Parenting working balance

It’s hard for all parents to balance work and … parenting. No matter what you do, it’s always a challenge to learn how to combine job and parents’ responsibilities. Nowadays, we don’t want to lose the job we’ve got because of maternity leave. It happens due to many reasons: good position, good conditions or you just love what you do and you want to continue doing that. In this article, I’ll talk about two “hardest jobs in the world”: teaching and parenting. 🙂 Well, at least one of them is (parenting, of course). What are the challenges of balancing and doing both jobs simultaneously? What are the solutions for a better work-life balance?

I’m sure things I’ll cover below aren’t only about teachers, but about people of different professions, but I’ll focus mainly on teaching as that’s what I do.

I would say there are two main challenges.

Challenge 1

Parenting suffers as a result of work responsibilities.

We all know that work is never-ending. But we want to do the most of it, to be effective, not to have backlogs, so on. As a result, we take work home on weekends or in the evenings. We prepare lesson plans or grade papers instead of reading books to kids or ask them about their day. In addition, we can’t visit our friends, go to some events as we have training workshops or classes. We work long hours and the quality and quantity of time we spend with kids goes down. Teaching is a job that requires a lot of energy and teachers often feel emotional burnout. We are exhausted, tired to death and completely worn out by the end of the day to spend time with kids. What’s worse we can become short-tempered and lose patience Or we just choose to work from home to spend more time with children, but our working and personal time blur and we cannot distinguish when we work and when we “do parenting”. 

Challenge 2

Work suffers as a result of parenting responsibilities.

When you have a baby or a toddler or even an elder kid, it’s always difficult to work. Sleep deprivation, illnesses, kids’ naughtiness, kids’ events, etc.. All that affects your mood, emotional state and ability to work properly and be creative. If we have some events that intervene, for example, an important call at work and your son’s performance in the kindergarten, you have to choose, to juggle. Also, we often come late and leave earlier as we have to pick up kids. As we become tired, we have less effective, interesting, thoughtful and creative lessons. As children need an ear or some cuddle time sometimes, we don’t return tests or essays to students on time.

Solutions

This balancing often reminds me of jugglers. You have to juggle work and home and to decide what is more important at the moment and what can be put off. I can say that you need:

• To plan everything thoroughly;
• To have great time-management skills;
• To prioritize tasks and duties;
• To become more organized and disciplined.

Also, it’s quite helpful if colleagues understand you and become supportive of your parenting responsibilities; if they don’t judge you or look down, but try to help put when necessary.

From own experience I can say that being a parent made me a better teacher:

• Now I can look at different situations from different angles, I see both sides;
• I understand how big an impact we have on children;
• I’ve become a better listener;
• I’ve become so efficient with my time. I work every minute I’ve got, try to be as productive as I can, and when the time’s over, I’m done. I never take anything home unless it’s extremely urgent.

Every time when I have to juggle and choose between work and kids I remember that I’ll never get the time with children back 🙂