The parenting guide
Is working from home harming your children?
Studies have shown that when parents are interrupted from their technology use by their children they can be quicker to anger, perhaps assuming their child is trying to be manipulative when in fact their child does actually need parental attention in that moment
Are you living at work? Maybe you prefer to term it working from home or parenting at work? If you are, and if you have children, then I am sure you have stories to tell of Zoom calls with the laundry visible in the background, or calls that are interrupted by the screams of a child being wound up to 90 by their older sibling. I think it is no surprise that keeping schools and childcare open have become so critical to give working parents some relief.
Difficult though it may have been trying to multitask the roles of parent and employee, you might wonder what has the experience been like for your children. What is it like to grow up in an “office”, with a parent that is often busy and distracted with their work?
In truth, the age of your children will possibly dictate their experience of your unavailability to them while you are working, but at home. Young children, like toddlers and preschoolers, will struggle with the idea, for example, that you are physically present, but unavailable to them. They might find it hard to grasp the idea that you can be in the kitchen but not able to play, or help, or mediate between them and their sister or brother. Having a separate space which marks out that you are unavailable because you are out of sight behind a closed door can be easier for children to understand.
There is almost no research about the impact of working at home on children’s development or emotional wellbeing, as the large scale uptake of working at home, in preference to a place of work, has never been seen to the extent that we are seeing now in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Working from home now may not be a choice for parents and that too may have an impact on how parents feel able to adapt to the dual roles.
There is a lot of research, however, about the impact of parental distraction on parent-child relationships, children’s wellbeing and children’s development. Much of the research is recent, and has been prompted by the distraction that technology, like a phone, poses for parents and how it interrupts their interactions and relationships with their children. This research cannot be directly generalised to the distraction that work may pose, but there are many elements that will resonate.
For example, studies have shown that when parents are interrupted from their technology use by their children they can be quicker to anger, perhaps assuming their child is trying to be manipulative and “negatively attention-seeking”, when in fact their child does actually need parental attention in that moment.
For some children the experience of approaching their parent, who is distracted with their phone, can be unpredictable. Sometimes they get noticed, sometimes they get short shrift. That unpredictability can be anxiety-provoking for a child, since they never know what to expect. Some children may react by withdrawing and seeking less interaction with their parent, others may seek increasing amounts of attention, and often in annoying ways through misbehaviour.
In some research, children talk about feeling lonely, sad, angry and dissatisfied when their parents are distracted and emotionally unattuned and unavailable. Other research has shown that children feel less relaxed, more upset, more sulky and can act out in negative ways more often when their parent is unavailable to them.
Some children may react by withdrawing and seeking less interaction with their parent
If we do substitute working, for technology, in those examples it paints a bleak picture of what it may be like for children who have had us more present, but potentially less available, over the last seven or eight months. Even now, children may be coming home from school or childcare to an “office” that has spread through several rooms in the house, with parents who are carrying work-related stresses associated with the uncertainty that Covid-19 has created.
As with all things related to this pandemic, we do have to retain hope that this is temporary and that it will pass. We have to focus on the elements that we can control, rather than those that we can’t. We can take advantage of the opportunity to focus exclusively on our work while our children are in school or childcare, and we can try to deliberately revert to being a parent, by carving out time in the evenings when we put laptops, phones and files away.
Being kind to ourselves, acknowledging that we can’t do everything and we only need to be ‘good enough’ may be the starting point to making ourselves emotionally available to our children, in the times when they need us. Returning to the basics of properly attending to them, looking at them, holding them close, listening to them and engaging with them will offset any other times when we can’t be as available because of the competing demands of work.