While parents want to give their attention to their kids, working from home while caring for kids brings two roles in close proximity. As your kids demand your time, you also have presentations to prepare and calls to make. Here is how to work from home with kids for parents who struggle to reach a happy medium between acting as parent and worker.
Structure Your Days
The most essential tool for balancing both roles is carefully scheduled time. Creating a dependable routine for you and your kids not only helps you maintain your focus on work, but it also makes your time with kids more intentional. After maintaining this schedule for some time, your kids will grow accustomed to respecting work time as long as you are consistent. If you need to, don’t hesitate to ask others around you to help out at certain times to allow for concentrated periods of work time.
Give Yourself Grace
As you work from home with kids, you will strive for proper boundaries that allow you to move between mom and entrepreneur or employee. Ideally, you’ll move between each role with ease. In reality, your kids will demand attention that disrupts your focus and drains your energy. These disruptions are normal. Give yourself grace on days when your kids need more attention than normal and your work suffers some. Acknowledging your stress and prioritizing your mental state keeps your endurance up and ultimately prevents burning out and failing in both roles.
Encourage Creative Outlets for Your Kids
Providing your kids with creative outlets is the best way to occupy them without simply giving them over to watching TV or playing games all day. Productive activities such as school tasks, making videos, art projects, writing, playing an instrument, and more, challenge kids while helping them to acquire skills. Once you get them started, you’ll have undivided time to work as they practice, which also benefits them. So, if you have a middle schooler at home beginning their e-learning, make sure they have all
the right school supplies to maintain a routine. If they want to create their own movie, equip them with the right video and sound equipment. Regardless of their creative outlet, give them all they need to do their projects as you plug away at your work. When you transition from worker to mom, you can then enjoy their project with them.
