Balancing Children and Working at Home

For many families, working at home is the perfect way to spend more time with the children, as well as enjoy some great working perks. However, it can become rather difficult to actually manage all of the stresses of working from home when you have children, and it becomes even more difficult when you actually are trying to home school your children as well. In order to save yourself some sanity, and ensure that your child gets the education that you want, there are a few things you can do.

Your first rule of working at home and still managing the house is delegation. This is your friend, just because you work at home does not mean you should do all of the cooking, cleaning, and transportation for everyone in the family. Rather, you need to take some time to really look at ways in which you can start delegating tasks to other family members and free up some time for you to actually work. Children as young as two can start doing some very basic chores, and by the time they are 4-5 can become skilled little housekeepers with certain tasks.

You should also work diligently to create a schedule that you are able to actually work with. If you are struggling to maintain a workflow, you are likely not getting in enough time at work and instead find yourself being sucked into the normal household activities when you should be working. This can be a huge problem if you are the only parent home most of the time, and you have small children and projects that need to be finished for your job.

Look for some spare time to finish up projects, such as an afternoon nap. Even if your child is too old for a nap, require some quiet time in the afternoons for at least an hour so that you can catch up on important phone calls that might need to be made, pay bills, and maybe even sneak in some work on those pressing deadlines. Consider as well that bedtime is an absolute must for the kids so that you can be sure you will have some time in the evenings to work after they are tucked in for the night.

Search for ways to maximize your efficiency. Can you reschedule some of your child's doctor appointments, classes or other activities to only a couple of days a week? If you narrow down the number of days that you are having to leave the house to take care of other business, you can increase your time to work, and spend with your family. This is very helpful because having to stop in the middle of a task several times a day or even a week to run errands, go to appointments and other tasks can really make it hard to concentrate on work when you need to.

As a final thought, that is certainly no less important you need to work on finding some time that you can spend with your spouse. This is something that is critical. Ignoring your need to spend time together can find you stressed, fighting and feeling all alone. Ignoring the problems can only make things worse, so look for ways to squeeze in a few minutes of time, and stick to the schedule so that you can stay connected even during a chaotic week.