7 Ways You Can Support Your Parenting Coworkers During COVID-19
COVID-19 has dramatically changed all of our home and work lives, but it's been a special challenge for caregivers, particularly people who are trying to work while parenting and homeschooling children. There's been no shortage of analyses about the wide-ranging and devastating effects of this: how difficult it is for essential workers, for divorced parents, for parents of teenagers, for parents of little kids, for single parents, how impossible homeschooling is, why this is hitting moms especially hard. And on and on and on.
Yep, the verdict is in: parents are not ok, and we need your help. Here's how you can show up and support the caregivers in your life right now:
Give caregivers paid, protected, unlimited time off to care for our families. It's difficult for anyone to concentrate on work during a global public health crisis, and that burden doubles or triples when you also have to care for and teach children. It's not possible to work well in these conditions, and expecting parents to do this is setting us up to fail. If you're in a position to do so, ask foundations to suspend grant deliverables while you continue to pay employees full time to be with their families. That is the only ethical thing to do right now. If that's not possible, then:
Be flexible with when parents work. Parents are trying to juggle many full-time jobs at once. We did not expect or prepare to work, parent, or live this way. In a practical sense, this means:
It may be impossible for us to do more than 20-30 minutes of work at a time because of kid interruptions and/or remote learning needs. That 20-page strategy brief or research protocol? Forget it.
We might not be able to do anything close to an 8-hour workday (try 2-hour workday, at most) because our kids need us at all hours.
We might not be able to be present on calls (ESPECIALLY not video calls). Our kids will inevitably choose that moment to fall down the stairs, or decide it's time to march around the apartment yelling, "POOP! POOP! POOP!"
Be open to switching shifts with us at the clinic. Childcare coverage is really challenging right now. It’s helpful to know folks are ready to support us if we need someone to cover our shift or stay a little later if we have to head home at a specific time.
We need more flexibility to be able to do our work whenever we can, whether that's time-related (i.e., before 7am or after 8pm), or place-related (i.e., scrunched over a laptop in our car while the kids run wild in the house). We need to know that the pressure to complete tasks within a regular timeframe is suspended and that there is no expectation that we have anything close to a "regular" workday.
Reprioritize goals and redistribute tasks. We need flexibility in deadlines and in tasks. There is no way any of us can be as productive and meet all of our goals during a pandemic, especially those of us with caregiving responsibilities. It's just not possible. We need our leaders and managers to reprioritize our tasks and have conversations about realistic and extended deadlines, changing expectations, and redistributing anything essential more evenly across our teams. Most importantly: we need our bosses not to count this against us at our annual reviews. This is not about not being able to perform at our jobs, this is about making sure our families survive this crisis.
Extend us some extra patience and compassion. We need it now more than ever. We have no free time, no breaks, no time to bake extravagant breads or binge watch all six seasons of 10 different TV shows. What little time we had to ourselves before is spent trying our best to maintain a façade of calm for our children, who are a combination of anxious, stressed, depressed, and wild. If we are a little more terse, unfocused, or tired than we've been before, it's not about you. It's about COVID-19. Have patience with us.
Support caretakers in their asks. Do you see your caregiving coworkers struggling? Send them a direct message or text to ask how you can support them. Maybe they’ve been working late at the clinic and you could cover the dinner delivery so their caregiving shift at home could be a little lighter? You could be even more direct and ask what task you can take off their plate, or if you don't have the bandwidth for that, let them know you see all the hard work they're doing and pressure they're under and reassure them that they're doing the best they can. If there's anything your caregiving coworkers want from management, back them up! A four-day workweek? No video calls? Extending benefits eligibility? Support them in these requests! You may have the time, energy, and ability to organize in a way your caregiving coworkers don’t.
Respect boundaries & schedules. When your caregiving coworker says they can't meet a deadline, can't make a meeting, or has a hard stop time, respect it. Don't question them or ask them to explain. Accept that they can handle their own schedule, have other priorities right now, and will get to their work when they can. Better yet, do this for all of your coworkers who deserve to be treated with some extra kindness right now.
Our families need us right now and are more important than work. This pandemic is having devastating effects on our collective mental health, and children are no exception. We're parents before we're workers, and need to tend to our children's wellbeing before we respond to that email or jump on that video call. Please don't punish us for that.
Note: this is written by a parent who is not an essential worker. To learn more about what it's like to be a parent and an essential worker, read this and this.
For more on supporting working parents generally, we suggest reading: