This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven’t read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.
I know that I said that the medical transcription series was done, but I started to think about it, and I realized that I never wrote any blogs about how to deal with children while working as a transcriptionist. We did talk about how most of the medical transcription work done in America is done at home, and did cover the flexibility and the types of jobs you should be looking at if you want to be at home with your kids while working as an MT.
But just because you can work at home, and just because your schedule is flexible, doesn’t mean that it is by any stretch of the imagination easy to work as an MT with kids underfoot (this goes for any of the transcription fields, by the way: Legal, general, or medical.) You’ll often hear people say when they’re transcribing, “I get into a rhythm and things just start to flow.” All of you mothers and fathers out there know nothing in the world rivals kids when it comes to destroying a rhythm and flow. They are either wanting something from you (“Mom, I’m hungry!”) or they’re fighting with their siblings (“Hey, I had that first!”) or they are quietly destroying something, which makes you even more nervous because they don’t alert you when they’re doing this. My sister tells me that when her kids are quiet for more than 20 minutes at a time, she knows they’re doing something she doesn’t want them (like drawing all over each other with lipstick and eyeliner) and she better go find them before her house is completely leveled. Sound familiar?
So if your kids are either needing you constantly or are being really quiet, which is also scary, how is a mother (or father) supposed to concentrate and work? I have written up a list of suggestions that I have seen bandied about the ‘net when discussing this problem. Not all of them will work for you, but maybe some of them will. Because this list is so long, I have broken them up into multiple blogs that will be posting over the next couple of days.
Here goes:
Work while the kids are in bed.
That means either staying up late and working after the kids have gone to bed for the night, or getting up super early and working while the kids are still asleep. Which you choose really depends on your own natural body rhythms, but either way, the worrisome aspect of this is sleep deprivation. Parents are usually already sleep deprived, so if you cut even further into the needed sleep, that can really be difficult. If you cut back too much on sleeping, you’ll be a walking zombie all day, and that really defeats the purpose of you staying home with your kids so you can “be there” for them. If you’re 95% asleep all day long, you aren’t “there” for anyone.