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| Balancing a laptop and a sleeping newborn in my lap |
With many people working from home and
a more general acceptance of employees being full human beings with
families and personal interests, I’d like to discuss my experience
working at home with young kids.
“The ability to work with young
children at home is zero,” claims a popular tweet posted a couple
weeks ago as many companies and institutions in the United States
temporarily shifted to encouraged or mandatory work-at-home status
for many of their employees.
I assure you, it’s not zero. I’ve
been working at home with young children for 4 years. In this time,
I’ve created and run a small business, traveled for conferences and
other business trips, helped organize conferences and events, taken
on additional pro bono work, written and published a book, and cared
for two young children. Without childcare or local family to assist.
Here are my tips to help with working
from home with kids, which may or may not resonate with you:
- Embrace the flexibility of working from home.
- Embrace kid interruptions.
- Encourage your kids to become independent.
- Take advantage of quieter times.
- Accept help if you can.
- Accept that some days are really, really hard.
- Have fun!
Embrace the flexibility of working from
home
So many work-from-home guides encourage
keeping a strict office schedule, only working in a home office,
avoiding house chores during the day, and other strategies to emulate
the office environment at home. That seems to work for many people.
That does not work for me.
I proudly defy most conventional
work-from-home advice. I encourage you to embrace the flexibility
working at home offers. You can work from anywhere. Any piece of
furniture or even standing up or walking. From any device or platform
(desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, even a pen and paper if that’s
your thing). In any room. Even outside in your yard or out-and-about.
A working environment does not need to be constrained by the office
life you’re used to.
Most of the time, you can also work
when you want. There may be immovable telecons, phone calls,
deadlines, and others’ schedules. But outside of those constraints,
your time is yours to plan the way you’d like. If you’re a
morning person, embrace the quiet still of the morning and be
productive at 5 AM. If you’re a night owl like me who sleeps in as
much as motherhood allows, embrace the quiet still of the night. Some
days, I’m in the zone at midnight and can work for a couple hours
at home at a time not conventionally seen as a time to work in an
office.
Flexibility of schedule also means you
can break up your day as you please. In an office, you may take
breaks to grab a snack, use the bathroom, strike up a conversation
with a coworker, take a walk, and whatever else you need to do to
recharge. At home, you have even more flexibility to take a breather
during the day when you need to. Don’t feel guilty for not working
8 hours straight at home; you’re a human, not a machine. Life is
more than just working.
Embrace kid interruptions
Young kids will need you. Depending on
the child, the situation, and the home environment, some kids are
more in need of help and attention than others. This may seem
incompatable with work, but with practice, you can work around these
interruptions. See above: your time is flexible. A coworker may
interrupt you at any time in an office setting. Your kids are your
coworkers and they provide you with breaks from work throughout the
day.
My 2-year-old is still in diapers so I
expect breaks for multiple diaper changes throughout the day, usually
not on my schedule. The kids need to eat, so I feed them when I eat:
breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks throughout the day. My 4-year-old
usually fetches her own snacks when she’s hungry. I also provide
them with drinks throughout the day.
When they need me, depending on the
nature of the need and what I’m currently working on, I either
pause work immediately to care for them or find a good time to pause
my work before caring for them. Coincidentally, I was in the middle
of writing the previous sentence when my 2-year-old asked me for a
drink refill. It’s not an urgent need, so I will pause my writing
to refill all our drinks at the end of this paragraph, so, now.
Breaks can also be for fun rather than
for need. Enjoy time with your kids. Give them your attention when
you can. Play with them. It doesn’t need to be long, just a few
minutes. Or perhaps you can spare an hour to do an activity with them
or to take a full afternoon off. Even just a few minutes here and
there helps to reconnect throughout the day.
Encourage your kids to become
independent
The ability for your kids to occupy
themselves independent of you depends on their age, their
personality, and your home environment. Where at all possible and
safe, allow your kids to play or work independently while you work.
Depending on their age and inclination to get in trouble, you can be
in the room with them or allow them to be elsewhere without you.
Both my kids have been very independent
from a young age. I’d even call my 4-year-old fiercely independent.
Neither has ever had any problems entertaining themselves. Whether
this is innate within their personalities or just how I raised them,
I’m not sure. But it sure helps to get work done when I don’t
need to divide my attention too much.
This doesn’t mean I work as if my
kids don’t exist. I almost always work in the same room where my
2-year-old is playing. I keep an eye on him with my laptop in front
of me. I prefer to watch both my kids in the same room, but this
usually isn’t the case. My 4-year-old, as independent as she is
roaming the house, is also endlessly curious and very clever with a
tendency to get into things she shouldn’t, so I take breaks to
check up on her frequently.
How would this work if my kids were
older? Your parenting styles and education philosophies likely differ
from mine, but I’ll offer my viewpoint anyway: we embrace
adult-facilitated student-directed home education, often called
unschooling. Home education does not need to look like school at
home. Trust that your kids are learning all the times and especially
learning when they are self-directed and engaged in an activity or
topic that is interesting to them. Under normal circumstances, we
take our kids out into the world to learn from the world and from
other people. But even at home, we have books, toys, iPads, TVs,
activities, and the endless resources of the internet.
Babies are understandably the most in
need of your time and attention. Maternity leave is truly needed
after a baby is born. I do not expect to get much work done in August
when my third baby is expected. Parents with young babies need to be
the most gentle with themselves about how much work they can
realistically accomplish. Some babies sleep long stretches or are
content to exist without much direct attention. Neither of my babies
were like this. My babies were constantly attached to me. In those
early months, I used voice diction or typed with one hand, used my
phone more than my laptop, warned people about my baby-in-arms during
calls, napped throughout the day, and set low expectations for my own
productivity.
Take advantage of quieter times
When my kids were younger, they used to
nap more frequently. There were times I struck gold and both napped
simultaneously! I took advantage of those quieter times to really
focus on work that needed my undivided attention.
More often, I find the quiet freedom of
late nights when I’m still awake and can work while activity in my
house has stopped and activity online (email and social media) is
minimal. My husband, for the same reason, works his side project in
the very early morning hours before the sun has risen and the hustle
of the day has begun.
Accept help if you can
Many work-from-home parents have
spouses, other family members, babysitters, or other childcare
options they can take advantage of to give them more time for focused
attention on work. If you have someone who can help you watch the
kids, for your own sanity, I encourage you to accept.
Because of the circumstances of our
family, only my husband and I watch our kids. Usually he works from
home on Wednesdays which gives me a little more freedom to step away
to be by myself on Wednesdays. Currently, he’s working from home
indefinitely, which allows us to share parenting responsibilities
even more than usual. There have been times when I’ve needed to
leave him with the kids in the evenings or on weekends for an hour or
two while I go off to another area of the house to work.
Accept that some days are really,
really hard
This is not easy. This is seemingly
impossible when you’re first thrown into it. I had the advantage of
working from home before I had kids so I could set my own routine and
slowly figure things out as my first child grew. For parents abruptly
put in the position of caring for kids while working from home during
a stressful time, this is going to be a very difficult transition.
Don’t beat yourself up.
Even for an experienced work-from-home
mom, some days are about survival. I had a challenging first couple
of months this year with my 4-year-old. Some days all I could do was
the bare minimum of work while I tried to keep my sanity. That’s
okay. Be patient with yourself.
But some days just fly by in a zone of
low turbulence, checking one task off the list after another, making
extensive progress on a project, and keeping the kids and myself
alive and happy. Those are the days when I know I can do this. And
you can too. Maybe not now, under the current circumstances. But
maybe one day.
Have fun
My favorite work-from-home memories of
last year were watching the kids play in the backyard in the warm
months of the summer and early autumn while I wrote my book using
voice dictation on my phone.
Yesterday, with business slow and my
mind distracted with the troubles of the world, I took some hours
“off” in the afternoon to garden in the backyard with my
4-year-old. I checked email on my phone every so often, but mostly, I
was out enjoying nature with my daughter.
I watch rocket launch livestreams with
my kids nearby (who often aren’t interested, but I try) and talk
with them about my work frequently. I truly enjoy being with my kids
every day and I enjoy building a business in the career I love.
I’m so thankful for the opportunity
to work from home with my kids. I wish everyone could experience this
in a positive way as I’ve been able to.
