Many of us think working from home is easier than working in an office, but working from home has extra challenges attached. Being a parent to a toddler or infant adds a whole new layer to those challenges, but you can juggle working from home and attending to your duties as a parent. Here is the best effective tips on how to survive working remotely as a parent to a toddler or infant.
How Important Is Self-Care If You’re a Parent Working From Home?
Self-care is critical for all parents. Without practicing self-care, you run the risk of becoming ill or otherwise harming your health, which in turn limits your ability to both work and care for your children. While you may think attending to your personal needs is selfish, it’s not selfish to practice self-care as such care is vital to juggling your responsibilities.
How Can You Create a Schedule?
A proper schedule is necessary if you plan to work from home while also being the parent of a toddler. Without a schedule, you may find yourself attending to only immediate tasks while losing sight of the big picture and hurting your chances of accomplishing your long-term goals.
Part of keeping a schedule is minimizing distractions enough that you can stick to it. For example, creating a home office space instead of working from the kitchen or a bedroom may help you focus on your work. You may work best in relative quiet or you may benefit from listening to music. Whatever boosts your concentration will help you keep a schedule and maximize your productivity.
What If You’re Not Happy With Your Job?
If your job is not working out and you feel like changing careers, you might want to seek out a new degree online. Online learning has become increasingly ubiquitous: One survey said that about 33% of college students are taking at least one online class. There are benefits to studying from home, such as better flexibility in your schedule. You can thus be fully available to care for your children while also earning your degree. For example, going back to school and earning an online teaching degree can help you obtain your teaching license. Along with completing a bachelor’s program, your state will typically require you to submit transcripts, complete a background check, and pass entrance exams and skills tests.
What Are Some Other Tips You Can Practice?
Some researchers say that baby-wearing can improve both your babies’ health and their moods. In addition to keeping your children close to you as you work, baby-wearing can also enhance your emotional connection and reduce crying, which will help you focus while you work.
If you’re able to share job responsibilities, a partner with whom you can split the work might make your dual duties much easier to handle. Splitting the work means having one partner care for your children while the other handles the job responsibilities. You might want to make shifts sharing these duties between morning and afternoon. Even if your job isn’t set up to allow for strict time shifts, such as would be the case if one of you needs to attend a meeting at a certain time, you can still communicate with each other to share different tasks each day.
Working from home as a parent may seem like a daunting task, and while it does contain added challenges, many can do it with a little know-how. With these tips, you hopefully will be better able to juggle both your parental and job responsibilities.
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