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Statistics for Sustainable Development > Blog > Juggling life between motherhood, home schooling and work during the Covid-19 lockdown
Juggling life between motherhood, home schooling and work during the Covid-19 lockdown
I am a mother of 5 children, whose ages range between 4 and 8 years old. In March 2020, Uganda went into full lockdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak. This meant that schools, and other institutions, closed as a way of containing the spread of the virus. Children had to study at home for their safety, and parents had to stay at home too. All of this happened in a very short space of time, and as parents, we had to reorganise our lives to create conducive spaces for everyone in the household, and to ensure that we remained productive.
To help us manage, we came up with several ideas, including creating timetables for different daily activities for us to partake in, synchronised mealtimes which would run for about 30-60 minutes, plus we would ensure that the young ones had some snacks that would see them through the day. Additionally, we organised workstations to accommodate us, which were usually selected on a first come first served basis (a trick that would guarantee that everyone organised themselves quickly to ensure that they didn’t get the worst workstations for the day!).
Image 1: some easy-to-grab snacks available throughout the day
After the morning meals, the young ones had two hours of schoolwork that the schools were sending to the parents. This meant that us parents would also have these two hours of quiet, uninterrupted time to get some work done before the little ones had a break. The break would run over lunch, and during this time, we would turn into teachers to look through the work completed, guide on difficult tasks and set up the children’s second part of the day’s work, which would last for another two hours in the afternoon. The long break was mostly filled with the children catching up on some small household chores, like cleaning utensils, sweeping up, weeding flowers and playing games. The chores were mostly aimed at keeping the noise created by the little ones down for some extra time for us parents to be able to work.