a stroll in the park

Coping as a working parent

As a working parent, I was hit with the unexpected option of working from home like many of my fellow colleagues and some people around the world who can get work done from their laptops in the comfort of their home. The ‘occasional working from home’ wasn’t an alien concept to me as my workplace provides us that flexibility, but doing this the whole time without daycare support or house help was not something we were prepared for. Being a parent to an almost-four-year-old had its fair share of challenges for me as a working mom. My kid’s private daycare shut down due to the pandemic lockdown. So my partner and I started managing work, housework, kid’s schooling, spending all day in the same apartment. It wasn’t easy for us to manage for the first few months of the lockdown. No surprise there. Loss of a support system to take care of our child during our busiest work hours, loss of our house help for meals and cleaning led to additional responsibilities on our plate that we used to otherwise take for granted.

I must admit, it got overwhelming at some point for me as I continued to work at the same pace as before the pandemic when the dynamics were different and far more convenient. At times I considered quitting my job. I questioned the purpose of all the running around and barely getting through the day, catching my breath, juggling work and the rest of my life with blurring lines. It wasn’t natural for me to feel this way about my professional life as someone who enjoys her professional life and the healthy dose of stress that comes with it. I had feelings of being inadequate as a parent. While I ensured I went out of my way to provide nourishing hot meals for my family, I couldn’t find myself adding value to my kid’s life in any way. Every time my kid incessantly tugged at my sleeve and insisted I stop my work and rather spend time with her pretty much the whole time, I felt very conflicted as a caring parent and a diligent professional. I knew I needed to do some things differently. Unprecedented times require a different approach. I knew I had a tipping point when I started humoring the idea of quitting my job at the prime of my career. I spoke to some people who had made that choice. I spoke to people in my network to share and listen to their foibles around WFH as a parent. I spoke to my mentors. These conversations helped me wade through the confusion and guilt I was going through. But the stress and anxiety continued to creep in. At this point, one of my dear friends suggested the idea of a graphotherapy anti-anxiety journaling workshop by Aditi Surana. While I maintain a private journal to process things, daily journaling wasn’t something I had tried before. This was a refreshing experiment and I buddied up with my childhood friend to take the journaling challenge for 21 days — the old-fashioned pen and paper way. This truly started changing my mind space. I’d recommend giving this a go if you are open to experimenting with ways to cope with stress during the pandemic.

After about 42 days of dedicated graphotherapy journaling, I saw a shift in my mindset. From wanting to give up everything, I went to a feeling of ‘I can do this’ to ‘I can change my life around.’ I started looking for ways to restructure my work around the rest of my life. I realized that as our professional and personal lives get enmeshed, I need to make time for things that matter and build ‘atomic habits’ that I can sustain for the rest of my life. While I was able to successfully get out of my anxious state of mind, I still struggled with the guilt of not being able to nurture my child or spend enough meaningful time. That’s where I started applying the design thinking lens to my ‘parenting’. I started putting myself in my child’s shoes. I started observing and making notes about what excites my child. I started noticing what makes my child smile. What makes my child focus and experience a state of flow. What does my child enjoy learning more about? I started making my own notes, finding patterns, and connecting the dots. I even did a ‘five why’s interviewing with my kid to understand what makes this ever curious mind tick. Asking why’s comes naturally to my child. Slowly, the patterns emerged and I started few experiments.

Key insights about my child (these may vary for different kids):

1. Enjoys making and breaking things, enjoys putting things together and arranging things
2. Loves weaving imaginary stories
3. Enjoys being a little helper around the house
4. Loves to dance to good music
5. Loves to imitate her parents
6. Enjoys art especially when we are engaged in artsy things
7. Insists on having company or likes to have a parent around when doing something alone
8. Enjoys the outdoors and nature
9. Thoroughly enjoys asking ‘why’s and what’s — curiosity comes naturally to children
10. The only sense of time for them is daytime (all things fun) and nighttime (end of fun)

Key insights about me as a parent:

1. I enjoy making things with my kid
2. I enjoy telling stories
3. I enjoy the company of books and art and preparing good wholesome nourishing meals
4. I find housework like cleaning, doing laundry, and washing utensils very meditative
5. I find solace in gratitude

Saddled with these insights, I also made notes of the activities particularly the kid enjoyed doing alone vs. with a parent. Choices of food, indulgences, natural sleep times, and dislikes. With some time, energy, and money investments, I made little experiments to create daily routines for me and my child. These routines helped me get rid of a guilty mindset to a thriving mindset.

Here are some child-parent routines that have become a part of my daily life’s fabric during the lockdown as a working parent.

1. Drying the laundry together and folding the laundry together: If your child wants to help out when you are doing the laundry or arranging utensils, or cleaning or decluttering your home, get them involved. It keeps them actively engaged, builds their motor skills, and gives them a sense of being helpful around the house and a sense of achievement.
2. Bedtime Reading routines: Reading a book with my kid is one of the best joys I’ve experienced as a parent. Consider creating a reading routine at least before going to bed with your child to connect and co-share their sense of wonder and storytelling.
3. Solve jigsaw puzzles — A lot of good puzzle boxes from amazon were a savior to keep my child engaged for 1–2 hours at a stretch. It’s a bit of a learning curve at the beginning but worked wonders long term. Now we try beating our previous record of time taken or do a puzzle marathon. This was particularly useful on days when you have back-to-back meetings where you can simply sit next to them on the floor with a floor desk.
4. Magic crate subscription — Magic crate is something we had subscribed to even before the pandemic hit and it continues to engage our child with their amazing set of activities, learning materials, and illustrative storybooks. Their stories have a nice rhyme to them too.
5. Get them to help out with meal prep and making food — my kid was a fussy eater and the typical ‘I don’t like fruits and veggies’ kinds. Getting them to help with washing veggies, cleaning the methi leaves, separating the green peas, churning the buttermilk, rolling chapatis, peeling boiled potatoes, or helping stir the cake batter, helps them learn more about the wonderful colorful world of vegetables and get to eat with appreciation. From disdain towards fruits and veggies, to now enjoying strawberries, carrots, cucumbers, mushrooms, beets, dry nuts, and green peas, and more, cooking and prepping meals together continues to be a fun collaboration.
6. Make with them or get them busy making: play-doh, DIY kits, craft activities, kid-safe paint, and lego, wooden blocks have been other saviors that keep them engaged.
7. Pray with them — whether you are the religious kinds, atheist or agnostic, making time to sit together and expressing gratitude towards what you have wrt relationships, things and situations is a good habit to inculcate at any age in your life.
8. Dance or a power workout with them — I went from ‘have no time to exercise to having small ten minutes dance breaks twice every day alongside my kid. Easy to squeeze ten mins between meetings.
9. Hitting the park or a casual stroll in your building in the wee morning of the morning with necessary precautions- observing a line of ants on the ground, locating anthills, marveling at different flowering plants and types of leaves, or sky gazing, even if it’s for 15–20 mins before you start your day or in the middle of the day, makes for an uplifting break and soaking up that much-needed sunlight.
10. Regulated tv time — there are times when both of us parents are in a work meeting that requires us to absolutely have no distractions; for rare times when our meeting times collide and are unavoidable, we let our kid watch some toons. While we are still slightly conflicted and confused about how much tv time is good, about 30 minutes of regulated tv time on those rare unavoidable days, during the pandemic has helped my child pick up conversing in the English language with the decent fluency of a five-year-old.

These daily routines have brought a sense of fulfillment to my life as a parent without having to wait for that long vacation or a weekend. Apart from following these routines, I have also learned to say ‘no’ at work without guilt where realistically I can’t take on more, asking for help from my spouse to share the housework load, regulating my bedtime with my kid, and waking up early to get some deep work done before the rest of the family wakes up, pre-planning meals, and getting 7–8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

What’s a typical day in your life as a working parent? How are you coping? Do you have any stories to share or want to simply vent or chat about it? Drop me a comment or a personal message.