Episode 058: Co-parenting with Brandon Hays

Welcome Brandon!

Brandon Hays is a dad and engineering leader based in Austin, TX. His professional mission is to help the tech industry improve by organizing people to accomplish things together in environments that recognize and support their "human-ness". His personal mission is to survive parenthood until the kids are in college.

02:40 Brandon's co-parenting

• Starting with traditional gender roles
• Co-parenting was a foriegn concept until remote work..
• The invisible work becomes more visible
• Covid has forced parents to confront the amount of work it takes to raise kids

06:30 Co-parenting during the pandemic

• Awareness that things changed… kids cannot return to school
• Brandon becomes the educator during the pandemic
• The amount of work to parent became too high when everything shut down
• Reworking the home dynamic when one partner needs help
• Asking for flexibility in places where he had previous thought was not available before

10:53 Working out responsibility between partners

• Clear contracts
• Splitting up tasks and making them known to each partner
• Alternating cooking dinner and clean up
• Family clean day
• Creating activities for kids, even after a long day
• Check in with your partner, how are you feeling burden?

14:05 Recognize your partner's strengths

• Being comfortable with how each partner co-parents
  
• Recognition of each partner
• Optimize each parenting style and continue to check in
• Asking and taking the self-care when it is needed

17:30 Working together

19:10 How has Covid refocused things?!

• Strengthened the team mentality
• Hard to sustain the intensity of the pandemic
• Constant change, the on-call parent

24:40 Prioritization - Do our actions line up with our values?

27:00 Take away: preserve time for planning and reflection

28:35 Genius / fail moments

• Allison checks in while her son is in virtual school and feels major mom guilt…
• Chris’s family visits and brings his camper for a huge win!
• Arit slyly phases out her daughters stuffed animal #genius
• Jess’s son goes full into minecraft, but it may be too much.. #possiblegenius
• KWu repurposed geotags for wooden toys for her kids #genius
• Brandon get creative taking pictures of his kids in their natural habitat

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Chris Arcand
Jess
Arit
Allison
KWu

Special Guest: Brandon Hays.

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