Learning things takes time and energy—two things that are in short supply when you have kids to take care of after working all day.
The biggest shift in how I approach learning things has come from having kids. Previously, I had ample free time to study whatever I was interested in—the primary constraint was whether I was interested enough to invest the time.
Now, I have two children. They’re wonderful, but as any other parent of small kids can readily attest, your work no longer ends when you’re done with your job for the day. Combine this with frequently interrupted sleep, and the result is that you have far less time and energy for learning hard things than before.
Today, I’d like to discuss some of the strategies I’ve found most helpful for continuing to learn a lot, even as a busy parent. Even if you don’t have kids, you might find some of these strategies useful for fitting learning into your busy life!
1. Make use of your fractured time.
I’m a big advocate for deep work [1]. These focused sessions of productivity, without distraction or interruption, allow you to perform difficult cognitive work.
However, long stretches where you’re guaranteed not to be interrupted are unusual when you have small children. A nap might last two hours—or fifteen minutes. Free time is haphazard and unpredictable. This is hardly a recipe for getting a lot of deep work done.
Some learning tasks do require long stretches of focus. But others are more easily fractionated. Those slivers of time can really add up if you know how to take advantage of them.
For instance, shortly after my son was born, I started learning my wife’s native language, Macedonian. To help, I made a few thousand flashcards to help memorize common vocabulary. While I couldn’t guarantee long stretches to practice, keeping flashcards on my phone allowed me to learn a lot in the random slices I did encounter.
2. Make projects ready to start—and ready to stop.
Short chunks of time can make learning difficult, but another difficulty is unpredictability. You might feel reluctant to start reading a book, watching a class or working on a hands-on project if you’re not sure if you have five minutes or two hours.
A factor that has helped me resolve this problem has been making projects ready to start. The fewer barriers you have before starting work, the easier it is to rack up learning time.
This strategy helped me a lot with learning to paint. It has been a hobby I’ve enjoyed since before having kids, but I usually worked in longer sessions. The effort of getting everything set up, only to potentially have to put it all away immediately after, made it unrewarding, and I stopped painting. The fix was to have a dedicated space where I could start or stop with little effort.
Even if you don’t have extra space for your projects, you can make them more ready to start. Supplies you need can be put into a box, ready to use, so that you can take them out and get to work. Lectures you’re watching can be left open in a tab on your computer, rather than need to be navigated back to and re-loaded from the class website. Digital projects can be kept open on a second virtual desktop.
When large chunks of time aren’t guaranteed, the best way to ensure more time is spent actually doing something is to make the cost of getting started as low as possible.
3. Find overlap with your other goals.
Another strategy I’ve found helpful is looking for opportunities to learn things within the scope of other goals I have.
For instance, if I’m interested in learning something, I might try to see how I can make it relevant for work—perhaps relating it to an essay topic. Learning a physical activity combines learning with exercise, and finding a project you can do with your friends or partner lets you spend more time socializing.
The idea here is that a learning project that serves two different functions will be easier to fit into your schedule than trying to accomplish two goals separately. Today, I start by seeking out projects with this kind of overlap since I know I can devote more time to them.
4. Learn with your kids.
Depending on how old your kids are, finding a project you can do with them can be a great way to both learn and spend time with them.
Sports, art, languages, or even just learning facts about sharks or dinosaurs are all things you can try to find overlap with what your kids want and need to learn. Spending time learning together is also a good way to show your kids that learning doesn’t need to stop when you’re finished with school. The best way to instill a mindset of lifelong learning is to demonstrate that behavior yourself.
5. Don’t wait for conditions to be perfect.
One of my favorite stories from Scottish polymath (and mother of five) Mary Somerville [2] was when an acquaintance told her she ought to study botany. Taking up the suggestion, she decided to spend an hour a day learning about it while nursing her child!
While it’s undoubtedly true that learning works best when you can give yourself a quiet, undistracted space and long stretches of time to focus, sometimes those expectations aren’t realistic.
When my son was born, I remember waking up every 2-3 hours to help my wife with feeding and changing. We tried to keep the room dark, but I might be awake for 20-30 minutes while he fed. I used that time to listen to Herbert Dreyfus’s class recordings on Heidegger [3].
Similarly, my wife began doing Pimsleur’s 30-minute daily French lessons during our son’s morning stroller nap.
I don’t recommend this kind of multitasking for any learning activity where the cognitive load [4] is high. Still, those slow moments can often be good for listening to an audiobook or watching an instructional video.
6. Let your kids teach you.
Perhaps the most important thing you learn when becoming a parent is about your kids themselves.
The rate of learning among kids is incredible. Children acquire dozens of new words per day. They learn to sit up, crawl, stand, walk, run and jump. Incessant whys may frustrate at times, but they’re also how kids learn the innumerable things we take for granted as adults.
The best way to keep learning when you have kids, therefore, is to pay attention to the learning your kids are already doing. From simple things you learned so long ago as to take for granted, all the way to helping with homework lessons you barely remember having learned yourself, raising kids is a continuous learning experience.
Learning has always been a central part of my life. Having kids enriches far more than it detracts from a life spent learning new things.