Freelancing From Home with Small Children

As wonderful as it sounds, working from home to spend more time with your children is more akin to torture at times. Not that you don’t love that angel who needs to be held all but thirteen minutes of the day or the toddler who always manages to test his favorite crayon on the wall when you’re trying to make a phone call, but there are unique challenges to trying to parent and hold down a career at the same time. It is possible to work from home with small children, but like so many things as a parent, this too shall require flexibility.

Work-Life Balance

For most working parents, a work-life balance means staying at work long enough to get the job done and then coming home to be with family and take care of the home. For freelancers who work in the midst of their family, there is a decided overlap that can be difficult to work with at times. In an office you can focus on work while on work time, but at home, unless you arrange an alternative childcare situation, you have to create your own work time – sometimes forcibly carving it out of time you’d rather spend elsewhere.

Life as a Freelancing Parent

The parent of small children is run ragged from the early morning wake-up call until the blessedly early bedtimes these little ones need at the end of the day. It is those early bedtimes that make freelancing possible in many cases. Baby goes to bed, and mom goes to work. If you’re lucky enough to enjoy naptime during the day, you might pick-up another hour or two of work time as well. Freelancing parents are up early, up late, and driven during those few quite daytime hours to make the job fit in an already full lifestyle.

Freelancing and Childcare

Many freelancing parents grow tired of burning the candle from both ends and opt for a part-time childcare arrangement. A mother’s helper might come for a few hours in the morning to give mom (or dad) a break from the childcare routine and time to work interrupted. A part-time daycare provider or babysitter is another popular option to buy some time for work during the day. But for many freelancing purists, sending children out when they could be at home the way the parent originally intentioned is hard to come to grips with.

Freelancing parents should have the best of both worlds. They should be able to work from the comfort of home and have ample time with their children. The trouble for most parents, especially those with young children, is that between working and fulfilling the endless needs and wants of small children, there isn’t time for anything else including housework, hobbies or even “me” time.

Working Arrangements

To make freelancing fit with raising children and trying to keep a semblance of a normal life, you’ll need to make sacrifices of some kind. Your house will likely not be perfectly clean or even in a state resembling clean. Those comfortable sweats might make take on a more permanent place in your wardrobe and the few salvaged hours for television or phone conversations might be performed as double duty – slinging laundry while watching three weeks worth of your favorite shows in a single sitting.

Your spouse will play a huge role in how well you cope with the insane schedule of working from home and successfully raising your children. Let your partner pick up some of the slack and make clear distinctions of household duties to be sure that all of the biggest jobs get covered every week in one way or anther.

Finally, when you earn a rare moment when everything went well, sit back with those warm babies in your lap and be grateful that you have the option to be home, even if you’re working harder than anyone outside of your situation could ever imagine.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com