Working From Home With Kids
This past year many businesses have had to adapt both the way they work and their expectations of how their staff work from home while juggling caring for their kids. In October 2020, according to data from the Office of National Statistics, 24% of people were exclusively working from home, which suggests that it might slowly be becoming a more permanent way of working. From my perspective, working from home is generally great. You can work and pop a load of washing on, while making a coffee, or cook a meal for lunch all at the same time. All things that would normally wait on you getting home from a long commute while squeezing in pickups. Adding kids into the equation though can really impact your working day. This just means more advance planning and preparation where possible. When you’re a parent nothing is more true. So If you’re new to remote working here’s a few tips and tricks to help get through the day:
First of all, weekends are the time to get organised and buy the essentials like craft materials, snacks and drinks and to plan out your activities. For children of around 3 and over I recommend snack baskets. This is where you fill a basket with 1-2 healthy snacks and leave it somewhere accessible to them so when you’re on a call there’s less chance of interruptions. While on the topic of food and drink for older children, lidded drink cups or drink bottles are really good when combined with a drinks barrel with a spigot kept in the fridge. You can supervise them filling their bottles up and they enjoy the independence of it. You can also get them involved with making lunch and small tasks like folding laundry or tidying up races. You could also consider a USB traffic light for when you really don't want to be disturbed but please bear in mind that many children might ignore it and disturb you anyway.
Younger children are more difficult in the food and drink department but having a good routine really helps, so if they have a set snacktime and naptime it makes it all go a bit more smoothly and you can plan meetings, assignments and other such tasks for when they’re napping. Expect to take more regular breaks during the day and catch up in the evenings if necessary.
Next: activities. I fully recommend the 5 minute mummy blog for activity suggestions which are tailored to different age groups and different settings. My children particularly enjoy the one where you make letters with masking tape and they peel it off. Another good investment is a cement mixing tray which can be filled with cars, cornflakes and dinosaurs. On hot days they’re great for waterplay and are relatively cheap and easy to clean up. Depending on your workload, a good opportunity is lunchtime for a quick trip out to burn off some energy. Even if it's a dash around the garden. A mini picnic or popping to the nearby park. As long as you manage your time effectively it's often more doable than you might expect. Other more independent activities are things like cosmic kids yoga on YouTube where they can copy the poses. There are some dance and movement classes available on YouTube (or other such video platforms) too which are well worth a try. The other thing that some parents have taken to doing is creating a small desk space where they can supervise colouring or messy play. Help with Lego builds and play clay creations. Always give them 2 or 3 choices of what’s on offer and that way you’re in control of what goes on and can plan for mess and materials.
Try to remember there’s no such thing as the perfect parent and when you're working from home and juggling childcare it’s stressful but not impossible.