The time of wanting to settle down and starting a family with your partner eventually comes into most people’s lives. Trying to finally buy a house or at least put down the mortgage for it, paying off all your current debts and loans. The need for putting down some groundwork, growing into your surroundings a bit, telling your parents that they are going to become grandparents, that sort of thing. Now, with settling down and children, comes a lot of changes which might heavily clash with your existing routine. Your career or working life might need to take a backseat to your family related errands. As your children get older, this becomes less and less impacting, and you will be able to embrace your older habits once again, but for the first few years, a lot of rather drastic changes will have to be made in order to accommodate your new life decisions.
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A tough balance to strike
A lot of people often have trouble balancing their professional life and family life, usually ending up in going too far in either direction. Being completely consumed by work and doing late nights in the office every day while the house gets neglected. Alternatively, the complete opposite. People take a lot of time off with little to no warning to their higher-ups, leaving both parties stressed and frustrated at the whole situation due to the uncertainty of what is going. Leaving them wondering if they should still bother relying on their employee as a major pillar of the company. While this is not an easy balance to strike and perhaps even an impossible one since one or the other is going to have to give way, previous arrangements can be made to allow both parties to settle on a compromise. If you wish to focus more on family, see if you can cut down your hours in general rather than having to take random days off every now and then. Maybe cut down the number of working days, or try to move your shift back a few hours so that you finish work in time to pick up the kids from the nursery. Alternatively, hire a babysitter to take care of your kids while you are at work, then spend that precious time with them in the afternoon. After a while you will be able to send them to the nursery and they will be able to interact with other children their age, leaving you less stressed if they are not feeling lonely at home.
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If you truly want to go all in on being a parent at least for the foreseeable future, maternity leave might be the option best suited for you. Sure you can use up your regular remaining holidays first or on top, but two or three week is not much in the grand scheme of things when it comes to raising children. Maternity leave can allow mothers to take several months off work in order to care after and spend time looking after the children. If you are not sure how much time off and pay you are eligible for, an employee maternity leave guide might be just the thing you are looking for. Not to outright say that your boss will try and cheat you out of certain benefits, but people are people, and you can never be too sure.
Improving yourself for your child
In order to bring up your children in a safe and secure environment which won’t negatively impact them somewhere down the line might require you to drop some of your existing bad habits. No matter how big and damaging or small and insignificant, now would be a perfect time for self-improvement, after all you are teaching another human being to exist, completely shaping their current worldview from what they see at home and during interaction with family or close friends. Though it is well known that smoking is not only terrible for you and the people around you, many parents still smoke while having children around and some mothers still tend to smoke even while pregnant. Secondhand smoking is almost as bad normal smoking, being exposed to and inhaling more than 7000 different chemicals. Hundreds of those are toxic and roughly seventy of them are known to cause cancer.There is literally no such thing as a risk-free level of exposure to secondhand smoke despite many myths that state otherwise which tend to be popular amongst smokers, such as blowing smoke over your shoulder. Knowingly exposing your child to coronary heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer is never ever something that a parent should be doing.
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A helping hand
An important asset to have on your side while raising children is someone trustworthy that could potentially look after your children. This is not even talking about the angle of not having to pay a babysitter, it is more about the fact that leaving your child with a stranger each time might reflect badly on it somewhere down the line. Not having a strong bond with parents of at least some sort of parenting figure often leads to self-doubt, lack of self appreciation, timidness, social awkwardness and “being a loner” at school and many other symptoms. Now, it is not an easy task to come across someone who you would trust with your child, but chances are that you might have some close family friends who you know wouldn’t try to rob your house during your absence. If you cannot think of any close friends who might be able to come down to lend a hand every now and then, maybe you have a trustworthy neighbour who wouldn’t mind helping out. Maybe they have kids of their own, which would be the perfect scenario. Not only could you drop off your kids next door whenever needed, but they would also have someone to play with in the meantime. Being separated from parents can be very difficult for children, especially at a very young age. If they have someone else to interact with and spend time with, they tend to not panic anywhere near as much as they are busy having fun and exploring the world together with their newfound friend.
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