The New Normal for Working Parents?

It's my fifth year teaching Marketing Strategy at the University of Oregon but my first year teaching it from my home office. I, like so many working parents, are doing our best to survive and thrive as we navigate this new normal. The video below gives you a glimpse at what so many of us are doing.

My weekly Marketing class is 3 hours long and for 2 minutes during last night’s class, my kids joined. On the one side, my kids were super curious about why I’m teaching from home and on the other side, I think it’s important to show my students that I’m a real person too.

I’ve worked in business for 20 years and there has always been an immense amount of pressure on people, whether they’re parents or not, to separate work and life. It’s one of the topics I’ve really struggled with being a foreigner living and working in the US as the pressure to perform and not show the rest of your life feels greater here than in most countries. We say we prioritize family but unless you’re an entrepreneur, the struggle is real and the priorities feel like they compete each and every day, especially these days. Even as an entrepreneur, this is still tough.

One thing I’m truly feeling from the experience we’re all having with Covid-19 is that there is and should be a much greater human element to our work. We all have families, hobbies, struggles, etc and it’s okay, and even positive, to share some of those. Those are the things that make us all real, make us relatable, make us human.

I hope we collectively find that by this forced overlap of work and life, we embrace that the overlap can be a good thing. Although I certainly couldn’t have run my full 3 hour class with my kids in the room, I was proud to show my kids all the faces on the screen who are keen to learn what I know about marketing and I was just as proud to show my students that there’s more to me than my resume.

There will be many ways we are changed by this pandemic. I hope this will be one of them.

Keep doing what you’re doing. You are not alone.