A guest blog by Kaitlin Cleary, Co-Founder, Team 624 Communications

After being at home every day with my two-year-old daughter and my husband for 10 plus weeks, we’ve found some new clarity on how we want our family life to operate going forward. Over the weekend, a conversation about egg muffins became an a-ha moment. For those who’ve don’t know about this Pinterest-inspired convenience breakfast, they are mini frittatas that you can make ahead of time for a week of busy mornings, everyone rushing to get ready for work and daycare. I casually mentioned that we hadn’t made them in a while, and we should make a batch. As the words left my mouth, I realized – we don’t need to eat breakfast quickly (or in the car) anymore. We’ve enjoyed eating three meals a day at our dinner table together as a family for almost three months. No one is commuting, we’re not doing daily pickups and dropoffs at daycare. There is simply more time. 

Another a-ha moment was on our daughter’s birthday. We had a big party planned to celebrate her turning two, which we were sad to cancel. But when the day came, we realized that she was probably happier spending time with just us rather than having a house full of people singing happy birthday to her (I still have video of her crying as we all sang to her at her first birthday party). As we sat there with her eating pizza and Face-timing with family, we also reflected on how much more exhausted and less present we’d be if we were entertaining for 50 people.

There is a silver lining to this virus that I think many families can relate to. We typically have (exhausting) play dates, work commitments and weekend plans with friends and family. We spend time researching 30 minute meals and efficient meal prep ideas, we take late-day phone calls from the car to maximize our workday before daycare pickup, we spend all weekend cleaning the mess that our hurricane of a schedule creates in our home. We enjoy only a few hours each weekday with our daughter. Now, we have almost 40 extra hours a week to watch her grow and change. While the stress of balancing two careers without childcare has been hard, we’ve found a way to share the load and make it work (though that is not the case for many women). We realize how much we can actually get done in fewer hours, and we’ve made the decision to reduce how many hours she’s in daycare for the future. We’re lucky to have this option, but it made me realize how much I wish it was the norm. Many families have no choice but to go along with the 40+ hour workweeks that our culture has deemed the “right” way to do things.

In our social circles and our workplaces, there seems to be a new level of acceptance of putting family first. The expectations on our time and energy have lowered. I don’t feel bad when I’m on the phone with a client and my child is yelling for more crackers in the background. We’re seeing how easily meetings can be phone calls, emails or video conferences. We’re all in the same boat, and the important work still gets done. Yes, we are missing the connection that physical proximity brings, but it’s giving us the chance to reset and learn which obligations fill us up, and which take away from our precious energy. It’s given us the mental space to re-evaluate our priorities and try to change our lives in any way we can to align with them. It’s not possible for everyone, but it’s my hope that American work culture can start to change, allowing people to more easily put family first.