Why Should "WFH Mum" Mean Doing It Alone?
Why WFH Mums Are So Isolated (And How to Build Your Village)
Funnily enough, I never really thought about how isolating working from home with kids could be. I mean, I'm home all day surrounded by my kids, how could that possibly be lonely?
But as any mum knows, you can be around tiny humans all day and still not have a single adult conversation until 6pm.
The isolation nobody warns you about
Office life has a built in village, even if you never asked for one. Someone to complain about that unreasonable deadline with, someone who notices when you've had a bad morning, and a lunch break that isn't eaten standing at the counter with one eye on a toddler.
WFH life doesn't come with any community built-in. You have to build it, and most of us aren't told that until we're already in the thick of it and wondering why we feel so flat despite technically having everything we wanted.
I wanted to work from home with my kids and I still do, that will never change. But I do miss adult conversations about things other than, "does he have a poo?", or "please can you take that off him?".
Working with kids around used to be the norm
Here's the thing though, working with kids around isn't new. It's actually the older way of doing things.
For most of human history, work and childcare happened in the same place, at the same time, in full view of other adults. Women farmed with babies wrapped to their backs. Shops had a crib behind the counter. Weaving, cooking, mending, minding the stall, all of it got done with kids underfoot, because there wasn't anywhere else for the kids to be and no one expected there to be.
And critically, it rarely happened alone. Extended family lived close by, often in the same house. Neighbours popped in and out all day. Older kids minded younger kids while the women worked side by side, swapping stories, keeping an eye on each other's children without anyone having to ask. The work was hard and the days were long, but you weren't doing it in isolation. There was always another adult within shouting distance.
Then work moved out of the home and into offices and factories, and it took the adults with it. Childcare stayed behind, and it stayed behind mostly with mothers, on their own, in houses that used to hold three generations and now held two people under the age of five.
Add in decades of smaller families, moving away from where we grew up for jobs or partners, and neighbourhoods where nobody's home during the day because everyone commutes, and the natural village didn't just shrink. For a lot of us, it disappeared completely.
Now working from home is bringing the two worlds back together (work happening where the kids are) but the village that used to come with that setup didn't come back with it. We got the old arrangement of work and kids sharing a room, without the old arrangement of never doing it alone.
Claiming some of that back
The good news is we don't need three generations under one roof to get some of that old arrangement back. We just need to stop trying to do this version of work and motherhood entirely solo, because for most of history, nobody did.
A lot of the time it's small things, not grand gestures.
Maybe a voice note back and forth with another WFH mum, nothing deep, just "how's your morning going".
"Co-working" for fifteen minutes with the camera on while you both work, not talking, just being present and offering company.
Showing up in a community of women doing the same strange, isolating, wonderful thing, so the hard days have somewhere to land that isn't just inside your own head.
None of it replaces a full office of colleagues, or a mother and two aunties in the next room. It doesn't need to. It just needs to be enough that you're not carrying every hard day alone.
You don't have to build it from nothing
If you're in the thick of this right now, wondering why you feel isolated despite being surrounded by your own kids all day, you're not doing anything wrong. You just haven't found your people yet.
That's exactly why the free WFH Mama Community exists. Not for tips, not for another system to implement. Just for other women in the same strange, quiet, full-house-but-lonely stage of working from home.
Come join us. You don't have to do this one alone.
The home office, but with a village.
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