants. For a week, I consistently decided to skip “family dinner”, a sacred tradition in our house, to catch-up on the lost hours during the day. After the evening snack, my husband took over for play, dinner & bath. Later, I relieved my husband at bedtime so he could resume his work. It worked very well for us. (3 year olds don’t have any sense of time). Didn’t go down well with our little person, who seemed genuinely aghast at my disrespect for our family ritual.
S@*t will happen. Be kind to yourself, focus on the big picture, and remember its a marathon.
We’re all ruthlessly prioritizing right now and planning every minute of our day, but s@*t is bound to happen! Just when I had carved out time to work on something important for a meeting the next day, my son had to be rushed to the Critical Care Unit for what seemed to need an emergency surgery at that time. Thankfully, it ended happily just like the fairy tales! I was very bummed about losing 5 hrs of our precious-precious time and walking into a house that seemed ransacked, pile of dishes and no food at 11pm, but reminded myself of how grateful we were to be home. Things eventually worked out even though they were short of being stellar, and I remembered to not be hard on myself and gave myself a pat on my back for ticking it off.
Identify everyone’s triggers.
Let’s face it, all parents in survival mode right now. For better or worse, this 24/7 lockdown has brought out the worst in everyone. Worst in us is mirrored by our kids, like everything else. While we’re too exhausted and moving way too fast to reflect on our behavior, we’re perhaps overtly hard on our kids when they act out. Our family benefitted a lot from identifying each-other’s triggers — a pure coincide — in the first few weeks. For example, my husband needs ‘quiet time’ after 1.5–2 hrs of childcare, which we built in our schedules. I don’t enjoy cooking or cleaning after, and providing 3 healthy meals/2 healthy snacks every day was draining for me. So we agreed to support a local home chef, who now delivers weekly meals for us. Our little person has his triggers too like interrupting his “job” (Montessori term for play) when he’s very focused on let’s say putting together a puzzle. Just being more attuned to one-another’s likes and dislikes, and accommodating for them helped our family be less stressed.
Reignite an old hobby.
This is so counter-intuitive because we’ve just focused on the entire note on not having enough time, period. However, now more than ever, it is important to find your happy place whether it is baking, dancing, running, crafts. And take baby steps towards it while remembering to be kind to yourself. I’m finding solace in reading these days, and with not much time, I have a modest goal of reading 10 pages at bedtime. I’ll be honest, some days I do doze off before getting to the 10th page, but then there are days when I read well past the 10th page. I used to be an avid reader many year ago, and for the past few years, have just been dabbling in audio books. My small win — just finished reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown last month (highly recommend the book and Ted talk).
Have other tips that’ve worked for your family? Please share below in comments.
