Synchronisity – how do you do it?
posted Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Picture this scene:
Three ‘working mothers’ conduct a moderation meeting at a University. They find a family friendly room which is large and spacious and where they can close the door. A friendly admin worker offers paper, highlighter pens, chalk and books for the children to play with.
One mum supervises her 2 year old with craft and drawing while the other mum gets her 6 year old involved in working with the 2 year old…meanwhile the working mums talk about the various marking criteria for the students’ work they need to grade…the baby cries and the other mum who doesn’t have her children here that day, helps the 2 year old’s mum out by rocking the baby to sleep in the pram while they continue to compare essays and marking criteria. Meanwhile the 2 year old and 6 year old have snack time, draw on the board, are taken to the toilet and play with toys – while the two mothers edit and comment over the upcoming exam paper. One mum pops out to do some photocopying while the other mum supervises the kids. Meanwhile the baby wakes up and has his bottle and nappy changed. Two hours later the meeting work is done, the children have had a nice time and everyone is pretty happy.
But what I really want to know (as you have probably guessed I was one of the ‘working mums’ at this meeting) if you think that in this time period were we doing paid work or family work? It seems quite obvious from reading the scenario that we were doing both, simulatenously in what might seem like a messy, overlapping but nonetheless effective way. This idea of synchronised time (observed by academic Alison Morehead) is evidently what many mothers do. Yet, most of the time use studies ask us to deliniate employment tasks from family or domestic tasks by putting our ‘time spent’ doing these tasks into different boxes or compartments.
What I would love to know is whether you have a tale to tell about synchronising your time – when you did both job and family work at the same time???
I’m sure its nothing new, just under-reported.
I took newborns to jobs at 2 weeks and 1 week – the latter being a workshop for the RTA, although most of that was work, stop to feed baby, then work again rather than a fully integrated approach.
Day to day, I send emails and answer phone calls while wrangling the three of them – refereeing the disputes, giving cuddles and so on. I find the 2yr old pretty hard to work with, but the other two are not too bad. I get very annoyed when people consider it unprofessional to be able to hear children in the background. Such a narrow view of how people work.
Ariane said this on October 5th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I do this all the time, since I’m on call from M-F including nights. I answer phone calls when I’m with my daughter and sometimes I take her to work with me if I have to go in.
This is not new; I grew up listening to my father’s phone calls and trailing after him in the hospital. I suspect that latter was more to humor my insistence that I was going to be a nurse (my original plan) than because it was his turn to watch me; he never took that kind of turn. But I do know that I saw a lot more of my dad than I would have if he hadn’t mixed work and family life, and I’m glad he did.
Jay said this on October 6th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I’ve taken my kids into the office with me a couple of times during school holidays, just for an hour or thereabouts to do stuff that couldn’t be done from home. The time I took all 3 with me was not terribly relaxing – my eldest (12) seems to be incapable of amusing himself without irritating the other two but when it was just Tom (8) and Cait (10) they quietly played DS games while I worked.
I wasn’t in paid work when the kids were younger but I did volunteer work – preschool enrollments officer and school uniform shop treasurer – with toddlers underfoot. Of course when you’re ringing someone to offer them a place at preschool they’re unlikely to be put out by hearing your kids in the background
mimbles said this on October 6th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
I used to have to drop in to finish research tasks or admin tasks from time to time after I picked my son up from day care. So I’d have a snack for him, sit him down with a game or book or put him in front of the ABC kids website and do what I had to. There were also times when I was working (endnoting, emailing, responding to students, etc) and waiting on hold on the phone for doctors, centrelink, etc that were all parenting-related. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do this kind of thing. I also used to do marking while rocking the baby in the pusher or do research reading while breastfeeding. How else can a person get stuff done?
Pen said this on October 8th, 2009 at 11:45 am
I’m sure I have hundreds of billable hours clocked over the past five years where I had a baby lying across my lap on a boppy pillow sleeping or nursing.
I have also at times when trying to get a few e-mails answered while I have kids crawling all over me opened one browser for e-mails and next to it another one with Sesame Street videos playing.
Annie @ PhD in Parenting said this on November 28th, 2009 at 12:48 pm