Megan and Tony Odett will be working this fall with officemates who’ve grown increasingly common during the pandemic: their children. The Silver Spring database administrators plan to shepherd their boys, ages 7 and 10, through virtual public school programs while simultaneously fulfilling work responsibilities, all from their two-bedroom apartment.

“We’re choosing the best out of a very bad set of options,” Odett says.

The opportunity to telework while parenting is a privileged one; the vast majority of working parents in the U.S. with children in their household don’t have the luxury of working from home. But for those who do, affordable, safe and equitable options that meet the needs of their children and their supervisors are elusive.

Some D.C.-area parents have no choice but to keep one eye on their children and one on their work during the day. Others are forming “pods” or “micro-schools” with private teachers for small groups of children that can cost anywhere from $25-$100 per hour (and using them may worsen persistent achievement gaps). And some parents are reducing their hours or quitting their jobs entirely, a decision that can put additional financial strain on a family, disproportionately falls to mothers in dual-income households and isn’t even an option for single parents.

As a rather daunting school year looms, working parents are making difficult choices to try to keep their kids nurtured, their employers happy and family members safe (and sane).

‘We Are Being Extra Careful’

For the Odetts, any kind of in-person schooling is out of the question. Just before Alex turned 5, he was diagnosed with leukemia and has since faced three and a half years of chemotherapy, a compromised immune system and other long-term health issues. Megan is cautious about putting him in a space that increases his risk of contracting COVID-19.

“Just given our general bad luck with health, we are being extra careful about him,” Megan says. “It seems like there have been a number of times when there’s a low chance of something going wrong, and then it turns out we’re the few people who have something go wrong.”

Alex’s health isn’t their only concern. As a “twice-exceptional” child, Alex needs gifted services as well as support for his autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. To address these needs, the family chose to relocate to Silver Spring during the pandemic so they could send their sons to a public school in Montgomery County. Before the county made the decision to go all-virtual through January, Megan says the family had already resigned to keep both kids at home.

“We had just decided to do whatever it took because of our feeling of caution about our son’s health,” she says.

The Odetts are planning to do their best managing their children’s education on their own. They continue to pay a part-time babysitter, whom they employed before the pandemic, but aren’t scheduling her to work.

While this school year may be less than ideal, their experience with Alex’s chemotherapy offers them perspective. “When you’re going through what we went through with his treatment, and what everyone is going through now, the key is to just come out alive,” Odett says. “Are they fed? Do they have a roof over their head? And then you can worry about their educational development and their achievements.”

‘Concerned With The Exclusivity Around Forming A Pod’

Many parents in the D.C. area and nationwide are concerned about the socialization their children will miss out on when school is online-only. Educational pods — in which small groups of children gather with a teacher or caregiver to complete school-provided work or a separate curriculum — are one way to increase social interaction, critical to child development.

Northeast D.C. parents Steven and Victoria Brown are considering placing their preschooler, William, in a pod this fall with other students from his D.C. public school. The couple is also expecting a second child in September and says the first few months during the pandemic were a big adjustment. Each morning, they’d compare their meeting schedules on a whiteboard and trade toddler duty accordingly, making up any lost hours at work later in the day.

“Each day is a marathon. I didn’t have an appreciation for how much we relied on the structures and supports that we had built around our routine to facilitate us going to work full time and have our son well-cared for by us and by his daycare,” says Victoria, a senior director at an affordable housing nonprofit. “The number of tasks that need to get done, both on the home front and the work front, are overwhelming.”

The Browns ultimately found a part-time babysitter to help at home four mornings a week through the summer. But when fall arrives, William is due for his first year of preschool, a virtual one, and the Browns are still figuring out the best way to support him. They want William to socialize with peers but have some reservations about pods.

“[We’re] concerned with the exclusivity around forming a pod and whether other kids who aren’t as well-resourced will have the same kinds of opportunities,” says Steven, whose focus area is racial equity and poverty as a researcher for the Urban Institute.

Equity is an oft-voiced concern for many parents and policy experts who fear that those who can afford to hire someone to assist their children may only compound existing inequalities when it comes to education. Yet some argue that rather than shame these parents, equity advocates should push for immediate changes from lawmakers, such as the technology to support more learning-at-home opportunities (roughly 17 million children in the U.S. live in homes that lack high-speed internet) and cash assistance for lower-income families.

The Browns are also looking at forming playgroups outside of school hours to meet their son’s social needs.

“Our biggest concern has been caring well for our toddler’s needs and recognizing that without other children present, his needs aren’t fully met,” Victoria says. “As much as we carve out time to play with him and engage with him and teach him, there is a really difficult lack of development happening for him when he doesn’t have the opportunity to regularly play with other kids. And that we felt acutely over the course of the many months that we’ve been in the pandemic.”

‘A Stay-At-Home Mom Without Ever Making That Choice’

As some working parents struggle to forge a framework that supports both their careers and their children’s needs, others — who can afford to do so based on other income — are opting out of the workforce altogether.

Kara Macek recently became a stay-at-home mom inadvertently. The Alexandria resident left her job at a highway safety association in March — which incidentally coincided with the onset of the pandemic — to launch a long-planned career in consulting. The career move would give her the chance to pare down her hours to 20 or 30 per week, she says, and bring her improved work/life balance, something she says she’d been “struggling” with for years.

“The cruel irony of all of this is that I had wanted to spend more time with my family,” Macek says. “Be careful what you wish for because I have been with my family 24/7 for the last six months.”

To accommodate the needs of her sons, ages 3 and 6, Macek set aside her original summer plans, which were to get her burgeoning business off the ground. Instead, she says her days are now an “endless litany of laundry and picking up after” her children. The experience has left her feeling “conflicted.”

“I feel lucky because we can afford this,” she says, noting that her husband has a well-paying job. “That’s a blessing. But I’m also disheartened by everything because it completely wiped out my original plans. And now I’ve basically become a stay-at-home mom without ever making that choice.”

Having a thriving career and thriving kids at the same time was already challenging for many mothers. The pandemic has made it monumentally harder. Some mothers who can afford to say they’ve considered quitting their jobs but fear they won’t be able to pick up where they left off. It’s a dilemma that more frequently impacts mothers than fathers; a recent study from the Center for American Progress says millennial mothers are close to three times more likely than fathers to report not being able to work because of a school/child care closure during the pandemic.

Preschool for Macek’s younger son has re-opened for in-person instruction. But she says she doesn’t want to send him due to safety concerns and because the few hours of consulting she’s doing per week doesn’t pay enough for the care. Instead, she is piecing together educational resources to homeschool him in the fall while she helps her older child navigate virtual classes through Alexandria City Public Schools.

“Who knows when it’s going to end?” Macek says. “Like everyone, we’re just in this limbo.”

Megan Odett says she’s been sharing advice on social media for parents who are scrambling to figure out how to meet work obligations and support their children under what are, at minimum, trying circumstances. During her son’s chemotherapy treatment, she says Alex essentially lost a year of his education yet “bounced back.”

“You can drop out of everything for a year and your kids will be OK,” she says. “Low standards are the key to survival right now.”