From the course: Balancing Work and Life as a Work-from-Home Parent

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Balancing structure with unpredictability

Balancing structure with unpredictability

From the course: Balancing Work and Life as a Work-from-Home Parent

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Balancing structure with unpredictability

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- We know that structure is good for us, but we also know that our children will throw a monkey wrench into that structure. So we must expect the unexpected, and we must build unpredictability into our schedule. Think of structure as a spectrum. It might be unrealistic to wall off an entire afternoon without any intrusions, but perhaps we can develop a system, like red light, green light, and yellow light for different levels of interruptibility. If you have a red light, maybe your child knows that that's absolutely uninterruptible time. Use this sparingly, and make sure that they always know the end time. I've used a variation of this for years with my own children. The equivalent of red light is "I'm on live television" or "I'm in a therapy session". It means that noise has to be kept to an absolute minimum, and if they interrupt me, they better have lost a limb. Yellow light, on the other hand, means that maybe I'm…

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