MA Rutgers Alum Co-Authors a New Book About Parenting and Working from Home
HELPING PARENTS BALANCE WORK & FAMILY
Shari Medini co-authors book on parenting and working from home
By Francine Tardo RC’96
When Shari Medini RC’06 was a student at Rutgers, she was a psychology major with a minor in English, but also had an interest in computer science. As a co-owner of AdoreThemParenting.com, a website featuring helpful resources for parents, she is able to combine all of her interests and uses them on a daily basis. In response to an increased number of parents having to juggle working at home with family responsibilities, she recently co-wrote a book, Parenting While Working from Home, to offer some tips to help parents manage their time and stay productive.
What inspired you to write this book?
My co-author Karissa Tunis and I have been working from home for over a decade so we have helpful tips and insights to be able to share with fellow parents who have been thrown into this for the first time. There are a lot of unique struggles to working from home – especially while raising a family! And this book is an opportunity to pass along practical advice in an easy-to-read monthly guide.
What is the most common challenge parents are facing in this current environment?
Knowing where to place their focus. Everything can feel like an emergency. My work needs me. My kids need me. And there are no clean spoons left! By the end of the day, parents feel like they both didn’t stop for a second and also got very little accomplished.
Instead, we need to take back control of our time and attention. Simplify your schedule by being very careful of what you say “yes” to. Stay focused on the tasks that will make the biggest impact. And have simple, clear, attainable goals for each week for different areas of your life such as work, family, and home.
What is your top tip for struggling parents?
Be intentional with your time. We often get asked how parents can find daily balance when they are expected to take on so many different responsibilities. And our solution to this is that you give up the idea of daily balance and instead zoom out to see a bigger picture. Striving for weekly (or even monthly) balance is much more attainable and productive!
This allows you to get creative with how you spend your time and energy day to day. We can also intentionally set a main priority for that day – for example, some days are work days, where the kids will likely spend extra time on their screens while we focus on accomplishing a bigger work project; some days are house days — where the focus is simply to get the house back into order, that might mean switching loads of laundry throughout the entire day and deep cleaning a bit more; some days are family days — where the focus is on quality time with our kids and family as a whole.
“By the end of the day, parents feel like they both didn’t stop for a second and also got very little accomplished.”
What motivated you to start your own company to help parents?
AdoreThemParenting.com was born out of a realization that, like many other parents, Karissa and I had been stuck in a cycle of consuming negative media. At first it can be humorous and comforting to know that you are not the only parent out there who is struggling; sometimes it helps to commiserate and joke about hiding in the bathroom with a bar of chocolate. However, when you’re reading article after article where the author is complaining about their kids, their spouses, their messy houses, and their demanding bosses, you start to see your own life through that lens.
As a first step, we made the purposeful decision to stop consuming all of the negative parenting content. It was amazing
how quickly we started to see a positive shift in our own lives. The most important lesson we learned was that there was nothing too
big or too small to troubleshoot! If something was frustrating us, we could likely brainstorm a way to improve it. We feel fortunate to
have now collaborated with over a hundred experts that have weighed in on popular parenting topics. We have shared hundreds of articles and thousands of ideas in beautiful, encouraging ways. And we truly appreciate the opportunities we’ve had to inspire parents, grandparents, educators, and childcare providers around the globe.
What type of feedback have you received on Parenting While Working from Home?
As parents, we are busy and can get caught up in the whirlwind of our daily lives. We have heard appreciation from parents regarding the easy-to-consume format of our book. Each chapter focuses on a different month of the year, contains journaling prompts to help figure out what’s working and what’s not, and breaks down practical advice into different areas of your life (you, your kids, and your work).
So many families have been thrown into this work from home situation without having the tools and resources to navigate it all
smoothly. And while there will always be some trial and error to figure out what works best for your own family, it has been amazing
to hear parents share the ideas and insight that they have been able to use from our book.
And while the process of landing a literary agent, signing a book deal, writing an entire book with my co-author, and marketing this book in the midst of a pandemic with our children home 24/7 has been intense… I have loved every single step of this journey.
