‘It can feel like you are drowning in a sea of projects’
Paul Sheridan on the reality of working from home with two small children — and why it can’t go on
FIVE minutes is about all in which you can expect to get some work done these days. Simply because it is usually five minutes before another major crisis develops out in the back garden. Or the front room. Or in one of their bedrooms. That five minutes of silence can mean many things. They could be playing together peacefully (rare), they could be plotting against us (much more likely) or they could be doing something dangerous which needs addressing immediately (a twice daily occurrence).
We are apparently ‘all in this together’ these days, but sometimes it feels like working parents are being punished for trying to raise a family and have a career.
My wife and I spend a good 13 hours a day combining our work with full-time parenting. That’s usually 7am until after 8pm Monday to Saturday.
Those five-minute silences need addressing. Constantly.
Children need to be looked after, loved, fed, entertained, educated and disciplined.
Up until mid-March, the job of parenting firmly fell to us and the wonderful people who run our local creche.
Because, make no mistake about it, the women and men who work in our childcare facilities are effectively parents to all the children in their care.
Our three-year-old boy, David, attends five days a week and our daughter, Annie (five), goes there for after-school. This service, expensive as it is, enables both myself and my wife to work full-time. And in turn pay for our house, our food, our clothes and everything else in between. Is it ideal? No. But the children have made friends and developed at a much faster rate than we think we would have been able to provide if one of us managed them full-time at home. Now, all that is gone. And although the Government plan is for the gradual opening of creches for everyone in phase four, we simply cannot see that happening.
“We are really going to have to plan for no creche for the rest of the year,” my wife said to me last week.
I fear she is right. Parenting two children under six while both of us work full-time from the kitchen table is the ‘new normal’ we have been hearing so much about recently.
The ‘new normal’ starts at 7am and continues all day until eventually they fall asleep.
The ‘new normal’ means there are no breaks — we go from work to parenting and back at breakneck speed.
The ‘new normal’ has turned us into multi-taskers who are almost permanently one screaming child away from screaming ourselves. We go from serving toast with Nutella on top to taking a Microsoft
Teams video meeting in the same hour. Settling disputes between the kids while trying to keep your boss and your colleagues happy.
It can feel like you are drowning in a sea of projects. And you don’t want your children to be a project. They are so much more than that. They deserve better.
A routine of sorts has developed. It’s messy and stressful for the children and for us, but it just about works.
Our daily aims are quite simple: eat together at 1pm and Monday to Friday there is no
Netflix before 5pm. Some days it’s hard to enforce rule two. Let’s just call it “aspirational”.
If we can manage to get them dressed, fed, entertained and keep them from killing each other, then that day is viewed as a success.
All the walks in the park and ‘movie nights’ on the sofa can’t make up for them not seeing their friends every day.
All the obstacle courses we make in the back garden can’t make up for not being allowed to hug their grandparents.
There are huge advantages to seeing your kids every day. Bonds grow stronger. You see them in a different light. You see their personalities developing. These are things that we are lucky to be able to experience. But you cannot give 100pc to your children and 100pc to your work.
My wife knows we are lucky to have jobs in the middle of what is shaping up to be an economic crisis of epic proportions as well as pandemic that has claimed almost 1,600 lives here.
But we also know the current set-up cannot endure.
Creches will not be able to operate at their previous levels. How can they?
Last week, Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone revealed the Government is considering the Norwegian model with play pods for kids, staggered drop-off and pick-up times, kids playing with the same toys every day. Good luck with that. There is a real disconnect between the Government and the childcare sector about how best to look after our children.
Covid-19 has deconstructed the standard working week in a matter of months.
Work and parenting will clearly never be the same again. We need ministers who don’t just firefight, but who plan ahead, who budget properly instead of throwing a lump of cash at the latest problem to hit the headlines. They need to think creatively and to engage with the childcare industry to see how we can move forward.
There are more than 200,000 children in childcare in Ireland according to the latest figures, meaning there are hundreds of thousands of adults feeling the massive pressure of working and parenting from home
There is only so long this can continue. If you leave a pot on the hob unattended for long enough, it boils over.
‘The new normal means there are no breaks’