How to Achieve Work-Life Balance As a Parent
You missed your kid’s soccer game again because you worked on this big client report, the one you are still falling behind. Oh, and didn’t you promise to bring cupcakes for the school baking sale tomorrow? And there is a meeting at 10, an appointment with the pediatrician at 11:30, and ugh, you should probably buy toilet paper someday. Everything seems to hang in the balance – your job, your family life, your sanity. And your refrigerator smells.
In almost every working parent’s life, there comes a point where you say it doesn’t work. Something has to give. Some people take extreme measures – they switch to less demanding jobs, quit to stay at home with their children, or encourage their partners to choose one of these options. These may be the right steps for you and your family, but they shouldn’t be the only way to feel this semblance of balance.
As someone who has gone to this limit, I appreciate the idea of a “5% solution,” as Daisy Wademan Dowling explained in the Harvard Business Review . Instead of taking a hasty and abrupt turn in life (which you may regret later), try a few tiny tweaks. Dowling, founder of the consulting firm Workparent, writes about flexibility in work – you can do better if you decide to, say, leave the office early every two weeks or go straight home from any flight that lands after 2:00 pm. “These measures seem insignificant, and they are,” she writes. “They won’t change your schedule by more than 5%, they won’t be enough to affect productivity, and your boss might not even notice. But they will give you a sufficient sense of flexibility and “give” the opportunity to continue on the path you have chosen. “
I think you can apply the solution to out of schedule areas. While you will never find one magic answer that solves a great work-life balance puzzle, there are things you can do to make things a little more manageable. Fold them up and you will feel a real difference in how you feel.
I asked friends and members of the Offspring Facebook group what small changes they made to achieve more balance at work and at home. Here are some tips.
- Strategize your working time. This option is not available to everyone, but it is worth exploring. For a mom named Louise, the optimal number of hours she worked with her husband made the most sense. “He starts later in the morning to bring our kids to school, and I finish my day early enough to pick her up,” she writes. A dad named Pablo got the green light from his boss to start work an hour earlier than everyone else so that later he could walk out the door in time to pick up his child from the nursery.
- Tell your colleagues that you must leave the office at the appointed time. If you say it out loud, you are more likely to follow through. “Work knows I have to leave at 4:40, no matter what,” writes a mom named Rosen. “Everyone helps me with this.”
- Use your out of office response enthusiastically. Mom named Christina turns it on not only if she is on the way to work, but also if she is away from her desk at a school event. “I found that this tiny, simple action completely eliminates the need to constantly check my email, which is very important,” she explains. “… I just don’t like the split-attention situation that is so common / difficult for many of us. At some point I thought, what the hell if I took the time to get to x, y or z, I really want to BE HERE. “
- Spend a mental health day at work.
- Everything has been delivered. “Every week we get groceries delivered one evening when our daughter is already asleep,” writes a father named Andrew. “Our friends constantly insult us because we are only two minutes’ walk from the supermarket. The way we see it: it allows us to spend the weekend doing something with our daughter, rather than dragging her around the store. ” You can also have essentials like toilet paper, paper towels, and diapers automatically shipped through Amazon Prime or other companies.
- Make your lunch breaks as productive as possible. Run errands, fill out school health questionnaires, and do whatever would be more difficult with your kids around.
- Set up “dates” from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm on weekdays: this is what Jenn’s mom does. “If my husband and I have had really productive days, we sometimes leave the office right at five and go out for a quick happy hour while we leave the kids in kindergarten until six. They have a lot more fun with their friends, and we’ve already paid for [childcare]! “
- If you can’t go to the gym, find a way to work out with your child. When my 5 year old daughter got into scooter riding, I decided to buy mine so we could ride on the beach together. Good communication and good exercise. Here are a few more ways to include your child in your workouts .
- Pass what you can. Many working parents said that hiring a housekeeper had a significant impact on their stress levels. This, of course, is not on everyone’s budget, but if cleaning has become time-consuming, you can calculate how much an hour of your time is worth and compare it with the estimate of a professional cleaner.
- Come up with some mantras in case it gets tough. It may be silly, but it helps. “You can do everything, but not at the same time.” “Done is better than perfect.” Or simply, “You are doing a great job.” A mom named Jamie reminds herself to lower the standards: “I’m not aiming for four-star homemade food. I gravitate towards protein, vegetables, fruits and grains or something like that. I don’t scold myself when it comes to macaroni and cheese. ” She writes that she will never become a Pinterest mom, and she is fine with that. “If I send my child the same lunch every day, it saved my mind and my budget.”