So you thought working at home with your teens would be great — you'd share more quality time with each other, you'd get to eat lunch together, and maybe (just maybe!) they'd give you a hand with the laundry from time to time. It was supposed to be easy, fun, and packed with amazing, memory-creating family-time. But boy, were you wrong. Working from home with kids (let alone teens) can be exhausting and unproductive. Between your teen interrupting your Zoom call, demanding for you to make lunch, or blasting the latest Olivia Rodrigo song at full volume, not even a zen home office or tranquil Zoom background can make you feel at ease. Because we understand the struggle, we've rounded up 15 things that perfectly capture what parents working from home with teens feel everyday — all funny, but some much, much too relatable.
An uninterrupted Zoom call? Never heard of it. At least once or twice or ten times a day, your teen either barges into your home office during a call or can be heard through the Zoom audio . . . and always doing something you don't want your boss to hear.
When you're home all day your teens assume that you're going to help them with their homework, projects, essays, presentations, and studying. So, lucky for you, you're left trying to remember how to do long-division and frantically Googling what APA format is between Zoom calls. It's basically like you're working your full-time job and re-doing junior high.
Now that you're working from home, it means your teens feel like they can ask you for everything and anything all day long. For instance, to make them lunch, to borrow the car, what you're making for dinner, if they can hang out with a friend, to drive them to the park, where their sweatshirt is, and if they can borrow our credit card to buy a ring light on Amazon. The questions never seem to end.
With your teen simultaneously doing homework on their desktop computer, streaming Netflix on their laptop, and scrolling TikTok on their phone, that leaves little to no internet bandwidth for you to use for your work. That means you get laggy load times, video calls that break up, and even difficulties connecting to the internet. Not like you have a job to do, or anything.
With teens at home when you're trying to get some work done, sometimes the only way to minimize the constant chaos is to bribe them. Your brides are everything from basic to creative, like extra allowance, Starbucks, their favorite dinner . . . anything you can think of. And no shame in it: you need to get your work done, too!
When you're working from home, the one imperative is that you have a fully charged laptop — how else are you supposed to answer the 100-plus emails in your inbox? But with your teens at home doing homework and streaming Netflix, they're sure to have "borrowed" your charger by mistake when they've misplaced their own (and of course, without asking!). And this leaves you frantically searching around the house while your laptop is at 7 percent.
You've scrolled through TikTok so you know it's pretty damn entertaining, so you can't really blame your teen for wanting to make their own content. But, every time you walk into a room that means you catch them filming some new dance routine or editing videos, rather than doing the things they really need to do (like homework, or taking out the garbage like you asked them seven times already!).
Pre-WFH, if your teen needed you they'd text you. Now, no matter where they are in the house or what you're in the middle of, you're hearing "MOOOOOM!" or "DAAAAAAD!" screamed from the top of their lungs. And even though you'd assume it's something important, it's usually just them asking where the chips are or if they can borrow your car.
You may have days when you walk into the kitchen or living room in the afternoon to find a massive mess. Because apparently, now that your teen isn't in school for eight hours a day, that means they have eight extra hours to make a mess in the house instead.
If you have more than one kid at home, that means you're probably dealing with a lot of tattling and he said-she said fights. Luckily, now that you're home all day, you get to play moderator every time your teens get into an argument. Fun!
Between the endless questions and requests from your teen you feel like you need to remind them daily that you in fact have a job that demands your attention from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and are not avaialble for their every whim. Not that they seem to remember.
Ever been in the middle of an important meeting that you can't duck out of so you need your teen to do you a favor? Say, answer the door for the delivery person? But instead of them taking care of it, they're conveniently nowhere to be found, leaving you to take care of literally everything. Sigh.
With everyone in your family home, it means everyone's using the bathrooms all day long. And somehow, your teen's always in there when you have three minutes between meetings are really, really need to go.
One of the best things about the bathroom at your office was that someone else always replaced the empty roll. But at home, your teen uses all the TP and just leaves the empty cardboard for someone else (ahem, you) to replace. Just what you need when you're doing everything else!