Practical Childcare Tips for Parents Working One Day Shift and One Night Shift
The coffee pot’s still gurgling when I fumble my work keys off the entryway hook at 6:15 a.m. My husband, Sam, trundles in the door 30 seconds later, scrub cap still crumpled in his jacket pocket, coming off a 12-hour night shift at the local hospital. Our 7-year-old, Lila, pads out behind him, sock slipping down her ankle, holding a crumpled permission slip for the field trip that’s due today. “I can’t find my glitter glue,” she says, right as our beagle trots past carrying a half-chewed corner of Lila’s math homework. I glance at Sam, who’s already blinking back yawns, and for half a second we both just stare.
We’ve worked opposite shifts for two and a half years, ever since I took the paraeducator position at Lila’s elementary school and Sam picked up more night shifts to pay down our old medical debt. When people hear our schedule, they usually widen their eyes and say “how do you do it?” like we’re raising a kid on a hiking trail or something. The first six months were a mess, honestly. We tried overlapping childcare where Sam would stay up after his shift to watch Lila before I left for work, and I’d stay up until Sam left for his shift at night. We were both running on four hours of sleep a night, and that’s when the scary incident happened at the park: Sam nodded off on the bench while Lila played, and she wandered two blocks over to the corner gas station for a lollipop before a store employee called us. We sat on the couch that night, both exhausted and shaken, and realized we needed actual small, steady rules, not just “we’ll figure it out as we go.”
The first change that stuck was the 15-minute no-phone handoff. No rushing out the door mid-sentence anymore. We block off 15 minutes at 6:45 a.m. for the morning handoff, and 6:15 p.m. for the evening handoff, before Sam leaves for work. All we do is go over the day’s list, written on a cheap $15 whiteboard stuck to the fridge. It has everything: permission slip due, needs new cleats for soccer, has a sore throat, needs extra cuddles tonight. No texting notes that get lost in a chat thread, because Sam turns his phone on do not disturb when he’s sleeping, and I don’t have time to scroll through old texts between classes. If something comes up during the day, I just write it on the board. It takes two minutes to update, and no one forgets anything important anymore.
Next, we fixed the sleep problem, without moving walls or renting a bigger house. Sam can’t sleep if the house is loud, and Lila’s 7, she can’t be expected to sit silent for six hours straight every day. We didn’t have a spare bedroom to turn into a dedicated sleep space, so we went to Home Depot and got four thick moving blankets, $10 each, and stapled them to the inside of our bedroom walls. We got a $22 white noise machine that blocks out the dog barking and the garbage truck. Then we made the quiet sticker game with Lila: between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., if she keeps her voice low enough that it doesn’t carry down the hall to the bedroom, she gets one sticker. Five stickers a week gets her a trip to the dollar store to pick out anything she wants, usually glitter nail polish or a pack of sour gum. It works better than us yelling “be quiet!” every five minutes, because she’s in charge of earning her own reward.
After Lila started having consistent behavior issues in first grade, we learned the biggest lesson of all. She was acting out, not finishing homework, talking back to her teacher, and we assumed it was because she missed us, that we weren’t giving her enough “quality time.” Her teacher, Ms. Henderson, said that wasn’t it. What she saw was that Lila never knew what to expect from day to day. One day breakfast was at 7 with me, one day it was at 8:30 because Sam slept in, one day she walked to the bus with me, one day she walked with our neighbor, and no one talked to her about the change beforehand. Kids don’t need both parents around all the time, they need consistency. So we made the routine the same, no matter which parent is on duty. Breakfast is always 7 a.m., always oatmeal or toast, bus is always at 7:45. After school, it’s always apple and peanut butter for snack, 20 minutes of outside play, then homework. Bedtime is always 8:30, whoever’s putting her down reads one picture book before lights out. Within a month of locking that routine in, Ms. Henderson sent home a note saying the acting out stopped.
We also stopped turning down small, low-pressure help from people around us. When our retired next door neighbor offered to walk Lila to the bus stop two days a week when I have to leave early for staff meetings, we said yes. We don’t pay her, we just bring her a loaf of our homemade banana bread once a month, which she says is a fair trade. We don’t need full-time childcare, just 10 minutes of extra help a couple days a week, and that makes all the difference.
Some days it’s still messy. Last week, I spilled coffee all over the whiteboard before we did the handoff, we forgot about Lila’s early dismissal, and Sam woke up to an empty house because the neighbor picked her up and forgot to text. We still have weeks where one of us is sick, the dog gets into the trash, and Lila eats frozen waffles for dinner three nights in a row. We don’t do big fancy family outings on our overlapping days off, because we’re both too tired. Most weekends we just get donuts and walk around the lake, and that’s enough.
I think a lot of parenting advice makes opposite shift work sound like this huge hurdle that requires fancy schedules or tons of money to fix. We don’t have a cleaner, we don’t have a nanny, we just have a whiteboard, some moving blankets, and a sticker chart. It works for us, most days. Some days it doesn’t, and that’s okay too. We’re not trying to be perfect, we’re just trying to get through the day with everyone fed and everyone safe, and right now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Practical Childcare Tips for Parents Working One Day Shift and One Night Shift