Good housekeeping ensures that one’s home is safe, clean, hygienic, and relaxing place for everyone living inside it. One of the challenges that many working professionals face is balancing between work, home, and self. For working parents, there’s the added responsibility of raising a child. However, for single parents, juggling everything all on your own is inherently a lot more challenging. The state of one’s household can affect a child’s mental, emotional, and psychological growth and development, which is why it should be considered as part of raising the child.
But between raising the child, working, and housekeeping, the latter can sometimes be neglected. Luckily, with proper planning and smart decisions, it can be possible to balance them. As such, we’ll be taking a look at tips to help you keep your house clean while still be able to juggle your duties as a parent and a professional:
Plan Ahead: Schedule and Routine
As with all things, making a plan would be the best way to help you manage everything that’s going on with your life. In this case, make a daily and monthly schedule and stick with it. Everything from the time you need to wake up, prepare meals, work, bonding and parent duties, groceries, cleaning, and all other tasks should all be properly laid out. Later on, with constant practice, it’ll become an easy-to-follow routine that moves like clockwork. Just make sure that your schedule is flexible enough to accommodate a few changes, like if anything comes up at work or if there’s a medical emergency. It’s also important to allocate some time for you to relax, de-stress, and unwind — perhaps one weekend off at the spa while your child’s at daycare or is with a family member, friend, or baby sitter; after all, if you’re low on battery, you do need to recharge in order to work.
Stock Up On Cleaning Supplies
One of the best ways to help you out with keeping your house clean is to be well-stocked in cleaning tools and materials so you wouldn’t have to stress out about having to go out and buy cleaners, rags, and other items when there’s a mess at home — kids can be a bit unruly and messy after all.
Routine Cleaning
Yes, you’re tired from work and raising a child, but you have to at least allocate an hour or less each day, or perhaps a few days each week to clean your home. If work and child raising’s too hectic, schedule it on your days off — bottom line is that you have to regularly clean. It’s important to clean your home in order to avoid bigger and more tiring spring-cleaning sessions later on, and also to avoid any poor housekeeping-related illnesses that may affect you and your child such as allergies from dust and dust mites, or bacterial infection from unclean floors, sinks, and bathrooms.
Delegate What You Can
Household tasks do take up a lot of time and energy, but so does work and raising a child. That said, you may want to consider delegating some tasks you have at home. For example, you can delegate tasks such as doing the laundry or gardening to businesses that offer laundry service and landscaping/lawn maintenance. Delegating can indeed be costly in the long run if you look at how much you’re spending in a year on delegated tasks, but it’s much more costly if you tire yourself out and get sick from doing everything on your own. Not to mention you’d be having less time to bond and raise your child if you focus more on your chores.
Conclusion
Being a responsible and caring single parent while working and keeping the house clean can indeed be difficult, but with these simple tips, it can be a little bit more manageable. Just remember that you can balance your job, child-raising, and keeping your home clean with the proper preparation — and that you can always get a helping hand by off-sourcing some tasks at home.
