Women at Work - Family Management: Meet the Parents

0:02What do you want? Play veranda santa. You want to play veranda santa? I just have to do a little more work though, okay? I'm Kevin and that's my four-year-old Maisie. Are you licking a plate? What do you do? Don't do that. But I have to I have to do a little more work, okay? I know you want to do it right now, but it's not time to play right now. Why?

0:37Well, because Willy's not home. Let's wait till Willy gets home. Daddy's not done working yet. It's not five yet. Willy is Maisie's little brother. He's one, and he requires a lot of attention. He gets home from daycare at five, which is why, up until that moment, I scramble to get as much work done as possible. It's in seven minutes. I'm Erica, and that's my three-year-old Claire. She really knows how to pull out my heartstrings.

1:17Oh, clear bug. I always miss you. But I also like work. I like both. Only one choice. Only one choice? What are you saying? In the eyes of a toddler, life is pretty black and white. Here's another of Claire's favorite questions, which usually comes right as I say good night. Yes, love. Work day or a weekend? Work day or a weekend day? Tomorrow is a weekend day. Sunday? Yes, it's Sunday, exactly.

1:51Exactly. But when I tell her tomorrow is a work day, she often throws a tantrum until like 10 o'clock. The next morning she's all, when will you come down, mommy? I don't want you to leave, mommy. I don't like work days, mommy. Sometimes when I head upstairs to my bedroom to work, Claire gives me a high five, a funny high five as she calls it, and a hug and a kiss. Other times she screams for me for what feels like hours.

2:24Claire's goodbye sets the tone for my work day. I'm either feeling confident like I can do this or the guilt creeps in. Being a working parent is hard under normal circumstances. Bring in a global pandemic, unpredictable childcare, school closures and homeschooling. And I think it's safe to say parents have hit a wall. We have. I still think back to when I got the call from Claire's daycare that they were closing for two weeks.

2:51Two weeks, I thought, how am I going to get through two weeks with my toddler at home, my husband Rob at home working full time, and myself working from home while seven months pregnant. And now here I am over a year later. Over a year. It seems like five. Yeah, no, exactly. It's like we didn't. Thankfully, we didn't know what was coming because I really believe if we had.

3:14There would have been a collective just panic among all working parents worldwide. Oh my God, could you imagine if someone came to you and were like, hey, for a year, you're going to have the kids, you're going to be homeschooling your kids, doing your work, and trying to manage all of that all at once. No. Thank God we didn't know. I know. I'm really grateful that we didn't know.

3:37It's like two weeks, I can do this. And then it just seemed like it was like, okay, we can do it for two more weeks, two more weeks, two more weeks. Right. And then now here we are. Right, exactly. So the last time we saw each other, it was February 2020, late February. Yes. I think your doctor said you couldn't work in the office anymore. You had to work from home. And then a few weeks later, of course, you know, we had a national shutdown. I moved in with my mother, with my two kids. Willie was four months old at the time, so I had a newborn baby and you were expecting your second at the time. Yes, yep. And so you were pregnant and you gave birth during a pandemic.

4:19What was that like? I was scared to be completely frank. I was really scared. I didn't leave the house. Nobody knew how COVID was spread. So I was very nervous. And we really did not leave the house at all. We were those people cleaning every bag of Doritos in the house. We were taking it all really, really seriously. So yeah, my last trimester was home with Claire without daycare. So Claire was around full time.

4:45Working full time my husband was working full time. He was in the travel industry so you can imagine how that went so he also was dealing with a lot of work stress at the time and you know mark my little baby now he's about eight months old came into the world super quickly got to the hospital. It was a quick one to be fair I was really anxious about having to.

5:11give birth with a mask on and Rob not being able to come into the room with me. The anxiety of knowing that I was going to have to do this mostly by myself with a mask made me want to stay home for as long as possible. So that's what I did. I basically stayed home almost too long. The baby was born basically two hours after I entered the hospital. So it was it was intense, but he came and he's lovely. Wow, that all sounds very stressful. Yes.

5:39It's been exhausting. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Exhausting. There's probably another word for it that just doesn't exist in the English language that we just... Someone needs to coin a phrase for the exhaustion of parenting during the pandemic. It's been really challenging. And I've had a lot of ups and downs. There's been times where I felt really good and really resilient. In the beginning, I felt pretty good. I felt like I was protecting my family.

6:07by going to my mom's house, because there's really no way that Julie and I would have been able to get all our work done, especially with a newborn. And I also felt good because my mom lives alone. And I thought it was really good for her not to be socially isolated. And so that was great. And I felt this urge to get a lot of things done. But the struggle was, there were times when...

6:34I just felt like I was failing at both roles, like in dramatic ways. And I remember one event very clearly. I had multiple deadlines and people were emailing me and slacking me to see where things were. And Maisie was laying at my feet in her Peppa Pig pajamas, whimpering, and she had this five mile stare. Like she looked legitimately depressed. And I've never seen her like this. Like she never stops talking. She never stops moving. She's very histronic.

7:02if she's upset then you really know about it. And she was like nearly silent. So like my poor little girl's laying at my feet and I had these deadlines and I had to, you know, sending out emails. I was responding to people on Slack and trying to get things done. But I felt like, you know, I wasn't assuming my role as a dad in that moment when she really needed me the most. But of course there's people at work that really needed me to show up in that moment too. And it was just a torrent of emotions. It was anger and guilt and I think we talk a lot about like work-life balance or work-life integration sort of whatever term you want to use but in those moments it just felt like a work-life car crash. Yeah, yeah, I know that is like heartbreaking because I feel like I can I can picture it right I can picture it like your daughter right underneath your desk on you know next to your feet just wanting attention and you not being able to give it to her and

8:00that pull like the heart string pull like I feel like we're home like we're able to work from home so we're home right and our children are seeing us work and because of that they have this sense of.

8:14What I'm constantly struggling with is like why aren't you spending time with me instead if you love me? Why don't you spend time with me instead and and Claire like she's going strong like we're a year into this and she's still Perseverating on the fact that I'm not downstairs and playing and why do I have to do this and and what you're describing it's like amplified the normal feelings that working parents have, right? Like we'd go into work and in some ways that was such a clear boundary. Like I would put on my, you know, work shoes. I would leave the house and I would feel like my professional identity would begin the minute I got in my car in some ways. And now it's just not there. And I still really struggle with the same feeling of how do you do both when you are so like everything's happening at the same time, right? Totally.

9:05After the break, we'll tell you about our latest challenges and the tips and tools that are helping us cope. Let me tell you, my biggest problem right now is getting through the witching hours. So that's between, I would say, five and seven thirty. When the kids are both home from daycare and preschool to the time that they go to sleep. So I'm an introvert, which means, you know, I can thrive in social situations, but I usually need a nap afterwards.

9:37So after a really busy day at work and going through meetings and talking to a lot of people You know, I usually need like 10 or 15 minutes just to decompress But the problem is and anyone who has kids know this usually at night they're at their craziest When I need some alone time and some quiet time my kids come through the door It's like they down 10 shots of espresso and have a day's worth of grievances and traumas to work through and it can be really hard because I'm overstimulated. And it's insanity. It can be a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. So if I'm in a good mindset, I have a lot of fun. And it's the reason why I get so much joy out of my kids, you know, they're jumping on the beds and we have dance parties and all that fun stuff. But if I am overstimulated, I mean, just the sounds of their laughter sometimes can sound like nails on a chalkboard.

10:39It's just like a crescendo of chaos like it starts off okay, and then it just keeps going and going and going and going and going And then finally it just ends in a chorus of cries Kevin so how do you how do you deal with that? Yeah, it's I have a few strategies. So the first thing that I do is I Know that I need to take time for myself during the day where I could get that quiet time So even though my wife and I are alone in the apartment for most of the day I need to make sure that I'm taking breaks because I've gotten into this habit during the pandemic of just feeling like time is incredibly scarce. So from the moments the kids are out of the house, I'm just like frantically trying to get work done until they come back. I'm definitely overstimulated when I do that kind of stuff and I'm really tired by the time five comes. So I just make sure that I take breaks. But one of the major things I'm doing right now, and this is advice from Daisy Dolling. She wrote this great book called Work Parent that's coming out in May.

11:48And she talks about establishing a point of control and a point of control can be anything. It could be a habit. It could be a ritual. It could be an activity. It's just one thing that you own that no one else owns and that you do frequently away from your kids or away from someone else. And so what I've been doing is on the days that I pick up Willie from Daycare at 430, I leave a little early. I get in my car and I listen to sports radio.

12:19I'll do it for 15 or 20 minutes and I don't even like sports radio to be honest It's like I don't care about their hot takes about Tom Brady and whatnot But it just puts me in a good mindset because I'm not thinking about anything else. I'm just listening to these hot takes on sports They're inconsequential. They don't mean anything But it's a good way for me to just reset myself and then I go in I pick them up from daycare And then I come home and I feel like I have that nice transition period between work and home. I love that. I love that piece of advice. Having that moment of respite, we all need it. Right. So Erica, I know you still have both kids at home during the day. Like, what are you struggling with right now? Yes. The idea of getting in a car sounds heavenly. I do drive around to nowhere sometimes. So yes, I have my eight month old and my three year old at home with a full time nanny. So I'm just so grateful for that.

13:14That said, I still feel like I'm always on, you know, like you described, like if you have childcare every minute of that is now work time, right? It's like the sacred time where you have someone taking care of your children and you have no time for breaks. You have no time really to do anything other than work. And so I'm constantly feeling like I'm on.

13:36I come upstairs to my bedroom. I'm in there basically for, you know, eight, nine hours while we have the nanny here. And I don't take breaks and I know I need to get better about this, but other than lunch, which sounds like a break, but that's when I'm on parenting duty. I think she'll be done soon.

13:56There's all very routine based, so at 12.30 she starts waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs so she knows. So that's when time starts ticking in terms of her patience level. So I need to get down there. And then we eat lunch together and we have playtime together. And I invested in a visual timer and I have to say people had told me about these visual timers. I was skeptical, but it's been a game changer.

14:20I put the visual timer on. It's essentially like a timer that's colored. So it's blue. So you can see the 15 minute countdown getting smaller and smaller. So we put our 15 minute timer on. Claire knows it. She goes, whoa, mommy, this is like a super long time. I'm like, it sure is. So she's excited about it. And then in that time, we have lunch together and then we have our play time.

14:44She crams in, let me tell you, as much as she can in those 15 minutes. And when she starts to see the color kind of get smaller and smaller, she just keeps wanting me to do more and more. So I often am a student in her classroom. She loves the letter C. So she's just drawing C's and trying to tell me how to, you know, draw the letter C. I'm singing songs with her trains. Then I'm pretending to cry because one of her dolls is hungry and we make, you know, some special concoction with like her fake green peas and her baby bottle milk and we're doing all of this the timer goes off i'm realizing okay i've got a one o'clock meeting now it's time to run upstairs so all of this is to say you know i'm running upstairs and then i am trying to roll switch very quickly with no break essentially because i was a parent and now i'm back to being you know an employee and this constant pull of never having a moment just for myself.

15:41is absolutely exhausting. And poor Mark, I haven't even mentioned poor Mark, but he's still nursing. So the little guy needs to eat. So in midst of this, he's doing really well. Like I can go two or three hours without feeding him, but I also nurse. So that also is that feeling of breaking up the day. So I really feel that all my breaks, anytime that I'm not working, I'm really putting towards childcare and taking care of my kids. Oh, I relate to that so much. I just remember.

16:09You know when I was living at my mom's house I felt like a hostage upstairs because we had to hide away from the kids right when we did come downstairs It was so intense because they haven't hadn't seen you for hours and so they want to make the most of that time So that's really hard when the timer goes off. I never know how well the transition will go I mean I'd say since the nanny has started and she's been here a few months now It's gotten exponentially better. So now I get kind of just like softer questions in terms of like mommy why do you have to work why aren't you spending time with me yeah how do you answer those questions i have to say i mean sometimes i basically you know crouch down i give her a hug and i say clear you know i miss you too and she then you know she has her pretend phone so she says mommy i'll send you a message if i need you and i'm like okay clear i'll have my phone next to me too and you know i've also relied on a lot of advice that we have on our site as well we have a great

17:03discussion guide called how to talk to your kids about work during the pandemic. One of the pieces of advice is to schedule family time without distractions. And for me, that's what the timer is. The timer is when I don't have my phone on. I'm not checking Slack and I have those 15 minutes, right, that I am with her and she knows are only for her. So it's allowed me to kind of set these boundaries, which, which I didn't realize how, how much I needed. Yeah, totally. No, I feel the same way. I'm just hoping that at the end of the pandemic, I keep up those boundaries as well. Thanks for listening to the first episode of Family Management.

18:08Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoek, Tina Tobi-Mac, Adam Buckholz, and Rob Eckhart. I'm Erica Truxler. And I'm Kevin Evers. And for a list of the HBR articles and books Kevin and I mentioned, check out the show notes.