For many working parents, fulfilling their personal and professional obligations is a tricky balancing act. Even if you like your job, you might be having trouble keeping up with your responsibilities at work because your parenting duties are so time-consuming.
For single parents and parents of children with disabilities, handling all of these responsibilities can be even more challenging.
Maybe you feel like you’re about crack under the pressures that come with being a working parent. You know that something has to change. If so, it’s time to talk to your supervisors about your parenting obligations and start implementing solutions that will allow you to attend to all of your responsibilities.
Here’s how to navigate these conversations in the workplace.
Meet with the Appropriate Parties
If you are ready to discuss your parenting obligations, you will want to schedule meetings with the appropriate individuals in your workplace. This could mean your boss, your manager or supervisor, specific coworkers, or individuals from your company’s human resources department.
It’s best to kick off these conversations in private. Ensure that you have plenty of time to share your situation and discuss solutions.
Be Specific About Your Needs
When you’re talking about your parenting obligations, you will need to be specific. Simply saying that you’re very busy with family responsibilities outside of work won’t necessarily help you design workable solutions.
Instead, talk about your needs in specific terms. For instance, you might have to alter your schedule to handle drop-offs or pickups at your child’s school, or you may want to work from home on certain days. Laying out the details in your meeting will help you and your supervisors come up with solutions.
Suggest Solutions
Don’t rely entirely on your supervisors to suggest solutions. It’s a good idea to be proactive about offering possible solutions. Share a couple of ideas you have that might help you strike a better work-life balance without sacrificing your performance at work.
However, be open to taking suggestions from your supervisors as well. They might have some great ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily have come up with on your own. Ideally, you should be able to agree on a few potential solutions that you can start implementing.
Talk to Your Direct Reports and Coworkers
Once you have decided on a course of action with your supervisors, you may need to discuss these changes with other people at your workplace, too.
For instance, if you have any direct reports who could be affected by these scheduling or process changes, you’ll want to let them know about the upcoming changes early on. Keep everyone informed so that no one feels out of the loop. That way, you can keep projects running smoothly. Furthermore, you may want to talk to some of your coworkers, especially if you collaborate with them often.
Share Feedback and Progress Updates
It’s just as important to share your feedback once you’ve started testing out some changes to your schedule, workload, or management approach. Your supervisors will want to know if you’re seeing improvements.
You may want to schedule a future check-in a few weeks after your first initial meeting, or a month or so after implementing a specific change. That way, if you need to tweak your plan, you can do so. What if a particular change hasn’t benefitted you much at all? You can talk to your supervisors about switching directions and trying something entirely new instead.
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Are you struggling to balance work with parenting? Talking to a therapist can help. Reach out to us today to discuss your options for scheduling your first session for postpartum counseling or parent therapy.