If you are currently a work-from-home parent, it can be challenging to both do your job and take care of the children at the same time. Read on the five major ways to keep your kids occupied while you are working at home.

Have you ever been in a situation, where you are on a call with your boss and all of a sudden, your kid ran to you and asked to be carried? Now, your arms are full with one hand holding a phone and the other is carrying a child.

This may have happened to you at one instance but with the present state of companies and businesses shifting to online jobs, it is likely to happen again and more frequently. Of course, you can’t just choose between your kids versus your job. There should be an equal footing to juggle them together as a working parent. But how?

Lucky for you, we have outlined five ways to keep your kids busy at home. From learning arts on their own to listening to educational content online, you’ll surely get ideas to help you focus on your career while also keeping your children occupied at home.

1. Prepare Creative Activities

There are tons of ways to occupy your kids by making arts and it can be quite overwhelming. Start simple and build up from there. For example, you can slowly teach your child to draw scribbles using different colors to improve visual perception and hand coordination skills. Then, build from scribbles and start introducing lines and shapes which your kid can copy and duplicate multiple times while you are working.

Coloring books are also a way to grab their attention. Prepare a colored illustration for your child to follow and allow him/her to distinguish the colors independently. Download and print some preschool coloring worksheets from educational websites. This way, you have more time to concentrate on your work while teaching your kid to know the basic colors.

Painting is a great activity for children, too! Just make sure to teach them on how to keep a tidy space and clean up their work afterwards. You can also extend painting to more creative arts such as using old magazines to put up a collage of the family or building a house made of scratch papers and popsicle sticks.

2. Get Craftier

Taking the arts outside and applying them in the real world is more fun with kids who are either preschoolers or grade schoolers. They already have enhanced fine motor skills that can build legos or dress themselves in any way they want.

Our suggestion for parents is to always add a small challenge in every craft they are assigned to make. If you are asking them to build legos, then you can add a task where they make checkboxes on buildings or other objects they have made or will make. In this manner, they are challenged to expand their list of objects and build more to their creativity’s extent!

You can also let their own interests take you. If your child is into cooking, then buy a toy cooking set and encourage his/her imagination to shine through. Or, let him/her help you with cooking by tasking simple steps like washing the fruits and vegetables, mixing the ingredients together or scooping measurements of ingredients.

3. Let Them Listen to Educational Content on YouTube

YouTube has a variety of videos just for kids. They are usually skill-based and educational videos to teach them young. While these videos are helpful to them, it can be distracting to parents when working due to the volume that sets off everywhere in the house. Buy wireless kids headphones specialized for your child’s needs and safety when listening to audio.


With their own headphones, kids also have the option to listen to their favorite playlist while doing activities like arts and crafts.

To engage them in educational videos, always begin by asking them what they would like to watch and connect this to what you, as a parent, want them to watch. For instance, your kid wants to see car videos. Have the initiative to let them watch videos about the science behind the movement of cars or the engineering of car engines. Let them learn a few concepts from what they are interested in.

In addition, introduce facts that they were not aware of. Like, did they know that humans evolved from monkeys? Or can we run as fast as the Flash? Allow their curiosity to rise and give them answers through educational content on YouTube.

4. Sharpen their Minds

Puzzles and word games are ways to sharpen your child’s analytical skills and improve memory. Ask them some riddles to think about or get them a jigsaw puzzle to assemble. Offer a challenge to time themselves and beat their shortest time.

Additionally, for younger kids there are fun ways to teach sight words for kindergarten, and as they get older you can provide them with word search puzzles where they have to circle words they can find from a list. You’ll want to start with words they can find horizontally or vertically then up their game by looking for words that are diagonal or backwards. You can opt to group these words per category to help them increase their knowledge and vocabulary.

There are also apps online that offer the same nature of word games we have mentioned. Look out for these apps to attract them and not distract you from working!

5. Plan Adventure Games

Keep them excited everyday without disturbing you through adventure games. These games are basically missions to accomplish and can differ each day.

In one day, you can organize a scavenger hunt around the house. Give them a mission where they are hunters looking for objects. Create a checklist of these objects and keep them occupied in finding those objects. The next day, give them a mission to build a fort to protect them from their enemies. Their fort can be simply made from pillows and sheets.

You can even assign a mission to help you out in your work such as getting bond papers from the other table or answering the phone when someone calls.

Conclusion

Keeping your kids busy at home is not a one-way street. Parents have to make an effort to make it work and we hope we’ve given you some ideas for your wish to come true.

These five ways should truly benefit you and your children, so feel free to use them to alleviate your anxiety about working and not being able to teach your kids. It is hard to balance working for your job and tending to your kids, but know that we believe in you!

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