We have 2 small children (2 yrs and 2 months) and our saving grace during all of this is that we haven't been working - we're both on parental leave. Before that, with our first one, I picked up most of the glue work because I have a flexible remote job and my wife works in healthcare. With the second kid, my wife is dropping to part time so she can have more flexibility for the family too. We're super lucky that our leave and her going part-time are exactly what we would've wanted to do during this whole pandemic quarantine situation.
My heart goes out to all of these families that are struggling to work with kids at home. There's almost nothing we (others) can do to help because all of the things you would _want_ to do to help require you to be physically present - which isn't good in a pandemic.
I love the point that it's "truly impossible to understand unless you also have kids" - I'm still amazed by how limited my empathy was for parents before I had kids. People without kids just don't understand what it's like to have them around 100% of the time and trying to imagine it only gets you so far.
Anyways, thanks for writing during all of this - it inspires me to write more. And tweet more.
This is one of the best pieces I've ever read on this -- and it's a subject with which I'm obsessed, so I've read a lot about it. Thank you so much for writing it.
This post reminded me a lot of Jenny Odell’s book/talk on How to Do Nothing. Part of it is a critique on the tech industry’s obsession with disrupting/only creating new things. She emphasizes how society doesn’t value maintenance work like cleaning/taking trash away.
In a work context, the incentives are to create a brand new ‘solution’ with the latest flashy software instead of tweaking or maintaining what’s already built.
Dear Vicki, You’ve seen my soul, and what magic is this piece. If I don’t renew on time please remind me to reread this. “You had me at...” the mental/real image of moms disguised as carpet or piece of furniture. Also, I’m confident many more errors and bugs will be recorded by technologists and writers during this new norm of interrupted work flow; my case history has logged a few between us and I’m shocked every time they’re uncovered and I wonder where the heck my mind was... still managing BIG work but honestly the. ‘Small’ maintenance that’s usually almost autonomous second nature seems to be battling with responding to unnaturally frequent cries for snacks, third breakfasts, and... various health hazards about the floor. I’ll stop now, TMI
You deserve a medal for this. Seriously, I'm not being facetious here--we recently gave out medals to visibly appreciate the invisible work that you wrote about. We couldn't do the ceremony we wanted, but we did manage to get it on a news podcast: https://worldandeverything.org/2020/05/the-meritorious-woman-award/
DM me on Twitter (@bibleviz) with your address and I'll send you one.
We are in the same boat as you, and it is really hard. We have had zero in-person social interaction with anyone for about 10 weeks, and two kids/two jobs. What we do is set aside much longer childcare stretches - I am on for the first 2.5 hours of the day, then she the next 2.5 hours, then lunch, then naps/quiet time where I am still on for 2 hours or so but can usually get some work done, then whoever needs the next hour or so can have it, then it's generally the end of the workday. Then whatever remaining work needs to get done gets done when the kids are asleep...
If more work needs to be done during one of our assigned blocks, we can sometimes (but not often) get it done by using screens/other activities. Before all this, our older child got about 45 minutes of screen time per day and our younger zero, now it's more like 2 hours and 1 hour, which we're not exactly proud of but it's not crazy.
We've scheduled our blocks to coincide with when the other tends to have calls, which allows us to maintain an image of availability and rarely have to say no. Of course, if you add up our hours it is way lower than it was before all this...
I became a subscriber after this post!
We have 2 small children (2 yrs and 2 months) and our saving grace during all of this is that we haven't been working - we're both on parental leave. Before that, with our first one, I picked up most of the glue work because I have a flexible remote job and my wife works in healthcare. With the second kid, my wife is dropping to part time so she can have more flexibility for the family too. We're super lucky that our leave and her going part-time are exactly what we would've wanted to do during this whole pandemic quarantine situation.
My heart goes out to all of these families that are struggling to work with kids at home. There's almost nothing we (others) can do to help because all of the things you would _want_ to do to help require you to be physically present - which isn't good in a pandemic.
I love the point that it's "truly impossible to understand unless you also have kids" - I'm still amazed by how limited my empathy was for parents before I had kids. People without kids just don't understand what it's like to have them around 100% of the time and trying to imagine it only gets you so far.
Anyways, thanks for writing during all of this - it inspires me to write more. And tweet more.
This is one of the best pieces I've ever read on this -- and it's a subject with which I'm obsessed, so I've read a lot about it. Thank you so much for writing it.
This post reminded me a lot of Jenny Odell’s book/talk on How to Do Nothing. Part of it is a critique on the tech industry’s obsession with disrupting/only creating new things. She emphasizes how society doesn’t value maintenance work like cleaning/taking trash away.
In a work context, the incentives are to create a brand new ‘solution’ with the latest flashy software instead of tweaking or maintaining what’s already built.
Dear Vicki, You’ve seen my soul, and what magic is this piece. If I don’t renew on time please remind me to reread this. “You had me at...” the mental/real image of moms disguised as carpet or piece of furniture. Also, I’m confident many more errors and bugs will be recorded by technologists and writers during this new norm of interrupted work flow; my case history has logged a few between us and I’m shocked every time they’re uncovered and I wonder where the heck my mind was... still managing BIG work but honestly the. ‘Small’ maintenance that’s usually almost autonomous second nature seems to be battling with responding to unnaturally frequent cries for snacks, third breakfasts, and... various health hazards about the floor. I’ll stop now, TMI
really enjoy your newsletters,
this one is great, hits home for me and im sure for so many others too...,
your doing a great job wrangling kids and writing! great piece! thanks
You deserve a medal for this. Seriously, I'm not being facetious here--we recently gave out medals to visibly appreciate the invisible work that you wrote about. We couldn't do the ceremony we wanted, but we did manage to get it on a news podcast: https://worldandeverything.org/2020/05/the-meritorious-woman-award/
DM me on Twitter (@bibleviz) with your address and I'll send you one.
We are in the same boat as you, and it is really hard. We have had zero in-person social interaction with anyone for about 10 weeks, and two kids/two jobs. What we do is set aside much longer childcare stretches - I am on for the first 2.5 hours of the day, then she the next 2.5 hours, then lunch, then naps/quiet time where I am still on for 2 hours or so but can usually get some work done, then whoever needs the next hour or so can have it, then it's generally the end of the workday. Then whatever remaining work needs to get done gets done when the kids are asleep...
If more work needs to be done during one of our assigned blocks, we can sometimes (but not often) get it done by using screens/other activities. Before all this, our older child got about 45 minutes of screen time per day and our younger zero, now it's more like 2 hours and 1 hour, which we're not exactly proud of but it's not crazy.
We've scheduled our blocks to coincide with when the other tends to have calls, which allows us to maintain an image of availability and rarely have to say no. Of course, if you add up our hours it is way lower than it was before all this...
Thank you for sharing. I can't start to imagine the struggle of parents, especially women, right now.
You brought up great points about building not only little things but also big things.
Thank you for the "what do you mean by do the math" reddit thread too. That was super interesting to read.