Working and Parenting in a Pandemic: True stories straight from the source
Chloe Elliott, Product Manager at Jama Software
COVID hit us like a hurricane and changed everything in an instant. Since March 2020, my husband and I have co-parented and co-schooled our two elementary school age children (age 6 and 8) while working full-time from home. This has been an incredibly ambiguous problem to solve on multiple levels. Our children went from attending physical school, going to various afterschool lessons, participating in sports and social engagements to staring at a computer screen for hours a day on our dining room table.
Very little instruction from the school was provided, and I did not expect much, as this was not a situation I have ever heard of a school actually preparing for. So, after we could take a breath and gain our barings, we sat down together, discussed the situation at length and decided that we were going to have to take matters into our own hands. We tried to weed out the “doom and gloom” of the situation and funnel our “limited” focus on what positive outcomes we wanted for our children. We wondered, how can we use this rare crazy situation as a learning opportunity? How can we rethink what success looks like and feels like?
We decided that the Spring term was a wash, and that we were just going to have to give Spring term a “thank you” and send it on it’s way. Just let that shit go and move on… We evaluated our comfort level with sending the kids to the various Summer camps I had meticulously scheduled and decided we were not comfortable. So, with Summer 2020 cancelled we proceeded to start a mommy-daddy summer school to try to catch them up and gain some momentum into the next school year.
In the process we have converted a big storage room into the family office where all four of us do our daily work. We did this on purpose, so that we could both work, and triage helping both our children. So if I cannot help, then my husband can and vice versa. Needless to say, there have been some funny conference call situations between all four of us. To help mitigate this situation we ended up creating some break out satellite spaces for when people know they are going to have a long back-and-forth conference session. We both happen to be loud conference call people, and it just does not work to have us both talking at the same time.
Throughout this whole summer we have iterated on the schedule and have finally found one which works perfectly for our work situation and our children. We have had many, many family meetings about what we think is working and what isn’t. This was the summer of family problem solving. I am grateful for this process and for the rare opportunity I had to do this with my husband and children. Through this process I have been able to better understand directly where my children are at in a way I would have not have known if they had gone to Summer camp or had been in regular school. My children have also had a rare look into our work, what applications we use, and how we communicate with our co-workers. Because of this exposure, we have been able to have on-the-fly conversations about how what they are learning now will apply to the work they could do in the future. For instance, I was able to help my 8-year-old son with fractions while showing him how I use percentages to tell a data story in my company PowerPoints. When was I ever going to be able to make that connection for him while I was physically in the office, and he was physically in school? From these realizations we started really questioning the possibilities around how “overscheduled” our kids — and we — are.
School is about to start again, which will cause us to have to reiterate and disrupt our flow once again. Right now, I only have more questions and concerns than answers. For this, I have forgiven myself and decided that this is where I am supposed to be in this moment in time. I know we are all worried about our children, I am choosing to regard the chaos as “very good news” which will bring about new opportunities and changes applicable to our new reality going forward.
This is just my family’s story, and everyone’s is different. Read on to see how this pandemic has impacted other members of the PDXWIT community.
Kerala Taylor, Senior Strategist/UX Architect and Marketer at PixelSpoke
When COVID first shut down our daughter’s elementary school and our son’s preschool, my husband and I considered ourselves among the lucky ones. He was furloughed for six weeks, able to get on unemployment, and available to provide care to our eight- and four-year-old while I worked full-time from home. Then in May, he returned to work outside the home and our lives became more complicated. We both reduced our schedules to 30-32 hours per week, but even still, juggling caregiving, homeschooling, and work responsibilities has proven to be unsustainable and exhausting. As we face the reality of virtual school in the fall, we are trying to figure out whether it’s even worth enrolling our now five-year-old in online kindergarten, and like every other working family, scrambling to figure out a viable way forward.
My husband and I are the only employees in our respective workplaces who are working reduced schedules (we are also the only employees who rely on dual incomes and have multiple children) and we both worry that this could be hampering our opportunities for career advancement. I’ve been incredibly distressed to see that working mothers in particular are leaving the workforce and reducing hours at far higher rates than working fathers, and I can’t even imagine the strain that the pandemic has placed on single-parent families.
Finding accessible, affordable, high-quality childcare was hard enough before COVID hit. The pandemic has only increased the burden on working families and wrought havoc on an already fragile child care infrastructure. Despite the fact that many employers are waking up to the fact that childcare is an essential service, government and business leaders are doing very little to offer support for, or even acknowledge the needs of, parents who are attempting to simultaneously work, homeschool, and provide care.
Hoang Samuelson, Treasurer at AIGA
Prior to the pandemic, I was working as an accountant for a small engineering firm, thinking that my job was secure, because the company was (supposedly) doing so well. However, on March 25th, after having worked at home for a week, I was laid off in a very abrupt and unexpected way. The following week, my son’s daycare closed down. The week after that, my daughter’s school began remote learning. The result was challenges that I’m sure a lot of parents faced — how to homeschool your children while also taking care of other children. Several miscommunications from the school aside, we managed to make it work.
However optimistic I tried to be, I couldn’t ignore other facts that were surfacing in our lives — my husband’s job was at stake (luckily his union made a case and he was able to keep his regular hours, even though “regular” meant 32 hours, not 40, as an hourly employee), family and friends began to distance themselves, and my unemployment took two months to process. Not only that, there were everyday challenges of maintaining a household with two young children. It has not been easy.
Five months later, I am still unemployed, but have begun to brush up on certain skills and even learned some new ones and have begun volunteering to (virtually) meet new people and develop my network. My biggest challenge right now is weighing the costs and benefits of work versus childcare, knowing that school will be remote this fall, and my daughter will need to stay at home. How do I figure the childcare equation when only one of my children is in primary school?
Elizabeth Stock, Executive Director at PDXWIT
I already had my hands full with a toddler and six-month-old at home with full-time childcare. I never felt like I had any downtime. I was either working/pumping/commuting or at home dealing with laundry/endless dishes/figuring out what to feed the humans in my house. I was spread so thin. Then, the pandemic hit and, of course, all childcare was suddenly gone. As was any job stability. Not to mention unbelievable amounts of anxiety about the health of my loved ones and the broader community.
As I navigated uncertainty within the context of my family bubble, I also had an organization (PDXWIT) to lead. An organization for which large events with hundreds of people felt foundational and defining to who it was. My brain was on overdrive trying to figure out how to convert PDXWIT into an exclusively virtual community while also trying to figure out how to exist in my household without sleep because there simply were not enough hours in the day to do all the things.
But somehow, we adapted. In doing so, the boundaries that once existed between home and work have all but disappeared. In some ways, that’s beautiful. I have unexpectedly been able to stay home with my baby for his first year. My colleagues have given me grace and encouragement when it comes to prioritizing my family through this. And PDXWIT — that organization I was trying to continue to lead while I struggled through the early months of COVID-19 — might just be okay after all.
What a year.
Padmashree Koneti, Product Leader, PDXWIT Board Co-Chair
From the start, the pandemic brought me to my knees. At the place I worked, a CA-based food tech company, revenue dropped to zero the day Shelter In Place was announced (and has not come back since). My daughter, a sophomore in college in Southern California, was still holding out hope that her Division III spring softball season was going to continue and this was just a bad dream.
I slowly came to grips with reality (about my company, losing my job, the virus’ toll and going online) in the weeks that followed and was eventually able to balance self-care with caring for others. I was lucky in that my college going kid was able to put things in perspective on her own and realize that her pain was far outweighed by her privilege. It was also great to see her acknowledge that privilege and get swept into the racial reckoning this country experienced confronting police brutality towards Black people. Engaging one another in conversation around these topics at the dinner table was a great source of catharsis for all of us.
As for my high school son, my partner and I were so absorbed by the cognitive load of each day that we quite frankly felt ill-equipped to give him much support as he drifted through tumultuous weeks, figuring out remote learning and school work.
As the summer comes to a close, we continue to struggle with this new way of life — the inability to collaborate live with colleagues, the inability to travel to visit my aging parents in India, the unresolved status of this virus, the social and political unrest. It feels like we are bearing the weight of the world on our shoulders. But I am also grateful that we have the support system, be it Whatsapp groups and Zoom sessions with family and friends, socially distanced walks, good weather, podcasts or something else, to find our bearings and offer support and connection to the community to the extent that we can.
Tiffany Nieslanik, Community Lead + Copywriter at The Mom Project
My family was in Amsterdam when the lockdown happened. We were scheduled to return to the U.S. on March 20th but after rerouting ourselves to head back through New York we ended up returning on March 16th, just before our state went to a “Stay-at-Home” order. It was a stressful journey to say the least — I was worried we would all get COVID or that we wouldn’t be allowed back into the States until we arrived home.
I feel very fortunate that we made it home safely, especially when considering so many of our family factors during the pandemic. My husband works for a company that is focused on virtual mental health, and health care in general, so he was able to work remotely immediately.
While my husband and I are accustomed to working remotely, we have always had child care for our three small kids and then all of the sudden, we didn’t. All of us being home trying to work, homeschool, and play without being able to go anywhere definitely started to wear on the kids. I also started a Master’s Program in March, effectively doubling my work. I joke now that for March through June my husband and I were two ships passing in the night. I would wake up early and start my work or school around 6 until 9 or 10 while he got the kids up and ready for the day. Then I’d take over while he would work traditional hours. Around 5 or so he’d take over again to do dinner and bedtime while I went back to work and school. Then after everyone was asleep he’d catch up on the work he had missed during the day time. It was unsustainable and there were a lot of household chores that absolutely did not get done. (I’m looking at you, laundry piles 👀.)
Since those early months we have assembled childcare and learning pods for the kids. All in all I feel fortunate for our ability to deal with the physical challenges represented by parenting in a pandemic, but I often consider the mental stress and fatigue and can’t help but wonder how that will manifest itself for all of us, adults and children, in the future.
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