As a part of the Belong and Grow (BAG) week the Athena SWAN team hosted a ‘Parenting through lockdown’ session via Zoom. This was an open session to anyone who is juggling work and parenting during the coronavirus lockdown.
The session was attended by 10 female members of staff with children ranging from 10 months to 16 year old. It was quite needed time out from working or parenting; time for reflecting with some good peer support!
Questions and themes discussed over the session were:
- How are you?
- What’s your situation? How many children do you have, how old are they, are you home schooling, do you have a partner; do they work?
- What’s been the highlight or the best moment during the lockdown?
- Self-care; what keeps you going?
- What have you learned about yourself and your family during this lockdown? The introduction to this question, ‘Do what you can’; the difference between the expectations and reality. (Who sets the expectations in your life; yourself, your partner, your boss, your children, your children’s teacher/School, your parents and so on).
The most fruitful dialogue was around the topics ‘what keeps you going’ and ‘do what you can’; the difference between the expectations and reality. As for ‘what keeps you going’ the most typical answer was exercise (walks with family, bike rides, running, walking the dog, yoga), chocolate (and other treats) as well as DIY/home improvement.
‘Do what you can’ is the tricky one as we want to achieve and do well in all areas; work, parenting, relationship and so on. It might be difficult to lower the expectations and to realise, that especially now, in these weird times ‘good enough is good enough’ but it really does make a difference in well-being and mental health!
As a good summary at the end, one of the participants said that it is important to ‘Live now’ as we are ‘not going to get this time back, so lower the bar and let go ’. Wise words!
If you didn’t get a chance to take part to this session and you want to share your stories and experiences with the Athena SWAN team then please email: athenaswan@kent.ac.uk