Social and Digital Change Group

We’re parents and carers too!

Issued on: Fri, 06 Nov 2020

By: Lavinia Hirsu

What is it like to be a parent while working at a university from home? How do things change when all of a sudden you become a carer and you must continue with all your professional commitments? In the current climate of the COVID-19 health crisis, university staff have found themselves in an unprecedented scenario: many have had to work from home trying to strike a balance between personal or family time and work. Under restrictions of physical distancing, members of staff have had to find creative solutions to look after their children, the elderly members of their families, neighbours, and other members of their immediate communities.  All these efforts and energy were deployed while the university maintained its doors open and aimed to support students and provide the same high-quality services. The collapse of all these roles into one and the same space of ‘home’ has been quite challenging.  

 Many members of staff did not have the space and time to share their experiences of the past few months. For this reason, the Digital Society and Economy group, represented by Dr. Lavinia Hirsu with the help of Dr. Mark Wong and Bishakha Chaudhury organised three online sessions (September 4, 11, 21, 2020). These meetings were ‘safe spaces’ for sharing experiences and strategies that helped attendees cope with and move forward during this difficult period. 

 In this blog post, we would like to share our collective experiences and observations not only to record what many of us have been through, but to reach out to those members of staff who wanted to participate in these sessions and couldn’t due to time, work, parenting and caring commitments. In our sessions, we focussed on four main questions and the observations shared from the meetings are clustered below around these questions: 

 

What are the challenges that university staff have experienced over the past few months? 

Caught between family and work, many university staff members felt a sense of guilt in allocating their time to tasks: having to spend quality time with children and other family members while engaging with regular and new work-related tasks. However, no matter how well we tried to balance these, the sense of missing out either or work or on family time has been continuously present.  

Because family and work have merged into the same space, work days have  extended significantly and switching off from work became really difficult. With children staying at home during the lockdown, parents felt the pressure to homeschool and they had not only to adapt their work to homeworking, but also to add extra support for helping children with their own learning. In this environment, the hardest aspect was to keep up with work-related activities that have no immediate deadlines. While Zoom meetings can be easily added to one’s calendar, working on research, writing or any other long-term project has been very difficult to schedule because other pressing matters always seem to override any long-term plans. With so many competing demands and with the added dimension of pastoral care for students and other peer colleagues, staff have experienced a significant increase in their workload, alongside a rollercoaster of feelings of anxiety, frustration, doubt, and uncertainty. 

Living in the same space with the rest of the family meant that sometimes not everyone had their own space. Sharing a flat or house with everyone in the family for extended periods of time meant little privacy or space for one’s own work. Work-related interruptions had become recurrent and catering to everyone’s needs in the family has been challenging. Even in families with older children, the pandemic affected everyone emotionally and some of our participants remarked that it had been very difficult to keep down ‘noise levels’ in the home. In cases where staff members had to move in with parents to support them, all daily routines doubled, thus leading to fatigue (e.g., lunch time was divided between preparing lunch for oneself and preparing lunch for the family member under one’s care). 

While the pandemic has put significant pressure on families living under the same roof; in a few cases, it has also led to the separation of family members. Some staff had to leave their children and partners and to self-isolate with their parents who needed personal assistance. Some of us had to adapt and settle into new routines with little sleep and increased assistance time dedicated to the elderly in our families. 

In the distribution of caring roles, female university staff indicated that they had taken heavier loads of family-related work (e.g., cooking, scheduling activities for the children, cleaning the house), particularly if male partners worked in the academia as well. However, this picture was more complex in the case of families who had to separate: the ongoing care of the elderly was taken over by women, while male partners stayed home with the children.  

 

What strategies have supported university staff in overcoming challenges and moving forward?  

While the first few weeks from the onset of the pandemic have been quite hectic, with time university staff have developed strategies that helped them better manage their time and roles: 

• setting time intervals for specific activities: e.g.. evening time is family time although settling in a routine has been very difficult with so many changes happening over the past few months;  
• for parents who were already home schooling their children, this period has been less disruptive because patterns of work-school-family remained quite stable and unchanged; 

• coordinating work-related calls/online meetings with children’s screen watching time;   
• replacing a strict schedule with a more flexible one based on blocks of activities arranged depending on work demands and family needs: play time, work time, meals, outside time, etc.;  
• not wasting time with the commute meant more time spent with the family and for work;
• finishing work meetings on time to allow for catching up on essentials such as grabbing a glass of water, food, a bathroom break, checking on family members;  
• being generous with oneself and recognising that we can only be in partial control of the situation. As carers, we too need time for ourselves! 

• dressing up for work to set a different tone to the work-related activities and to make the experience of the ‘office’ in the home a bit more real.  

 

What has been the role of the digital in everyday experiences during the pandemic? 

Living and working at home with the family meant more hands on digital devices and less bandwidth. While experiences varied depending on the age of the children, many university staff felt that children’s screen time increased and, with it, access to digital work was sometimes affected by the quality of the online connection. 

The question of screen time was answered by some of us with different solutions from the beginning of the pandemic up to present. If at the beginning, some university staff decided to control screen time and tried to settle into a routine, with the passing of weeks, this close monitoring changed and parents had to build more flexibility in their schedules, allowing more screen time when online professional work had to be given priority. 

However, it is important to note that the experience of the digital had also led to some positive outcomes: e.g. parents scheduling FaceTime with other family members. These online meetings became a substitute for the face-to-face childcare support, a kind of ‘outsourced work’ that family members offered. From uncles who helped with math to grandmas chatting with their grandchildren about their day, online meetings have provided a much needed breathing space for parents. The growing number of online resources, from school-mandated homework to online PE classes, arts and crafts tutorials, etc., gave parents a wide (sometimes even too wide) range of educational materials to share with their children. 

While connecting more became a solution for some families, intentional disconnecting from devices was a strategy for coping with the overall situation. Walks in nature became one of the most recurrent activities for many families. Because the increase in screen time was recognised as a potential source of fatigue and stress, going out and engaging in physical exercise worked as a balancing activity. The slow traffic also meant walking in quieter and less polluted cities.  

 

How would university staff be supported in the near future in the context where the pandemic is likely to have significant disruptive effects on daily activities? 

Looking ahead, many university staff are worried about the ‘scenario’ in which we’ll move next. With a lot of uncertainty ahead, university staff are afraid that they will have very little notice and resources to plan for: children falling ill and being sent home, family members needing to be shielded without professional support available, the pressure for work to resume as normally as possible although it is evident that the pressure points caused by the pandemic have not disappeared with the current second wave of infections underway. University staff also noted that institutional support and acknowledgement of the ‘working conditions’ in which we find ourselves are critical and should continue. 

Besides anxieties though, members of staff also hoped that we could keep and build on some of the positive outcomes of the pandemic such as the flexibility of working from home, the possibility of having a lunch with the family outside, the walks and the link with nature that many of us developed over the past few weeks and months, as well as a more compassionate transformative approach to our work in the university that takes account of people’s lives in relation to their university roles.  

From the many emails we received from colleagues in the university, we are aware that we all need this critical space to share and reflect on what we’re all going through at the moment. Yet, to come together, we need valuable time which, at the moment, is at a premium. For many of us who have multiple roles and duties at home and in the university, this time for ‘us’ is difficult to carve. If you are reading this post, we would like to thank you for all your hard work, both personal and professional!  

 
Resource: If you or one of your family members need support with independent living, please access https://www.sdsscotland.org.uk/ 

 

 

 

 

IN RESPONSE TO "WE’RE PARENTS AND CARERS TOO"

Issued on: Wed, 25 Nov 2020

We’re very grateful that colleagues in the university have responded to our blog post, “We’re parents and carers too!” We would like to share here one comment we have received that adds to our blog another important experience that might resonate with many colleagues in the university:

 

“I just read your blog post about the parenting/pandemic issues. But there is one point I’d like to make, which is absolutely not a criticism of anyone, just my own experience. A lot of the discussion about parents, both in the University and in media more broadly, seems quite often to be focused on parents of school aged children and the challenges of home schooling.

I have an 18-month old and I had just returned from maternity leave when lockdown happened, when my child was 10/11 months. He finally started nursery at 15 months and those 2 days a week are now a real breather for me and my husband. Or in other words, the days we get the most work done. But the sort of support and guidance for dealing with this situation with smaller children at home is not really there, I feel. I cannot plop him in front of TV all day, nor can I give him tasks to do independently as he is too small for that. So instead what is happening is literally all awake-time is spent between work, caring, housework, leaving no time for myself. I’m also still breastfeeding, and that is completely impossible to stop with me having no way of separating myself from the home for hours at a time, unlike if I was in an office, so also night time is affected. Positively, breastfeeding seems to have become my ‘creative thinking time’. All annual leave goes toward caring responsibilities. It is awfully draining. I think the University is giving the right messages that people should be taking their annual leave to recharge, but not necessarily acknowledging that for many there is no opportunity to recharge within that time because there is ‘nowhere to send your children’ e.g. for playtime, so instead parents/other carers are still just constantly ‘on’, whether at work or not.

[…] the reality in these strange times, doing my job seems to have become the ‘getting a breather’ in the mundaneness of life – I’ve got lots of exciting things going on at work, and it’s almost like the only ‘normal’ thing in life: albeit virtual, I can at least feel like I get out of the house, unlike in my ‘family life’ where I am largely stuck in the house doing the same stuff over and over again (I think the lack of a support network from friends and family, and especially being able to go indoors with your/other people’s kids is really difficult now after such a long time of this). […]