What remote work taught me about homeschooling
As a founder of an all-remote company, I am quite familiar with work from home, see our prior post. When my daughter’s school closed in March (as most schools around the globe), I am suddenly in the unfamiliar waters of homeschooling. While I looked forward to more family time, I was apprehensive about how to manage while also having a full-time job. Fortunately, I was able to take the best practices from transitioning office workers to work-from-home and apply them to my daughter with relative success. While my daughter is 6, I do believe many of these tips can work for most school-age children.
Maintain a routine
When you transition from an office to working from home, the lines between professional and personal are easily blurred. A similar routine of wake up / shower / change into office clothes can really help your mind separate work from personal time. For my daughter, we try as much as possible to imitate her prior school routine times for wake-up, meals, breaks and bedtime and even getting her out of her PJs. In the current state of uncertainty and change, I have found this helps her feel safe as more things stay the same. I worked with her to create a schedule in Google calendar and she loved the concept — especially telling me that we are late for a meal.
She’s really enjoying the proactive programming of her day and activities, and was quickly using Google to schedule meetings like “mommy & me exercise” or “playtime with grandpa”. While she had some issues in the actual execution (i.e. she created everything as an all day event), it still managed to teach her the value of having a strong routine!
Keep moving
In our ongoing staff surveys, the personal health/fitness metric often emerges as an area for improvement. As such, we do fitness competitions two months of the year with a focus on simple at-home exercise apps (e.g. 7 min app) and live exercise classes. Although playgrounds are currently closed during the Shelter in Place ordinance, my daughter still has the same boundless energy. The easiest hack for me has been to have her join our exercise sessions: live classes I join, chin-ups my husband does, walks with my father-in-law early in the day, etc. Of course, the best hack (though it takes significant patience to implement) is having her burn off energy while contributing to improving the state of the home. While she is still working on attaining normal standards for cleanliness, she does enjoy helping daily with sweeping of the living room and loading/unloading of the dishwasher!
Socialize and learn virtually
One of the long term challenges we have observed with our team members is the risk of becoming socially isolated. To combat this, we host virtual happy hours, use the “donut” app in Slack to randomly connect staff, and recently expanded to other forms of virtual social activity (crafting, cooking etc.). Just as those working remotely risk fewer human connections, my daughter dearly misses her friends during the current Shelter In Place. I have recently set-up Google Hangout dates with three buddies where they have participated in dress-up parties, sharing craft ideas, as well as spilling my nail polish everywhere. We also set up our own virtual meal hangouts with other families to give her some variety. Though she is at an age where typing is painfully slow, she was also quick to discover voice-to-text and is now a master user of emoticons!
Enable independence
With an all-remote company across many time zones, it is not as easy to just casually ask your office mate about this & that without delay in the response. We try to address any delay by being extremely transparent and providing everyone easy access to resources that they can self-access. As when your kid is at home during work hours, you need to think two steps ahead concerning how they can be more independent so you have fewer interruptions while working. To plan ahead, I leave her snacks on low shelves that are easy to access, buy small jugs of milk so she can prepare her own cereal, as well as plan leftovers from dinner that can quickly be remade into lunch. Outside of food, we set-up a special place in her room so all her schoolwork is easily visible. I also convinced her to organize her room, which was a painful four-day process, but now she knows exactly where everything is (not so different than helping remote workers build good habits).
In short, everything that has helped transition into a remote worker has been just as helpful for transitioning my daughter during school closures! For more ideas, Forbes has an extensive list!
