Work-life balance has taken on a whole new meaning in the wake of the pandemic. COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns triggered many companies to convert to a partial, if not total, remote work-from-home model. While most childcare and schools are back in-person now, this was not the case throughout 2020.
Some have struggled to create structure and boundaries in their new work-from-home (WFH) lifestyle, and the blurred lines between work and home life take on a whole new meaning for WFH employees who are also parents.
Learning how to work from home is hard enough, but parents face the additional challenge of simultaneously caring for their children who weren’t able to physically go into school or daycare due to the nationwide restrictions and lockdowns. While most of those constraints have been lifted, parenting as a WFH employee still poses unique challenges, especially for the entrepreneur.
The balance between parenting and working from home is different for every person and every child, and the shifts that occurred in the workplace throughout 2020 are creating waves of change that continue to affect work culture, especially as it relates to parents. Our very own Julie Martin is here to begin the discussion about parenting as a work-from-home entrepreneur.
Martin is the Director of Marketing and Operations at foundingAUSTIN, our podcasting arm founding_media, and the affiliated financial management company NEST Financial. She is also an entrepreneur herself, as the co-founder of Mother Luck Ranch.
All of her industry is made more impressive by the fact that she has two children under the age of three. Her youngest Evey celebrates one this month, and her oldest Luna is two-and-a-half.
While COVID-19 changed a lot about her work structure, Martin was no stranger to the working-parent lifestyle. Before the pandemic she was running a boutique and teaching at the Art Institute. Baby Luna would accompany her to the boutique most days, hanging out in her baby carrier or roaming around the shop. Martin’s husband had switched jobs to a remote working position right before Luna was born, so he was able to watch Luna while Martin was teaching, before Luna could attend daycare.
“He would wear Luna in a wrap and she’d fall asleep while he worked,” Martin explains. “This was in 2019 and pre-pandemic, so he was a bit of a trailblazer at the time, attending ZOOM calls with a baby sleeping on his chest.”
Martin’s transition to her current roles and fully remote work coincided with her second child’s birth, and she had to learn how to navigate the new working style alongside her responsibilities as a mother of two young children.
She explains that allocating time for work around her kids’ schedules has been a huge part of being a present parent while still fulfilling her professional duties. Sometimes exercising this flexibility means scheduling Zoom calls during the kids’ naptime, or attending meetings with her camera off so that she’s able to nurse Evey while she works. Sometimes it means clocking hours late at night, after the kids are already asleep. Maybe it means setting up an office in the corner of the playroom for a few hours, or a play area in the corner of her office.
Photo courtesy of Julie Martin
Martin and her husband have also developed a solid, functional co-parenting dynamic, so that one parent will look after the children during times when the other parent has an inflexible work obligation or needs to carve out uninterrupted time to complete a project.
Overall, Martin has noticed that the merging of parenting responsibility and work responsibilities in the new and normalized WFH structure has created a lot more understanding from employers and the public in general.
“Working from home and seeing parents who have to raise kids while they work from home has created a lot more empathy for working parents, and parents in general. Even just having my husband work from home with our first child really gave him an understanding of the weight of childcare, which too often historically falls more heavily on the mother. Employers and coworkers are similarly gaining that new understanding as they watch their working-parent colleagues, too.”
She also believes that the increase in remote work has removed the stigma that parents aren’t accomplishing enough when they work alongside their children.
“Children are no more distracting than coworkers,” she explains, and while parenting and working concurrently requires flexibility and intentionality, it doesn’t deter productivity. As employers notice that, they shift their values and it creates a more empowering workplace for the employee. Rather than creating restrictive schedules that chain their employees to their desks, parents are able to maintain productivity by adhering to a schedule that actually fits the multiple and sundry demands of their lives.
This freedom benefits the employers, too. For example, Martin cites that her ability to work from home with her kids enabled her to come back from maternity leave much sooner, at 2 months postpartum instead of four months. The WFH lifestyle can benefit the children, too – when she returned from maternity leave after Luna, the stresses and time and privacy constraints of an in-office work environment meant that she wasn’t able to pump. Conversely with Evey, Martin was able to nurse because she was working at home and had a more flexible schedule, rather than restrictive hours in a stressful workplace environment. For employees, employers, and children, it’s a win-win-win.
As a mother of two, Martin emphasizes that every child is different: both in what they need from their parents and how well their needs will coincide with the demands of the parent’s workday.
Her oldest Luna is extroverted and needs to participate in daycare where she’ll socialize with other children to be her happiest. Martin explains that she’s able to utilize the time that her daughter is at daycare to get heads-down work done as part of her parenting and working strategy. But talking with other working parents at the daycare also opened Martin’s eyes to their shared needs across her community.
During the pandemic, parents in the same neighborhoods and communities would intentionally create groups for socializing their children that were insulated from outside exposure and therefore safe from a health perspective. These self-directed communities – formed independent of any institution or organization – made Martin realize that working parents don’t have to wait around for someone to create community structure.
As more employers gain empathy for working parents and society begins to comprehend the needs and demands that working parents face as parents and employees, she believes there’s opportunity for a huge cultural shift to a model where working parents can come together to co-work and co-parent in the same space.
In the same way that Martin and her husband share parenting responsibilities according to what their personal work schedules allow, Martin envisions communities coming together and forming larger coworking and coparenting pods. Working parents and guardians could come together in this way and create a mutually beneficial, positive dynamic for young kids who aren’t old enough to go to school yet.
“As a society we don’t ask for help too often, but there is community available and people are missing out on an opportunity to create a support system,” Martin explains. “It could be like a mommy-group, but instead of just for socializing, it’s also for co-working.”
Martin believes that raising children is a group effort, and in the contemporary world of technology enabling more and more things to “go remote,” combined with the health and safety restrictions of the global pandemic, we have been pushed away from community into isolation.
“It really does take a village, and support systems have gotten smaller over time, but we can create our own systems of support and community without waiting for it to be created for us,” Martin says, encouraging parent-entrepreneurs who are working from home to go out and intentionally create connections with other like-minded individuals.
Written by Catherine Casem
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