For the next few weeks, I’ll be home 5 days a week with my son while my husband goes to work and my daughter to daycare. Here’s the challenge: my son will be doing third grade with a full schedule of alternating synchronous lessons and offline activities. Meanwhile, I’ll be teaching lessons, recording videos, and meeting with colleagues at set times. My son will have to become largely independent. He’s capable of this, but it still makes me feel sad to leave him alone while I work elsewhere in the house.

He started on Thursday, and I decided that for the first few days I’d try to stay physically near him, on my own laptop across the dining room table. I’m working on schedules and content creation but haven’t started live lessons yet (the schools want the kids to get used to their classroom teacher’s remote learning schedule before adding in specials and band/orchestra). So theoretically, I should be able to help my son with his first days of learning while gradually coaching him to become more independent.

That was my plan, but things did not go too well on Thursday. I may not have been teaching or meeting live, but the work I was doing still took a lot of brainpower (have you ever tried finding common windows of time within 10 different classroom teachers’ schedules?). So every time my son needed me, when he wanted help spelling a word, or remembering a direction his teacher had given him, I really struggled with the interruption. I had the best intentions to be patient and calm, but it was HARD. Later, he and I talked about how the first day went, and I said, “Here’s something you should know about your mom. I am very bad at doing two things at once. It’s just not a strength of mine.”

It made me think: is multitasking a superpower these days? While so many of us are working from home and caring for others in the same space, acting as a teaching assistant to our children while fulfilling all our usual work expectations, are those of us who are poor multitaskers at a disadvantage?

It feels a bit unfair. For years, productivity gurus told us that it was better to focus and give our full attention to one thing at a time. Turn off email notifications! Close your office door! That’s how you think deeply and creatively. That’s how you get the project done well and efficiently.

And that’s how I’ve trained myself to work: deeply and creatively. But now I’m realizing that mindset doesn’t work in my current situation. If I’m juggling two active situations, I can’t go as deep. Things may take longer. I’m working against my own nature and preferences, and that’s hard.

But I have to adapt, at least temporarily. Because my son might just be one kid, balanced against my full classroom of kids, but he’s MY kid. It’s important for me to help him. It’s important for me to keep his school day calm and empowering, focused on the excitement of learning. That’s the emotional work that his teacher would typically do. That’s the missing piece that’s been left in the laps of working parents in our current situation. (This is no one’s fault; we’re all doing the best we can.)

Here are some tips I’ve gleaned from other working parents:

1. Set up your child’s browser in the morning with all the tabs open that he’ll need that day. He can close them down one at a time as he completes each task.
2. Write out the schedule so it’s clear and visible. I put Edwin’s on a whiteboard so that he can glance up at it without toggling to another tab. I may also start putting my own schedule on there.
3. Set alarms for a few minutes before each next meet starts. This will be especially important if I can’t be there to remind him.
4. Come up with a signal that means you can’t be interrupted except in an emergency– for example, if we put our headphones on.

Eventually, I will also ask for help. My mother-in-law can be here physically, and my parents are eager to help virtually (through a separate Zoom screen) when things are extra-tough. I’m hoping both Edwin and I can settle into more of a routine next week.

(Best part of our new routine: listening to Harry Potter audiobooks while we eat lunch together.)

PS– Is anyone else having trouble seeing the title for each post on this site? This started for me last week, but before I go deep on fixing it, I wanted to see if others noticed the same thing.