What Does Balancing Distance Learning and Working from Home Look Like for You? PERSPECTIVE

If you’re struggling to navigate working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic while your kids are now distance-learning, please know that you're not struggling alone. In an article for the BBC, parent Alina Dizik writes, “I have suddenly taken on new roles as lunch caterers, office admins, therapists and assistants to our mini-executives, all on top of our regular jobs. Every day feels like a Monday.” Sound familiar?

As Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist and director at the Child Mind Institute, told Vox, “No one has experienced juggling the range of things that many parents are currently juggling. Forgive yourself.” The fact is, as that Vox article continues to explain, this situation is unprecedented. If you do a quick search on Twitter about parenthood and the Coronavirus, you’ll see many tweets from caregivers earnestly describing their current emotional state as near breakdown. How many of us have been on a video conference for work when our children suddenly and immediately need our attention? How many of us have panicked over a work deadline while ensuring that our child is also completing their educational tasks for the day? Sometimes it can even become difficult to share various technological devices because now we’re all at home and required to use it.

The first thing we have to do is remember that this is not supposed to be easy. We’re not yet sure how to balance these numerous responsibilities because these are more responsibilities than we’d ever expected to take on—especially while stressing over a public health crisis. Don’t beat yourself up for being human and exhausted. Thankfully, experts have recommended some tips to hopefully make our current reality slightly more manageable.

Tonya Dalton, a North Carolina-based productivity consultant, tells the BBC that we should try overly communicating with our children to help them better understand times in the day when we need to focus on work tasks. Being overly communicative, as she describes it, helps to set boundaries by driving home to our kiddos when we are unavailable. And as Dr. Amy Hanreddy told us in her live chat, we should not expect our children’s school days to look anything like they did pre-Covid; by the same token, we shouldn’t expect our work days to feel “normal,” either. Dizik and New York-based career expert Holland Haiis both tell the BBC not to try and “mimic your day at the office.” Instead, it may be more useful to only focus on to-do lists for the day, rather than attempt planning ahead. If we’ve found it impossible to predict our lives day-to-day, why set ourselves up to not meet our goals for the week? Still, it’s important to do what works for you—another family told the BBC that they found they need to maintain the exact same meal times each day to achieve some semblance of structure and routine.

Productivity can also be improved by limiting our tasks each day to no more than five responsibilities. Anderson tells Vox that our lists can include one or two goals specifically for our child to complete, and one thing we want to do with our family or partner to wind down—no matter how short or simple.

If you live with a spouse, partner, or another caregiver, make sure to schedule shifts with each other so that you each can take time to focus on work for a few hours a day, as the BBC article suggests. For single parents, the number of obstacles and unrelieved responsibilities quickly becomes obvious. From daycare centers closing to fears of contracting Covid as a sole guardian and having to manage a job and the household alone, these struggles are exacerbated. Check out this article from The Washington Post for more about how single parents are being impacted.

Do any of these struggles sound familiar to you? Have you already implemented any of these tips, or do you think you might try to? What frustrations are not addressed in either of these articles? Times are tough—let’s all be a support system for one another as best we can.