Managing Children's quarrels

[tonyahollister]

I recently started freelancing from home. I thought it would offer me flexibility regarding my children during work hours, but the reality of the daily routine now feels like a nightmare.

Since I constantly have to stop whether to prepare breakfast or snacks for the kids, break up their fights, or ferry them to and from school my actual work time gets fragmented into tiny chunks. I sit at my laptop for 30 minutes, then get interrupted to handle household chores, then sit for another hour, and the cycle continues. By evening, I honestly have no idea how many hours I actually worked versus how much time I spent looking after the children.

Does anyone else work this way? How do you structure your day when your time is constantly being broken up into small segments?

How old are your children? Most people don’t work like this, no, because as you are finding it is basically impossible. Your children need to be in school/childcare for you to be able to work properly.

You said they're in school, so that's hours every day when you can work.

I don't think anyone can parent while working, or vice versa. Kids are either old enough to be left unsupervised, or need to be supervised by an adult.

You can't work effectively and mind children.
How old are they?

(Plus your title bares no resemblance to your post?)

No idea by you thought this would work unless they are old enough to get themselves breakfast, behave properly and not interrupt. That just leaves school drop off/pick up which would seem doable.

Hadn’t you spent any time with your children before deciding this was a good arrangement? As I’ve not spent much time with children and it sounds to me it was an obvious nightmare from the outset.

This is exactly why employers expect WFH employees to have adequate childcare in place. You can’t be either a good parent or a good worker if you try to do both at once.

I don’t handle household chores or childcare when I’m working. That’s how you handle it. If they are at school you have at least 5 to 6 hours of uninterrupted time. I’m not sure why you’d find it hard to work when you have 5 hours plus to dedicate to it?

How old are they? Your need to put firm boundaries in place and not intervene for arguments. I work from home during school holidays but that is definitely "do not disturb" time especially for remote meetings. I do take frequent breaks though because it's good to move about anyway. So it's a balance and for me it works very well and my kids know not to bother me too much.

My guess is the kids are in their 40s and both work as teachers.

I don't think this is necessarily true if the kids are old enough/and you've been strict on making sure they don't disturb you. Most kids much rather be at home than being sent to a club all day long, so you can threaten them with that!

Sorry, I don’t have much sympathy. Either the children can function without your input or they can’t. If they can’t, you can’t expect to both look after them and focus on work.

But as others have said, what about all the hours they’re at school?

Then the children don’t need "minding"!

You need childcare. WFH just cuts out paying childcare to cover your commuting time.