Parents during the pandemic
In my previous blogs, I have talked about the future being remote jobs and virtual education but I haven’t gone into the topic where both of those concepts meet, parents managing kids at home. To show how the pandemic has affected working parents who have children going to school, I interviewed my aunt who works as a software engineer at CISCO and has two children both under 11 years old.
I asked her if her kids are paying attention to class by themselves and how well you are managing everything and her response was: “The pandemic has really affected kids learning because they can’t focus and get distracted, whenever they get free time, they tend to watch TV, youtube, my son who is 7 years old tends to be the most distracted and starts to play online games. It is hard to manage my job and monitor what he is doing. Sometimes the teachers forget to upload things to google class and it is very difficult for me to track what is happening in the classroom. Working at home it is really hard for me to see what assignments are due when, if he is attending his class, if he is paying attention in class, completes his work, and overall tracks his progress in school. Since I have two kids, one is 7 and the other is 10, I have to equally dedicate my time to monitor both of their education while balancing my job and that gets very hard. It gets even harder when teachers do not upload assignments properly or forget to do so. I can’t hold my son responsible for knowing all his assignments because he is very young, but when the teachers don’t do their job properly it becomes very hard for the parents and we have to put more effort than necessary. Because of the economic downfall, my company has been doing a lot of budget cuts and one of them is firing people. Removing all these people has made my job more difficult because I am basically doing three people’s worth of work while simultaneously managing my kids and the house.”
Additionally, she mentioned that every working parent with children is facing a similar situation where not only do they have to monitor their kids’ education but also take on the extra stress of their jobs due to the pandemic harming the economy. If remote jobs and virtual learning are here to stay, we need to ensure that they boost job and educational performance and not harm it.
What if the parents are not computer literate and their young children need help with school? What if parents are unable to handle their kids and their kids at the same time? Situations like this give rise to a need for companies to understand the difficulties of parents with young children and provide them with the necessary resources. For example, more flexible break time from work, technical lessons for parents with little to no knowledge of computers, more paid leave days, and more. By implementing these solutions, not only will children receive the necessary attention they need from their parents regarding their education, due to reduced stress levels, there will be a growth in job performance.
