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Children know everything. They are like sponges, that take in all around them. And their little antennas work really well for picking up emotions and tensions all around tehm. Last Sunday I got proof again…

“Get the junior bed!,” she says to me. Otherwise you’ll just have to buy a new one next year because they grow so fast”. I watch how Kate bends down on the street to shovel her dog’s shit into the plastic bag: dog leash and stroller in one hand while she’s holding Nina’s tiny hand in the other. Wait, does she have three hands? I am carrying some groceries and am holding my daughter’s hand. Nina, Kate’s three year old, yanks on Kate’s arm. She wants to run. Kate’s one year old starts crying in the stroller. Kate loses balance, her face hovering dangerously close over the shoveled shit. I can just grab the back of her jacket to hold her up. One of my grocery bags falls down, eggs break and we break out in laughter.

We eventually made it home without any more kids crying or things breaking. But we never finished our conversation about the “toddler versus junior bed”. But that’s another story.

I ask myself rather, how much multitasking can one do without messing one thing up?

Multitasking might be the ultimate oxymoron for mothers. We all do it, but we all know it makes nobody happy thus it’s really impossible. Raising and spending time with a child requires, as I learned the hard way, 100% attention and focus. Absent-mindedness is what makes your baby wail. It is what inspires your toddler to pull the crayons out to doodle your precious sofa. When suddenly listening to your friend on the phone switching to that annoying “email-voice” (Hallowell, E.M., Ballantine, 2006), wouldn’t you do the same? Well, substitute “crayons” and “sofa” for “befriending” and “facebook”. Having always been someone who rather concentrates on emails and phone calls, as well as cooking and shopping online at the same time, than doing one thing alone, spending time with my daughter has taught me, how not to do too many things at once. With a child, there is only one moment: “now”. And you know it when you do the same mistake over and over again, trying to tell her/him about a wonderful upcoming event. Then tears are shed, since he/she wants it “now”. If one tries, spending time with children heals. If we listen, if we are “there now”, we can learn. We learn real focus and attention and thus we learn to be happier. We learn to stay in the moment.
Guess what, here is another paradox, focusing on a single task will only help your multitasking: Multitasking is an illusion, since we can only deal with many things by shifting our focus from one thing to the other (just in a rapid way by way of the amazing prefrontal cortex), but we can never do anything simultaneously. (Even computer, for which the term was first used, don’t multitask for real. They just process one task, while others are waiting in line (context switch).
So you just get better at switching focus by really focusing on dancing with your baby or by fully concentrating on that book with your little one. As long as we do these things, there is nothing wrong with every once in a while typing a text on your blackberry while pushing the stroller and talking to a friend that shovels her dog’s shit. Just don’t do this while crossing the street.