To say that many moms are facing additional challenges right now as they work remotely and try to tend to their children’s needs is a gross understatement. Plenty of working mothers are struggling with that delicate balance: addressing your kids’ demand for attention with your colleagues’ need for you to meet deadlines and be on time for a Zoom call with your professional team.
While the pandemic continues to roar across many places in the United States, mothers who work full time and usually put their children in school or day care have been been handling both duties for months now. It can be enough to make your glasses fog up with frenzy, but a balance can be struck, and you can manage everyone’s demands, with just a little planning and forethought. You can even do it and have a little time left over for yourself — not a lot, admittedly — but enough to let you squeeze in a relaxing bath or sitting down to enjoy a glass of wine.
But it takes a lot of organization, concentration, and patience. Then again, you’re a mother, so you’ve got all those traits in spades, right?
Here are some tips for coping with kids, colleagues, isolation and spousal demands, too. Try at least two of them this week and see what a difference they make to the peace and serenity of your household:
1) Set small goals each week. Buy a white board and write down everyone’s goals and responsibilities; here’s nothing like seeing those tasks in black and white to make you focus. Erasing each one as it’s completed lets you erase it from your mind, too.
2) Outline weekly menus, and who’s cooking. Be sure you switch up tasks with your partner. For example, let them have the home office to really concentrate on work from 4 — 6 p.m. while you prepare dinner, then the next day trade those duties. Keeping to a schedule like this allows both of you to handle office duties as well as contribute to household chores.
3) Focus on school work, but leave room for fun, too. It may be that, after your child’s school closed in the spring, all the lessons prescribed by teachers didn’t get finished before the school year officially ended. Do not stress about this! Keeping your children healthy, engaged and coping well with social distancing and wearing a mask is far more important than finishing the last chapter in their math textbook. There will be time to catch up a little later in the summer.
4) Check in with the kids daily, to learn how they are coping. We are sailing through unchartered waters, and no one knows precisely how, or when, the pandemic is going to pass.
Your kids are nervous and upset about it, just like you are, though they may not have the vocabulary to express it. Be sure you ask specific questions, but (depending on their ages) do not overwhelm them with too much information. Children up to about age 12 don’t know how to process future concepts, like returning to school in fall or winter, and when there will be a vaccine and or cure for COVID-19. Answer all their questions simply and honestly, and if you don’t know something, for goodness sake admit it. Then do some research on it with your child, and gain a better understanding of the virus together.
5) Take time to bond as a family. If there is a silver lining to the virus, it’s that many couples and families are able to spend more time together. But that time should be used wisely, to enhance your bonds and deepen your understanding of each other. Play board games in the evening, go for long walks and talk about all of it. That’s how you and your family will come out the other side of this, secure and healthy.
At the end of the day, when the kids are asleep, take 20 minutes to do something just for yourself, but stay off screens, if you can. Screens before bed interfere with REM sleep, that deep cycle that allows us to awake refreshed. No one needs insomnia in the midst of a pandemic.
Stick to a schedule, check in with your children and partner, and perform lots of self-care. You will get through the pandemic, and so will our whole country, if we just work together.
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