It is true that homeschooling may protect your children from COVID and the rare but tragic event of school shootings. However, for the newly converted homeschooling parents, most of who are single or dual-earning households, it is unlikely that they will be able to afford a well-rounded home-based education to ensure their children’s physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development in the same way that most public and private schools can –even if you are working-from-home.

For many families new to the process, homeschooling tends to largely rely on parents and kids staying at home and kids taking online courses that parents must supervise and help with. This kind of homeschooling plan can weaken children’s immune system and make them more vulnerable to infections in the long run. As a study in Nature explains, early exposure to different germs in childhood is actually beneficial to children’s immune system development. Traditional schooling involves exposing children to various other children from different communities by physically gathering them in the same space, and the daily commute between home and school, as well as the various extracurricular activities within schools, also means more interactions between children and different individuals. By contrast, homeschooling often leads children only to be exposed to a set group of individuals such as family members and neighbors.

Homeschooling, if not designed appropriately, may also increase mental and behavioral problems related to social interactions among children. Interacting with other children in their age groups, or developing peer relationships, is crucial for children’s social-emotional development. Even if parents are able to find or form a local homeschooling cooperative to exchange and share teaching skills with other homeschooling families, they typically need to put in time and resources to follow the day-to-day operation of the study pods and, often times, to design children’s curriculum themselves, which can be especially challenging to working parents.

In addition, parents might unintentionally limit their children’s social circles to peers who live in nearby neighborhoods and, therefore, share sociocultural backgrounds. Culturally diverse classrooms are crucial in fostering adolescents’ intercultural competence, which is in turn beneficial to their psychological well-being in multiethnic settings. Schools with greater racial diversity also contribute to better intellectual outcomes, as students in these schools demonstrate better cognitive skills in complex thinking.

To be fair, the increase in remote-work opportunities beginning with the pandemic does make it easier for working parents to balance work and homeschooling. However, homeschooling children requires active engagement in the process: simply being physically present at home does not make a homeschooling plan a preferable alternative to conventional schooling. It is perhaps not a surprise that parents who were home-schooling during the pandemic experienced significantly higher levels of psychological distress and work/social impairment. Moreover, the unequal, gendered employment dynamics means that mothers’ careers, but not fathers’, are often negatively affected by choices to homeschool children.

While concerns of school shootings or COVID are understandable, parents should be aware of the immense efforts that are demanded for them to assist a homeschooled child, and working from home can only help to some extent. While some homeschooling supporters celebrated the rise in homeschooling as parents “re-empowered to take back the reins of their children’s education from government bureaucrats and teachers unions,” for many other parents, determining whether to homeschool often entails a practical decision-making process involving complex cost-benefit analysis rather than making a simple political statement.

If you and/or your partner are working remotely and planning to homeschool your children this fall, make sure your home-schooling plans should involve much more than online courses. While it certainly helps enroll your children at a local home-schooling co-op, you can also consider harnessing the power of the internet and virtual collaboration technology to connect your children to virtual home-schooling groups with families of different backgrounds and across different regions.

All in all, whether you are a pro or an amateur when it comes to homeschooling, just take it easy and remember that this fall you and your children are about to embark on an indelible journey of learning together, working together, hanging out together, and perhaps driving each other a bit bananas. And remember, it’s never too late to enroll your children in school again.

Those who oppose fully remote work argue it makes building and sustaining corporate culture difficult. However, what the last two years have shown is that the traditional methods used to build corporate culture before the pandemic do not work well for many workers, especially women.

In fact, remote work can build a more gender-equal culture that makes it easier for women to succeed in work.

Remote work has the potential to reduce gender gaps in wages and promotions by reducing after-work socialization that is typically more beneficial to male employees. Offices are fundamentally social places, where employees discuss both work and non-work-related topics with their managers and co-workers throughout the day and often at after-work events. Through these social interactions, employees often cultivate social capital and form bonds with each other. Yet these social interactions can be skewed along gender lines, potentially excluding women at work. In many organizations, men tend to maintain their dominance by excluding women from male networks and from the social interactions that would be beneficial to women’s career development. One key study on this concept shows that about 81 percent of women surveyed say that they feel excluded from relationship-building at work. Many also feel excluded from after-work hours socializing. In addition, before the pandemic, many women, particularly mothers, regularly miss off-work social activities because of the disproportionate domestic duties they fulfill for their families.

Conversely, remote work allows women to more easily participate in after-work socialization from home, allowing women to gain benefits in wages and promotions as well. Research finds that the advantages drawn from male employees socializing with their male managers during smoke breaks increase the gender gap within pay grades by 40 percent and explains one-third of the gender gap in promotions. Remote work has reduced this male-to-male advantage that happens in the physical workspace.

Remote work can potentially ward off office romances and prevent sexual harassment from arising by drawing physical boundaries between female employees and their male coworkers. Propinquity, namely proximity, is one of the biggest factors that foster interpersonal attraction between coworkers and often leads to romance. However, in cases of sexual harassment, male employees harm the productivity and social wellbeing of their female co-workers. Working from home can reduce this problem, especially in male-dominated fields. When employees are far-flung and working remotely, they are unable to interact in a shared physical work environment, making it more difficult to build interpersonal attraction and have office romances. As such, it sets up barriers to help women avoid sexual harassment and microaggressions.

Modern technologies for remote work can eliminate some disadvantages women face in the workplace. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom help level the playing field because it equalizes the experience. Regardless of your title or position, everyone is in the same size box. It also empowers women to speak up. For example, on Zoom, women can speak up more easily by changing their volume while men’s voices are typically louder in person. If women are not comfortable talking, they can type their comments in the chat. Research finds that one of the reasons behind women’s discomfort with speaking up and feeling shut out in meetings is that they are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than their male counterparts are. In contrast, women are far less likely to be interrupted by male colleagues on Zoom. Remote work reveals how we can promote gender equality and ensure women’s voices are heard in the newly built digital world. Women can use it to drive change and redefine their own culture of interaction and socialization in the new era of work.

To be sure, building a new corporate culture can be challenging when in-person connections are absent.

Despite those challenges, remote work provides a great opportunity for employers to revolutionize how people work. They can allow for increased flexibility as well as resetting certain aspects of corporate culture, given that the pre-pandemic ways of working and managing appear to be unsustainable. More importantly, this may also be a great opportunity for women leaders and employees to take advantage of the momentum reinvigorated by remote work and steer the culture in their own way. Through remote work, gender equality can be boosted, making it easier for women to succeed in work.