As a young family, sometimes balancing your life feels like a struggle. You and your partner would wish to focus on your careers, but you also have idealistic notions of spending adequate time in raising your children.
In truth, there shouldn’t be a conflict between family and career as both can be given enough attention. There are just some points in your life where you have to carefully consider your options.
Consider where you live
If possible, choose a property near your workplace. The time for commute would be lessened. You could also opt for a place that is free from traffic congestion. It could be the case that the nearer housing areas would have a higher volume of vehicles on the streets, and you’d end up wasting time in traffic.
But where you live is not just important for the time you will be saving. It also determines whether the environment that constantly surrounds you would support the life you want. In this case, you might want to opt for a longer commute if you could just take an early morning jog or a quiet walk around the neighborhood.
You could either buy land and customize your home design or find a package that offers both house and land. Choose a place that would allow you to enjoy the lifestyle you want so that when you’re home, you can fully relax from your work.
Don’t overwork
Understand your work responsibilities and your personal limits. Many people think that they need to work hard to achieve their goals immediately. And when they get their goals, they would then have the time to spend with their children. But you could not know when you will exactly achieve your goals. By that time, your children might have grown up, possibly even resentful that they had not been your priority.
Maintain your health so you could do more. Your health should never be sacrificed for meager overtime pay. Think that when you get sick, you will be losing money, so the one you earned while sacrificing your body will simply be canceled out.
Spending long hours on your work doesn’t necessarily mean you are productive. In fact, it could mean the opposite. The attention span of a person has its limits. Even if you force yourself to concentrate on something and cancel your breaks, your mind will automatically wander elsewhere. Don’t push yourself when you feel that you have reached your limits. Take a long break to refresh your mind.
Encourage your children to spend their time productively
Parenting is not just entirely about you. In fact, it’s mainly about your children and how they could fully develop with your guidance. Your role isn’t to monitor them all the time. Rather, your role is to guide them while they explore the world. They would feel more confident in life if they had the liberty to act independently while they were still young, with the knowledge that you were there supporting them.
So that you’re not constantly worried about the time you can’t be with your children, encourage them to find hobbies that would occupy them. Support their interests in music, a sport, or even a club where they could spend time with their peers.
Expose your children to your work
Children, especially at an age where they are most impressionable, would only understand your absence if they don’t exactly know what you are doing when you’re not in their sight. It would be good to show them your workplace and what you do. They will have an idea in their mind whenever you inform them that you have to go to work. Unlike the complicated communications among adults, children could actually understand you better if you show them something.
Understandably, there are jobs where you couldn’t bring your child with you. In this case, try to explain to them what you do, in terms that they would understand.
Know your priorities when you set your schedules
There are important gatherings at work that you couldn’t miss. There are crucial networking opportunities. But don’t overdo it. You have to assess your gains in attending events versus your gains in spending time with your family relaxing. This goes the same for your time out with friends or time for yourself. It’s also crucial that you have a time when you can just forget about your responsibilities at work or as a parent and devote it to your interests.
Career and family should never be considered as opposing factors in our lives. They could harmoniously coexist if, from the start, we have a clear idea of what we want our lives to be. The choices we make would easily make sense because we know that our decision will have to be towards the realization of this idea.
