People looking after children while wfh

[paws732]

My company operates mainly remotely, so we mostly work from home with occasional office days. We have a lot of Teams meetings for connectivity.

With the summer holidays, I have had meeting with a lot of colleagues who have their children sitting on their laps during the meetings. These children range from 5-8, and they are not behaving themselves either. One child kept putting things on their mum's head, and another was having a tantrum about being bored.

AIBU to think they shouldn't be looking after children while wfh, even if it's the school holidays? I feel it will eventually spoil wfh arrangements for everyone, as employers will not tolerate this is many companies.

@paws732 surely if you have children you understand the massive pressure on people to pay for childcare and stay in work? I am currently in this position. It’s awful. You will always be entitled to work from home unless there’s a business need for you to go in. Don’t kick up a fuss and make life even harder for working parents.

I've worked from home / remotely for over 10 years. Obviously in that time my children have grown up. When they were very young I was part time and had a nanny. This helped me focus more whilst they were out and about etc. now much older and a little more self sufficient during school holidays I'm able to juggle both and arrange my working hours to suit afternoons out and such like. I'd be a little annoyed to have teams calls with colleagues and children misbehaving.. the odd occasion fair enough, but certainly not the norm! How can you do an effective job with that sort of chaos. The irony is the one thing working parents have already wanted is flexibility in the working environment. Since lockdown we've all changed the way we work (I was already working remotely so very used to it). This seems to have been abused somewhat and now companies are doing a full 360 and asking employees to get back in the office and do a 9-5 job.. not surprisingly!! Like anything, take the piss and it's taken away.

An 8 year old during the summer holidays for a day or 2 a week, or half day after a club is very different from a toddler who isn’t enrolled in nursery during the work day imo.

Yanbu. Its not allowed (specified in company policy) at my work.

We aren't dicks - if someone has an odd day with a poorly child at home who can't be sent to childcare we get it, we've all been there. Same applies for things like having kids home 3.30- 5 in summer holidays and catching up in the evening - we know summer clubs are a nightmare for not including wraparound. But routinely expecting to work with younger children at home to try and save money on childcare - not acceptable and you'd likely get put on a performance plan if you were doing it.

As a manager I don’t mind one of my reports who has kids at home in the holidays. The youngest is 7 and they’ve never impacted her work quality or quantity.

If her work was slipping that would be a different conversation with her about ensuring she was in the right environment to achieve her goals.

Massive difference between having a child at home getting on with stuff while parent works, and having them on your lap playing with you while you try to have a meeting.

If they need that level of interaction, your mind isn't on your work.

We wouldnt allow this either (a one off if the manager is ok with it isn’t an issue - I have allowed it in my team occasionally). It’s clear in our policies it’s not allowed and we expect parents to have the same arrangements in place as if they were in the office. To some extent I suppose it depends on the age of the child - if they are self sufficient then fine, you can get on with work. At the end of the day, if performance at work is fine, then I as a manager might not know if someone was attempting to work and do child care at the same time - but if performance was dipping, and I found out about children being at home, I would have to tackle it. Ultimately we would remove the right to home working until performance improved.

Mine are in this age group and there’s always an available adult in the house to provide care but they’re magically attracted to the study, so do appear from time to time.

I think it can work when you take a few things into account. A) people stay with flexible and family friendly companies for longer especially mums who juggle the lions share of caring responsibilities. This saves the company money that would otherwise go into recruitment and training. B) for the same reason if a company is serious about promoting women thriving in their workplace they need to understand and respect that there will be a juggle between workload and caring load and make allowance for that. C)I think it's fine when it's reasonably temporary such as school holidays or sickness- obviously not every employee with children can be off during the school holidays and with col and childcare fees so extortionately high not everyone will have family handy to take this on. D) I think it's up to the employee to get their work done and for a lot of parents wfh this often means working later in the evening when kids go to bed so they're possibly doing more/different hours and this level of flexibility helps them stay in their job. I work in a very family friendly workplace. There are certain types of meetings I wouldn't bring ds into but outside of that it wouldn't be an issue. I wouldn't think twice about other people having their kids there provided their work isn't suffering and they aren't unavailable. It's one of the main reasons I've stayed with my company as long as I have despite having better options for progression elsewhere. I don't stop being a parent just because I'm employed and it's unreasonable for employers to expect us to act like that's the case. I'd count your blessings you can afford childcare/ have family available to help/ are living in a part of the UK with free childcare hours available.

This.

You can't be a present, attentive parent and do a full day's work at the same time.

Something will suffer - likely both.

Different for teenagers who are pretty self sufficient but for DC under 8/9 I'd say no.

Your 'available adult' needs to do a better job then.

The occasional interruption is fine, it will happen in a different way in the office (eg a call from a child you have to take).

But otherwise children need to be kept away or know to stay away from your home working space.

It’s fine for 8/9 year olds plus as they just entertain themselves. I’d expect anyone with a child under 7 to have childcare in place for at least most of the day.

I think it's very unprofessional to have a child on your lap/in the room when you are in a meeting. If i wfh I would be hiding the fact I was doing childcare.

I wonder how many men are doing this? I'm prepared to bet not many. I expect yet again women are pressured into doing more. Wfh - great can do childcare/laundry/walk the dog/get dinner ready (said no man ever).

I also don't think it's about 'well if they get the job done'. If this were the case, if we were in the office, we'd all be able to go home after we'd 'got the job done'! It's no wonder service levels and productivity are so low.

I'd count your blessings you can afford childcare/ have family available to help/ are living in a part of the UK with free childcare hours available.

If only it was that easy!

We are driving DC 3 hours to relatives to be looked after and then having to commute back from there ourselves - that covers a few days.

We have also arranged complicated childcare swaps with other parents.

We have used all our holiday, built up time in lieu, and had to take some unpaid leave too. Not easy or fun. It would be much easier to keep them at home!

Disruptive behaviour during meetings is not acceptable. But a child at home during the holidays who is largely amusing themselves, I don't see the problem. I WFH 100% of the time and my kids are too young to be around while I do that, but my bosses and other colleagues sometimes have an older child visible in the background watching TV or walking past the screen during holidays or after school and it's never really an issue. You can't get away with not doing work in my job (without being too specific, we have fixed daily deadlines that have to be met at all costs and people have specific roles to enable that to happen, so if someone wasn't doing their job it would be abundantly obvious as the whole thing would fall apart).

My dd looks after some friends kids when the parents are wfh. The parent just don't want the kids set on screens all day so she does baking/ craft/ games with them. Cheaper than childcare and nice for kids to be in own home. She generally does 10-4 or similar so kids get long lie etc.

In theory, I totally agree with you. In practice however, I've found getting 9-5 childcare across the summer holidays to be an impossible task. So something has got to give.

In some areas the childcare provision simply isn't available - especially for the 7-11 age range. And I say this as someone who lives in a (northern) city suburb. I imagine it's even worse for rural families!
School clubs don't cover the whole summer holiday because the buildings are closed for maintenance. The local hobby clubs only operate 10am to 3pm.
Massive reductions since Covid mean there are less big holiday clubs available. The nearest 8:30am to 5:30pm holiday club to me is an over 2 hours round trip each journey, because various major roads are closed for maintenance over the summer months.
Parents don't have enough leave to cover the whole summer, or enough money to hire a nanny, and don't always have family/friends available to pick up the slack.
Yes it's not ideal to WFH with kids and I think you'll struggle to find many people who enjoy it. But what's the alternative?

If they're toddlers I can understand and empathise (I have some lovely colleagues so I tolerate it). However.... the novelty of kids being cute on Teams has generally worn off.

WFH is not a euphemism for cheap child care.

I agree with this. I’m not a parent but I an actually don’t mind if people are juggling children and work from home but to bring them into ms team /zoom meetings is incredibly unprofessional and inappropriate. I suspect some of my colleagues have kids around after 4pm but I never see them on camera. It happened a couple of times with small babies at start of lockdown but thankfully not since.

The company I work for doesn't allow working from home under any circumstances for this reason.
As soon as lockdown ended, everyone was back in the office.
Those who said they couldn't go back to the office were given their p45s under the guise of being made redundant unless they had been there less than two years, then they were just given their notice.
We want staff who give 100% while at work, not ones who are trying to see to their kids at the same time, and we certainly don't want kids interrupting meetings. So unprofessional.
Imagine going to see your bank manager for something important and her kids were running in and out of the office interrupting and demanding her attention, you'd be less than impressed.

I don't know how you can address it but yes it's ridiculous. I don't wfh but husband does and I once came home and my son is having a conversation with one of dh's colleagues and I said after 'you really should have even bribed him or something to get him out, it looks so bad.' Fair enough if they're in the house and you make excuses to get out to see them, but don't have them about when you're supposed to be concentrating on something!

YANBU

I’m doing it one day a week through the holidays and my kids are 7 and 9. It’s mostly because they get exhausted from the constant shunting around they do in the holidays (today you’re at club, tomorrow you’re with granny, next day it’s club in morning then x is picking you up for a play date in the afternoon etc) - it’s their holiday and they should get a bit of downtime. But they absolutely know they can’t interrupt me on meetings, play nicely in the mornings and we go out for a dog walk at lunch, then tv in the afternoon. It’s Mondays and I also do a couple of hours on Sunday night so I’m ahead for the day. I don’t hide it from my work but equally it’s very rare anyone would know they were there, I do meetings as normal. All the SLT have children a similar age and I’d be shocked if they weren’t doing the same a few days too.

BUT kids in meetings is unacceptable at any age and they are taking the piss

That's fine. It's not anywhere I would dream of working but as long as everyone knows that's the deal that's fine.

We've had the opposite experience. People WFH has made productivity and morale increase, sick leave has decreased, more women have come back after maternity leave and been able to work more days than they expected (myself included), we've been able to recruit people from a much wider pool of talent. We have a totally hybrid model, people can come into the office, WFH, whatever they like. I love it.