Working from Home – The Best Option for Moms

By Radhika Rao

If you are a working person, you may have thought through your decision to have a child numerous times. This is essential because most mothers would like to spend a substantial amount of time taking care of their children themselves and ensuring that they grow up to be responsible and successful in whatever they choose to do.

However, giving up a career and becoming a full-time mother may be an option that you may not find extremely attractive as well. This is more pertinent for women who take their careers seriously and plan to grow significantly in their field of work. Additionally, household finances and expected increase in outlay after the child is born may not allow you the luxury of being a full-time mother.

And therefore, the option that presents itself in front of most mothers who would like to maintain a balance between work and children is the obvious one – work from home.

The benefits of working from home are fairly obvious to someone who has assessed the situation in her context. Working from home allows you the flexibility of choosing the time that you will utilize to work. It enables you to pick your children from school, spend time with them over lunch, and accompany them on field trips and birthday parties. You may never have to miss a football match that your son is playing in, if you are working from home and have the flexibility to adjust your timings.

Leaving your child in a day care when your child is not well is a task that most mothers find difficult. With the new found flexibility that you have in a work-from-home scenario, you can tend sick children while you work. Appointments to the doctor do not have to be scheduled depending on whether you have a meeting with a team or not!.

For a working mother, maintaining a balance between home chores, time with children and a job is a Herculean task. If you decide to work from home, you can manage time more efficiently and multi-task to achieve better results. For example, you can do the laundry while you work on your computer. Cooking dinner can also be done while you are speaking to a client for some potential business on phone. You can do your business networking on phone as you drive to pick up groceries.

And the list of benefits goes on! You can control the amount of work you put in based on an assessment of how much you want to make in a month. Vacations can be planned in tandem with school summer holidays. And to top it all, there will be no need to tolerate that angry and irritable superior of yours anymore who cannot appreciate why you need to leave on time to pick up your kids from the daycare center.

Even though the idea of working from home is appealing, you must think about the practical aspects of implementing your idea. If you do not plan ahead, you may find yourself in a situation where you are unable to concentrate on your work while your child is at home. You may find it too irresistible to spend all the time that you have with your child. On the other hand, you may suddenly find that all your friends and neighbors plan to pay you a visit just because you are available at home now. Your spouse may start depending on you to a higher extent to complete the household chores. The kind of roadblocks that a work-at-home mom can face may be endless.

It is therefore, essential that proper planning be carried out before actually taking the final decision. The ideal aspect of the whole thing actually is to start your work from home even before the child is born. In such a scenario, the child grows up sharing his / her time with your work. Tantrums for your time will be less of an issue if your child has grown up knowing that there are certain periods of time that mom needs to complete her work.

The art of time management is a crucial factor in the success of your attempts to work from home. Even though you do not report into a boss, make sure that you are your own strict boss. Keep a specific time for play with kids, household chores and work. Ensure that you leave some room for time for yourself and your spouse while you are in the process of scheduling.

One of the most important aspects of scheduling includes planning work while your children are at school or sleeping. Another time that may probably suit you is the night time, after your children have gone to bed for the day. With sleep patterns having been disrupted anyways, many mothers actually find working late in the night comes naturally.

If you plan certain activities for children that they enjoy doing you will realize that you can work and enjoy what they are doing at the same time. Choosing the right age appropriate activities is important for them to really get engrossed in the activity.

It is important that you do not lock yourself in a separate room while you work. If your child feels left out every time you step into your work room, he is likely to detest your work as he grows older. On the other hand, learning to work effectively even if it means being disturbed and interrupted at times is a better option in the long run.

All said and done, the fact still remains that there are likely to be some peculiar issues that you may need to tackle for your own specific situation. The trick behind managing situations when they do surface is to keep calm and not get hassled and disturbed.

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About the Author:
Radhika Rao is a work at home mom and assists her husband Vishal Rao in managing the Work at Home Forum