[HN Gopher] How do you juggle WFH with a baby?
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How do you juggle WFH with a baby?
Author : remoteworkprep
Score : 21 points
Date : 2024-11-07 21:06 UTC (5 days ago)
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| xrd wrote:
| Feels like this only works if your bosses (your spouse and
| employer) are willing to acknowledge the realities of WFH with a
| baby. Otherwise, forget it.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The first six months are by far the most difficult. Once you
| can get the baby on a consistent sleep schedule, you can start
| to plan around that. Granted, you won't have time for much else
| in the world but you also won't be at risk of being fired.
|
| The real crime here is that maternity/paternity leave is far
| too short and it seems that most employers simply look the
| other way for the first year in observance of that fact.
| tobinfricke wrote:
| I'm sure that some people are able to make it work, but in
| general the answer is: you don't. Taking care of a baby is a full
| time job in and of itself, associated with frequent interruptions
| and sleep deprivation.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| FWIW it's not impossible, but it always requires some external
| help, esp. with single parents: friends doing your dishes when
| they visit, a nanny once-twice a week, etc, etc. Otherwise it's
| a highway to burnout and depression.
| tptacek wrote:
| People do it all the time. We did it. In our industry, in two-
| tech-worker families, there's a norm of staggered parental
| leave. Contrary to a lot of popular opinion, taking care of an
| infants or toddler isn't a full time job. In fact, even if
| you're especially attentive, there are long, long stretches of
| downtime.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Taking care of a newborn baby is absolutely full-time job. I
| don't know how to interpret "we did it as two full-time tech
| workers" other than "we grifted our employers by getting paid
| full-time to work part-time and we juggled having a baby at
| home."
|
| I'm as pro-natal as they come, but a newborn should have your
| full undivided attention.
| tptacek wrote:
| We raised two. They turned out great. It was not a full-
| time job.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > I'm as pro-natal as they come, but a newborn should have
| your full undivided attention.
|
| Exactly - the attention it takes has to come out of
| SOMETHING - whether it is your work or health or the child.
| You can see the difference between kids that have full
| undivided attention of someone who cares a lot about them
| (family members or a great paid caretaker) versus ones who
| are physically near parents but ignored (since the parent
| is looking at a screen focusing on work) versus ones who
| have been distracted by some electronic stimulant versus
| ones who have been outsourced to daycare where the
| caretaker ratio means babies don't get full attention.
|
| But even leaving aside what's best for the child, I think
| it's about getting the most out of your own parental
| experience. You only get so much time with your children.
| That time goes away in a blink. Be there for them as much
| as you can, and make the best of it. Making it "just work"
| with less than that may be something you end up regretting
| later.
| zimzam wrote:
| Parental leave is definitionally _not working_.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's also _temporary_.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| By the phrase "full time job", most people here seem to mean
| you can't do anything else substantial on a particular day
| that you're the main carer for a baby. Not that this
| necessarily takes up many years (as, indeed, not all full
| time jobs do). Unless I misunderstood, it seems you comment
| doesn't substantially disagree with the one you're replying
| to; it just quibbles pointlessly over definitions.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes, we're not disagreeing about semantics, we're
| disagreeing in substance. You can provide excellent care
| for an infant and toddler while delivering knowledge work
| (including software development) at competitive levels
| while working from home.
| advantager wrote:
| Maybe not your infant, but this is certainly not any sort of
| universal truth. Possibly you could argue that physically
| attending to the infant themselves is not a full time job,
| but all of the associated tasks in maintaining any sort of
| functional environment (food, dishes, laundry, etc. etc.) is,
| at least to me, at least a 9-5 job.
|
| Our son demanded by wailing or screaming to be held during
| all waking until at least 12 months, including sleeping for
| more than 10 minutes alone. I worked from home during this
| period and I cannot fathom having been at home alone with him
| and attending any meeting or focusing on a task in a
| realistically productive way.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You take parental leave or your wife/husband does. How do you
| go into work and manage a baby at home. You don't.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is an article about working from home.
| hug wrote:
| The point that people are trying to make is that if you are
| busy taking care of a baby at home you are not working, or
| at least not working at the same level of capacity or in
| the same fashion as as you would if you were not looking
| after a baby... And if you're not working when you're at
| home, you're not working from home. You're just home. Most
| countries in the world would call that parental leave.
|
| Is it possible that we can change workplace expectations to
| remove synchronous communication & work in such a way that
| these things _aren 't_ roadblocks? Probably, and I would
| argue that we should.
|
| Is that the current way of the world at the vast majority
| of employers? Not even nearly.
| tptacek wrote:
| I am responding to a comment pointing out the
| untenability of going to a workplace while also taking
| care of a kid, which is specifically not what the article
| is about.
| chgs wrote:
| I've worked for bike longer than my kids have been alive,
| they're in high school now.
|
| If the house burns down then sure, I'll stop work, but day
| to day I start work when I start and finish when I finish.
| I don't do a half assed job trying to do a home job and a
| work job at the same time.
| higgins wrote:
| When I learned juggling it was years before I was confident
| enough to juggle babies
| jmfldn wrote:
| Impossible without either harming your own wellbeing, the child's
| or both. And I suspect the quality of your work, even if you
| somehow manage to somehow pull it off, would be very badly
| affected. Caring for young children, let alone babies is an
| intense, full time job.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you have a spouse/partner/SO who is willing to be the
| fulltime caregiver while you're "at work", you can make it
| work, just like it would work if you were at the office.
|
| If not, though... yeah, it's going to hurt somewhere.
| dboreham wrote:
| Long time ago but I found you can write quite a bit of code with
| a baby balanced on your lap late at night.
| tptacek wrote:
| I did my first startup when I was ~22 years old and still
| roughly on my teenage-year "sleep till noon, up till 4"
| schedule, which actually worked somewhat well (I want to be
| careful with what I say here because I was in a bunch of ways a
| total fuckup of a husband at the time) --- when the boy woke
| up, I was awake to take care of him. It did not cost me any
| productivity (in fact, it probably snapped me out of a bunch of
| unproductive A.D.D. spells.)
| gehsty wrote:
| Living in abject chaos and constantly being surprised how little
| sleep you actually need.
| fHr wrote:
| You don't and this is one of the reasons why we who can work and
| hustle as hard as in the office from anywhere have to RTO
| ultimately.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| You don't. You need a good partner who is going to support you
| during the time you are going to take care of the baby.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The reality is that raising a baby requires full time attention
| of one person and really even more than what one person can give.
| Our social and economic systems have not evolved to recognize
| this reality and support it properly. Even with one person full
| time, you do need help to catch up on chores or to just take a
| break or to keep yourself in a good mental state. Otherwise, you
| aren't going to be able to give what is needed. Anything less,
| and you are _definitely_ dropping the ball SOMEWHERE to make it
| work - you're either hurting your own health or depriving your
| child of parenting /attention or whatever else. There's no
| shortcut and I simply do not believe anyone says everyone just
| makes it work. Sorry they only do that by providing a reduced
| amount of parental attention to their baby, full stop.
| tptacek wrote:
| No it doesn't. That wasn't a norm historically and it's not a
| reality for probably _most_ working families.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > That wasn't a norm historically and it's not a reality for
| probably most working families.
|
| The norm historically is that people lived in homes with
| extended family like grandparents. There were always multiple
| people taking care of young children. I get that you want to
| defend your own parenting experience, but I think you are
| ignoring what you left on the table.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think that's been true in the United States for a
| very long time. In fact, multigenerational households are
| at a high _now_ , from a low over 50 years ago.
| 2024user wrote:
| Is this from the view of a single parent?
|
| Really the only answer is to hire a nanny/au pair for your
| working hours.
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