Working Moms Trying to WFH With Little Ones

This story is part of a series on how COVID is impacting working moms. My last post was about how working moms are dealing with distance learning.

Though distance learning presents a challenge for many working moms during the current COVID-19 staycation, schoolwork (in theory, at least) should occupy children for part of the day. Working moms with younger children don’t have distance learning tasks to occupy their kids. Indeed, many working moms may have relied on daycare or a nanny prior to COVID but must now cope without that extra help.

Among respondents in our survey, 8 in 10 working mothers with children 0–5 years old had some help with childcare prior to COVID-19. Half of these moms previously sent their child/children to daycare.

Currently, only one in three has any outside help with childcare. Unsurprisingly, this is a daunting challenge, especially for moms who are now working from home.

Without outside help, how are parents managing childcare duties for their infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers? While some partners share childcare duties, (36% say they and their partner are splitting childcare duties and 12% say their partner is the primary caregiver), half of working moms say they serve as the primary caregiver.

Here is some feedback about how working moms are dealing with working from home with pre-school aged children.

“Almost impossible. Thinking about quitting job, but I am the sole earner.”

“I hadn’t realized how few of my colleagues had young children and my daughter (4) basically sits on, near, or with me when she’s in my office. People seem unbothered by her presence but at the same time I have this extra constant multitasking burden that just totally zaps my energy and I really need time alone at some point in the day to unwind and decompress.”

“It’s really hard for me to be productive during the day. I can work in short spurts in between feeding, helping, dealing with the kids. When I have work that I really need to focus on, I have to do it after the kids are in bed.”

“It’s absolutely awful. I’m barely able to do the basic tasks for my job due to interruptions and having to relieve my husband so that he can work.”

“It’s very challenging to work with a toddler in the house. I never understood just how problematic it would be, until we were thrust into this situation.”

“It’s hard because I have a newborn and a two year old. And I have no dedicated workspace.”

“The only reason I can manage is because my husband is currently on paternity leave. Once he returns back to “work” full time I’m not sure how we’ll do things.”

“It is SO hard to work with young children in the house. Especially when my partner had to work outside of the house. Whenever I have meetings I can hardly focus on them.”

“It’s really embarrassing to have them walk in on zoom call after zoom call.”

“It’s a constant balancing act — does the child or the job get the attention. If the child gets the attention, my income suffers. If the job gets the attention, my child suffers.”

As usual, I want to close out with some hopeful remarks:

“It’s chaos, but I get everything I need to get done.”

“It’s tough but we are tough! As a working mom, we are used to having to be flexible so in some ways I feel that this can be a little easier for us in some ways. But I know that not being able to accomplish everything with kids “underfoot” is super frustrating. I also realized pretty quickly that before this my work/home boundaries were awesome and I really did do well protecting each area. Now I am relearning and adjusting to this new season.”

“It took us two weeks to adjust and those were the worst/hardest weeks, but we are fully adjusted to this now.”