Oscar, my four-and-a-half-year-old son, came into the living room with two toy cars. I was sitting at my computer and had a call in a few minutes. His grandmother had just settled down beside him to look after him.
“Dad, will you be the red one?”
I said I was working. Oscar looked at the screen, then at the car I still hadn’t taken. I was at home. To him, surely that meant we could play.
Working from home with a child sometimes starts with this simple misunderstanding: the parent is there, but part of their attention is elsewhere.
At home, work becomes hard to see
When I go out, Oscar sees the door close. When I work in the living room, he mostly sees his dad on a chair. The same computer can show a photo or help prepare a document. He can’t guess what my screen needs from me.
Yet I had started to get annoyed. I’d already explained that I was working. Why did he keep coming back?
Because I was still there. And because “not now” didn’t really tell him when we could make the cars roll.
I could explain work in simple words, but I couldn’t ask him to manage my working day on his own. A clearer boundary doesn’t replace someone caring for him.
Arrange the handover, then keep the appointment
Before the call, I left my keyboard for a moment. We set up the cars on the rug with his grandmother. I said I was going back to my desk and we’d carry on with our garage after snack time, when I could actually be free.
That small departure made more sense than answers called over the screen. It also let his grandmother take over without me remaining the person consulted about every car.
“I'm at home, but right now I'm working. Grandma is staying with you to play.”
“After your snack, I'll close the computer and we'll carry on with the garage.”
That promise only meant something if I kept it. Otherwise, “later” was simply another way of saying no.
And on days without someone to take over, I couldn’t rely on a four-year-old’s goodwill to free up a long stretch of work. I needed to rethink the arrangements or my expectations, rather than find a more convincing sentence.
After his snack, Oscar came back with the red car. This time, I closed the computer before taking it.
He didn’t need me to be available all day. At that moment, he could finally see that I was.
