Balancing Work & Remote Schooling

Juggling Remote Schooling with Work

What a year this has been so far, I think many of us are holding our breath while juggling more than we ever have in our lives. It’s been a tough year for everyone, but especially parents juggling working from home with remote schooling during COVID. Most of us have no background in teaching and suddenly we are faced not only with staying abreast of our work for our employer or our business but also remote schooling sometimes multiple children in different grades. It’s tough enough for a family with two parents to manage but I also know a number of single Moms or Dads that are doing this dance solo and they have won their hero wings this year!

So it is with a whole lot of compassion and love that we give some of the following tips for doing the work and teaching balance because we are doing this dance with you with our own children. For Sonoma County, it’s been a particularly tough start to the school year with many people being evacuated during the first weeks of school while maintaining work and their children’s schooling. So above all else, cut yourself some slack, be kind to yourself, try to keep a sense of humor with your children, and be thankful for the small things each day. We try to count our blessings each night, focusing on what is positive in our lives.  Below we give some hard-won tips that have helped us keep our heads above water in these unusual times. 

 

Don’t Be Slave to a Schedule

Most of us have tasks that need to be accomplished each day for our job or our company, but it is possible to move these tasks around and not be rigid in your approach. It’s more that you complete your tasks each day than needing to have them done by a particular time. If you can cut yourself some slack in your schedule, helping your children with their Zoom classroom will be so much easier.

 

Check Lists for Work & School

Our teachers have our kids tasks per day listed in Google Classroom, but we also like to print these in bright colors that the kids can check off as they complete a task. They stare at a screen so much these days with Zoom and having something on paper that they can look at, and check off tasks as they complete them gives them a sense of accomplishment. Since helping our children set up checklists each week for their class assignments things have been so much less frantic. We use Microsoft To-Do List for our company tasks and larger companies use Asana or Slack for keeping teams on track. If you are a small business owner both of these resources can work well for checking in with remote employees and keeping yourself on task.

 

Take Breaks for Creativity & Exercise

We can’t stress this enough, no matter what age your children are, get them off screen time multiple times a day and outdoors. We suggest simple stretching exercises in the morning, a 5-minutes breathing exercise for grounding part way during the day, and then a break for doing something creative and fun sometime during the day. These only need to be 15-minute breaks but they make all the difference in the world with both yours and your children’s focus, productivity, and attitude! Nurture first, remember to breathe, and stay in present moment. Breaks can be an art project, craft project, baking or cooking-which can help make your lunch or dinner easier, puzzles, or whatever intrigues your children and gets their mind off their classroom assignments and gets them laughing and spending quality time with you.

 

Set Up Separate Work & Study Spaces

Setting up different areas for each member of your family to do their work is optimal. Strive for different rooms for each of your family members to work in. This may be a simple as a table set up in a corner of the bedroom for each child. If your children share a bedroom, try rearranging furniture so they can have a table or desk at the opposite side of the bedroom.

If you don’t have a separate office in your home, Mom can use the kitchen table as an office, plus we have some great ideas for simple extensions of windowsills that create a windowsill office.  Dad could set up his office in the garage; you just have to get creative here. Also, we can’t stress enough how liberating headsets are for each family member. Headsets are so reasonable these days and it keeps multiple Zoom meetings from interfering with each other. This is a time to be creative in solutions and including your children in coming up with solutions that work for the whole family.

 

Set Reasonable Goals

Try to remember how tough this is for you, but if you think it’s tough for you, your children have been in the world a much shorter time and their reality has just gotten turned upside down with a pandemic that has them not seeing friends, family members, attending school, being part of sports teams, and so much more. It’s been brutal for everyone on many levels. So this isn’t the time to ratchet up goals and expectations, quite the opposite, it’s a time for setting reasonable goals for your children and yourselves.

Try to think long-term when assessing goals and expectations. Ask yourself if what you are attempting or wanting for yourself or your children absolutely needs to be done the way you are approaching it, in the timeframe you are structuring it, or the way you are approaching the task. We look at the tasks before us and ask ourselves if the timeframe, task, the approach is really critical to the outcome or if it can be approached in a more creative manner that creates less pressure for all but still produces the desired results.

 

Stay Connected

Stay connected with your children’s teachers. Communication is paramount these days so that you help your children be as stress-free as possible during remote learning. We are making sure we are putting everything in writing to our teachers through text messages or emails so we have that information to look back at if during all this juggling we need a refresher on what is due when and what was said to whom. 

The same goes true with work these days, keep a paper trail through text, email, or online software to make sure that everyone is informed and on the same page. With so much going on it is super easy to have things fall through the cracks and lists and online software is one of your best safeguards in not having a mistake you need to explain later.

 

Patience & Meals

Two things that will help us all get through these times with a lot more grace is humor, patience, and meals. Maybe not in that order! I keep going back to a quote from Socrates, “Is it true, is it helpful, is it kind?”  If we can all count to 10 before speaking, just take that pregnant pause to ask ourselves those 3 questions, life no matter what the circumstances would go so much smoother at home and on the job.

Humor and not taking ourselves too seriously is a great skill to model for your kids, the same with patience. Our children follow so much more what we do than what we say and it only gets tougher as they approach their teen years. Our children are our mirror to see if we are walking our talk.

Meals can be a time of creativity, incorporating part of schoolwork into making a meal together makes the classroom much more creative and you have a wonderful meal as the outcome. Kids love tangible results they can see from their work, the same as adults! Eating together is a time to slow things down, discuss the day, share funny stories, and slow the day down and connect with one another. It’s a wonderful opportunity for connection we should all take.

We hope this fall finds you healthy and enjoying much of what Sonoma County has to offer. We are so fortunate to live in such a beautiful area. Take time to feel all that is wonderful and good about your life, thank you is the simplest prayer. We are thankful for each one of you in our life as we traverse this year with grace and grit because we know that those of us that live in Sonoma County are strong, resilient, and committed to giving our best to our community and life!