Support for Working Parents with Young Children
How do you manage work when you are caring for a young child? Whether you’re squeezing in just a few tasks or trying to find some regular habits for working at home with kids, we have some time-tested ideas to suggest.
Working at home when young children are around can be a very tricky balance. When I had two young kids underfoot, I tried following the wisdom of families in my community. “Just work when they nap,” they advised. And although we tried this tactic multiple times, it proved to be unreliable and unsuccessful with our own children. I finally realized that I needed some habits for working while my kids were awake and present with me. But how to move forward?
This was a formative experience for me in parenting. I had to learn to listen to my own instincts rather than blindly following the advice of others. As I experimented with different strategies, I was pleased to discover that, for our family, original children’s audio stories fit in as an effective and delightful part of the solution.
Strategies for the Working Parents
When children are little, we have two basic choices for getting work accomplished.
- We can arrange for someone to mind the little ones in order to have chunks of worktime.
- We can tackle work in those little cracks of time that we find.
Childcare is an important tool in our toolbox. Whether you get help from a daycare, a nanny, a spouse, a grandparent or relative, a babysitter, or a mother’s helper, all of these types of support can create the kind of deep focus one needs for work. And one can get creative — have you ever had a co-working playdate with a friend who has kids the same age as yours? Hiring one sitter for a couple of kids can be less expensive and more fun. And if kids are old enough, they might even enjoy entertaining themselves in their playdate — so you and your friend can get some solid work done (and trade off managing spats or crises).
But sometimes, we’re in a situation where we need to find creative ways to squeeze a little work into the cracks — a few small tasks to complete, an emergency meeting, a quick phone call, or just chipping away at a bigger project. Of course, screens can be an option — and we won’t fault you for integrating “video time” into your work-from-home survival kit. But we also know it’s not the only solution. Let me tell you about other ideas we’ve heard from parents who have found creative ways to cobble together a few moments to work.
Assemble your tools. Young kids often need only a little prompting to explore a game, toy, or book that feels new to them. When our kids were young, I recall rotating toys by putting some in storage for a while until they felt fresh again. If your child seems to have grown bored with a toy or game, put it away for a few weeks, then bring it out again to see if it has regained some novelty.
Arts combine well with listening. Cultivating an “art station” with different kinds of crayons, pencils, markers, clay, etc can help artistic endeavors to take shape with minimal intervention. In our family, we had a regular habit of getting out the art supplies while listening to original audio stories for children — and Sparkle Stories were always at the top of the list. This is also a great way to structure playdate time with your kids’ friends!
Sensory play. Creating a box filled with sensory delights can yield great dividends in independent play. Watch what kinds of things your children gravitate towards and curate a collection that piques their interest, looking for textures and scents and sounds. Sensory play can be paired soothingly with audio stories for an age-appropriate, almost meditative experience.
Rest time. Some families have great success with quiet nap time or rest time. Kids who are easily overstimulated often seem refreshed after a rest in a quiet room. Sparkle Stories offers an entire line of “Sleepytime” stories to help calm little minds and lead them into rest.
Be ready to work. The success of working effectively in these small moments often depends on our own planning and intentionality. Once, I heard one woman tell a story about writing her PhD in five minute increments when her daughter was small. Her strategy included always having her laptop at the ready, always knowing what she wanted to write next, and taking advantage of those little moments that arose when her child was playing happily. Squeezing in a dozen sessions like this throughout the day gave her an hour of writing time — and she did finish writing her dissertation this way.
My kids are teenagers now and it’s a lot easier to find time for work. Take heart! (Also — don’t listen to people who complain about teenagers. They are wonderful.) But I cherish those days of typing away with toddlers underfoot. The season was certainly complicated, but also rich, full of love, and an opportunity to learn about myself and my family. Those teenagers still remember Sparkle Stories with great affection, and I’m grateful that those little moments of work added up and are allowing me to move into a new stage of my career. The struggle is real, but definitely worthwhile.
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About the Author
Ann Boyd
Ann is a writer, editor, homeschooling mother, voracious reader, full-fat baker, and musician. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters and chronicles the journey at Boyds’ Nest News.
