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Comment by fermigier | Hacker News Reader

Not a single mention of "child" or "children" in the text. Nor in this discussion so far.

I'm wondering how many of the people advocating working at home have children and how they deal with them.

I work at home since July, have 3 boys aged 4, 6, and 8. We homeschool. I have an office in my basement that's about the most isolated place in the house. They come see me a few times each day but for the most part it's not a problem at all, which is a lot less of a problem than I thought it was going to be. Maybe it's easier because we have multiple and they keep each other busy, I dunno.

Unrelated bonus - I've gone from filling up my car about once a week to about once a month, have lost 10 pounds, and went from ~$60 for lunch per week to basically $10 or so.

edit: it's a globally distributed team, so no matter what time there's folks working on something. This means that what used to be my old "coffee and HN time" in the morning before going to the office has become "go ahead and get stuff done" time. I go running mid-day. The whole schedule just gets a lot more flexible in a pretty nice way.

I have 3. When I first started working from home, we set some ground rules, which mostly amount to "Be quiet in here." and "I might boot you out of my office, just say OK and go.", and "If my headset is on, and I am talking, do not interrupt."

It actually has been great. Taking a break to talk to a child is refreshing. Being able to be a parent more than just after dinner is good for everyone involved. And they get to see what I do.

It helps if your entire company is remote - then everyone understands the balancing that happens between family and work.At my company, it is common to step away from your desk to go to a child's activity, help them with something, or just go play with your kids. And when babies cry or toddlers interrupt conference calls, people just laugh. We all understand what it is like to work remotely, and our leadership care about the work getting done, not the schedule you keep.

I will admit that it would be harder to work for the kind of place where remote worker are still expected to sit in their desks from 9-5, lurking on some always-on hangout/slack/whatever. If kids are involved, I would skip that kind of team and look for people who value full flexibility in remote work, not just in location.

Great question. Another section of the book we need to update. We have quite a few folks with kids (maybe half?) and a 14 week parental leave when you have a kid or adopt a kid. We've learned a decent amount on making kids and working at home a good experience.

Different things work for different people - here's how it worked for me

I started working at home when my son was born (he's 25 now) ... my partner worked mornings ... what worked for us wasfor me to get up and spend the morning with my son (and later daughter) at 11 when he went down to nap I started work, my partner got home about the time he woke, I worked thru to 7 or 8ish. I arranged child care for the 1 day a week I had to go to work (50 miles away)

Later when they started pre-school and then school I continued to do the morning up and away process

This worked great for us, YMMV

I work from home and drop my 8-month-old off at daycare in the morning.

Because I'm a bit of a night-owl, though, and daycare ends, I end up working for about 30-60 minutes with her in the room. It's a little unpredictable, but people understand.

I'm glad you said that. I worked from home frequently when my son was 1-2 years old. Now he's 4, and forget about it... there's no way he could stay away from dada all day!

Are you asking about watching children while you work?

I would imagine most would go to daycare during the work week (our 1 year old does on days when my wife works).

Not necessarily watching children, but having them around can be in my own experience a bit disturbing, specially when you're living in an apartment and when they are between 1 and 5.

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