Apr. 20, 2020

Telework with CHILDREN at home

Recommendations on telework and family life abound in the context of quarantine. You will surely have read or listened to some guide such as establishing routines, defining a physical work space, reserving several times of the day for family leisure and spending that time with the children, etc. Neither of these suggestions is completely effective. Probably your productivity will drop by half compared to your best days and with more dedication than usual.

Realistic expectations

It seems convenient to start by lowering our expectations and that of your company. You have to explain your working conditions frankly to your company so that the threshold of your professional activity is adapted to this context of forced and sudden confinement. It is very likely that there will be moments of anxiety, frustration and overwhelm, so we must modulate our sense of professional responsibility and accept from the beginning that job performance will decrease. The risk of not doing it is reaching a greater effort and exhaustion, which will fall on us in the future.

Time in front of the screens

We can face this circumstantial situation if we are more flexible in matters such as the time that children spend on screen entertainment: television, Internet and video games. These days it will go up a lot, and teleworking parents will be able to do very little to prevent it.

Do the job together

Children want parents to pay attention to them and to share their time with them. They will feel cared for if they work alongside us. Homework time is another good time to demand silence and attention. While they do schoolwork or paint, we can attend to occupations that require little concentration such as checking and sending emails or even making a call.

Explain what your work consists of in simple words. For children, watching you work at home is curious for them, at the beginning they will have many doubts and questions and they will want to see what you are doing. It is best to let them see and observe what was a mystery to them before COVID-19.

Give them activities that take up a lot of time

A good strategy is to give them activities that will entertain them over a long period of time. For example, putting a children's feature film on them, combining the screens with creative games that they can perform alone (puzzles, crafts, experiments), a hot bath, etc.

Work while they sleep

Probably children will set the daily schedules. The best way to advance work is to take advantage of the first hours of the day, the last hours of the night and any other time when they are relaxed.

Give them responsibilities

Children can feel useful and get out of boredom by giving them chores around the house, such as cooking, cleaning, or tidying up the house. We can also take advantage of the quarantine time so that they begin to assume new responsibilities, such as preparing breakfast, making their own bed, folding their clean clothes and keeping them in their places, etc.