How do you juggle WFH with a baby?
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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.
When they get a bit older, you can put them in a Bumbo and have them on your desk, if you can do it safely.
It's harder to work from home when they get mobile to be honest.
Even if I had no meetings, I can't concentrate on solo work with a wiggly/screamy thing on me or in the same room. One of the biggest benefits of WFH for me is avoiding the distractions of the office. Babies are FAR more distracting than anything at the office.
Infants aren't much of a distraction IMO. My cats were more distracting, at least until the baby got mobile. That stage is certainly more challenging.
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.
I am stipulating a two-parent household (but stipulating both parents work). If your focus is especially fragile (and I've worked with and admire many people form whom that's the case), a sitter makes this even more tenable. And, again, we're talking about WFH; we're not even addressing commute issues.
They lack the ability to metabolize their toddlers demands and the discipline to get into flow. Or maybe it's because their focus is especially fragile.
What would it take for you to not be able to work full time? Personally it was enough that I didn't get to sleep more than 4-5 hours every night, and I don't think a more "robust" focus would have helped in any way.
I am sure there are software development jobs I am not well suited for, and should not take. In fact, I can think of a bunch of them. That doesn't make them impossible jobs; just not good fits for me. Lots of parents handle this problem just fine. If you can't, make other plans, that's fine too.
But I think you are making a very bold assumption based on a sample of two, and also being quite dismissive of the challenges that other parents are facing.
Personally I believe I would have broken down mentally had I not spent the vast majority of the downtime on getting sleep myself.
If not, though... yeah, it's going to hurt somewhere.
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.
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.
It's as though society has become disinterested in supporting stay-at-home parenthood. My wife and I need both of our incomes to support ourselves and our future child, and neither of our jobs pay terribly! (Neither is a Bay Area tech salary by any means—but we also don't live in the Bay Area.)
Like is it just a given these days that you have a child, take maternity/paternity leave, and then put the child in a daycare? We would like to avoid that if at all possible.
A friend of mine made things work by having his wife quit her job and start her own small daycare at home, such that she could care for a couple of other children in addition to their own. But is something like that necessary for median-income families to support their children while avoiding daycare, these days? It certainly feels like it is, at least...
The main thing you can do, in my opinion, is be ruthlessly efficient at work, and find a way to deliver full time value with less than full time hours while working from home. Also squeeze in work at night, weekends, etc.
If you can't swing it financially, you have various choices -- Don't have kids, find higher-paying jobs, reduce expenses, or move closer to extended family/volunteers.
Nobody is "disinterested in supporting stay-at-home parenthood." On the contrary, the tax code is structured to give significant advantages to single-income (or at least lopsided-income) households over dual equivalent-income households.
I spent 110% of my take home salary for a nanny, and burned through my savings to get through the first few years without losing my job. I could not initially find any open spots in a daycare, except some that were so awful they seemed unsafe. It was a bit demoralizing having a doctorate in the sciences and realizing childcare costs over my full salary at that stage of my career.
Now he is old enough to be in public school, but public school is only a half day and closed about 4 months a year, so I still need to work from home half the day while parenting at the same time. It has been extremely difficult, but I have managed to do it.
One thing that has helped is to be ruthlessly focused on work during the few hours I have alone, so I can work less the rest of the time. Most people don't really do 100% focused work for their entire work hours... so the truth is you can do what is expected or more at a full time job in less than full time if you are good at what you do, and really focus.
I also re-married, and my new wife is awesome, and does some of the parenting, but is also a busy professional with a demanding job.
What else could I do? Quit my job and raise my son as a homeless person? Give him up for adoption? No- I was going to fight with everything I had, and try to succeed at both my career and as a parent. I think I am doing pretty well at both- I am an academic scientist and was able to publish useful research and earn tenure during the middle of all of these hard times when I was working reduced hours.
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.
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.
At any rate, I was just making a comment about the prevalence of multigenerational caregiving. I would contend: it was also not a major thing in '70s and '80s America (though it probably was much earlier in the 20th century, and in other countries).
When I did it, I got about 4 hours of work done during the 9 hours of my partner's work+commute and another 4 after my partner came home.
One indispensible tool was the combination of a standing desk and a front carrier. My baby slept well in that. Another trick was to take them to the park, tire them out and then they'd fall asleep in the stroller on the walk home. Park the stroller in the back yard and pull out your laptop and work in the back yard.
And one of the newborn naps should be a parent nap too, since you likely didn't get a solid 8...
Really the only answer is to hire a nanny/au pair for your working hours.
(most companies don't allow bringing your baby to the office, why would WFH be any different)
Articles like these are exactly why companies are reconsidering their remote work stance.
If you're older than I am, maybe you're familiar with cubicle culture norms I just didn't get exposed to in the late 90s, but from my perspective flexible schedules and evaluation by completed work has always been one of the perks of this field.
I can't speak to other fields where people commonly work from home, but ours is marked by a particular reverence for focus and flow, so I'm not inclined to expect the situations are much more difficult.