Working From Home With Small Children (The Honest Version)

My home office is a room at the back of the house with a desk, two monitors, a reasonable chair, and a corner where someone — not me — has decided to store a felt-tip collection, six board books, and a plastic dinosaur that I have stepped on in the dark twice.

The dinosaur is a stegosaurus. I know this because I have picked it up approximately forty times.

Working from home with small children is the kind of thing that sounds ideal in the abstract — no commute, proximity to the family, flexibility — and is, in practice, a specific and daily negotiation between two sets of needs that do not always acknowledge each other's existence.

The version I didn't expect

I had worked from home before Ellie for several years. I knew the shape of it: the self-discipline it required, the isolation that was sometimes useful and sometimes not, the particular silence of a house in which you are the only person and the work is therefore the only thing happening.

What I had not worked from home with was two small children and a partner who was also working. The shape changed completely.

The practical interference is real but manageable. Children interrupt. They interrupt with urgency and without regard for the phase of the work you are currently in. Sam has, on multiple occasions, opened the office door during video calls. He does not open it gently. He opens it with the confidence of someone who knows this room and considers it a shared resource. I have developed a kind of one-handed, mute-button competence that is not in any job description I have ever seen.

The deeper interference is the proximity to everything else. The working day happens in a house that is also a domestic environment, and the domestic environment makes itself known. The pile of things in the hallway is visible from the office door. The sound of the day's emotional weather carries through walls. The transition between working self and parenting self, which a commute previously handled through geography, now has to be handled internally.

This is the part I underestimated.

The transitions I've invented

I have built three transitions that I did not have before children.

The morning block. I start work at 7:30am, after the school run, and I work without interruption until 12. No social media, no email outside the block, no domestic tasks. This is the time when the cognitive work happens. Its reliability depends on both children being in school or nursery and is therefore imperfect during holidays, which are their own category of experience.

The closing ritual. I shut the laptop at 5pm, physically close it, and stand in the back doorway for about ten minutes. Outside. Not doing anything. This is the manufactured commute — the decompression interval between the working version of me and the version that needs to be useful from 5pm onwards. It is twelve minutes and it works disproportionately well.

The visible boundary for the children. We have a rule, negotiated with Ellie and enforced with Sam to the extent that Sam acknowledges rules: the office door closed means Dad is working and does not want to be interrupted except for blood or fire. The office door open means Dad is available. Ellie respects this with about 80% consistency, which is actually excellent for a five-year-old. Sam respects it with about 30% consistency, which is actually excellent for a two-year-old.

The advantage nobody talks about

There is something the working-from-home-with-children arrangement gives you that an office job cannot, and I find I think about this on the hard days to recalibrate.

I see them during the day. Not constantly — the closed-door rule exists for good reason — but during the lunch hour, during the natural transitions of the day, in the margins. I see Sam at nursery pick-up. I am present for the small things that happen outside school hours that an office-based parent would simply miss.

I wrote about being an older parent and the clarity of time — the heightened awareness of how quickly the stages pass. The working-from-home arrangement is, in spite of the stegosaurus, a daily delivery of the thing that awareness tells me matters.

The felt-tip situation

I have not moved the felt-tips. I keep meaning to and then not doing it.

There is probably a reason for this that I am not examining too carefully. A reason that has to do with the specific texture of a room that is shared, even when the door is closed, even when the work is happening, with the life that is going on in the rest of the house.

The stegosaurus I have moved. It is now on the windowsill.

I step around it deliberately now. It seemed like the right decision.