A work at home parent is an entrepreneur who works from home and integrates parenting into his or her business activities.

Entrepreneurs choose to run businesses from home for a variety of reasons, including lower business expenses, personal health limitations, eliminating commuting or in order to have a more flexible schedule. This flexibility can give an entrepreneur more options when planning tasks, business and non-business, including parenting duties. While some home-based entrepreneurs opt for childcare outside the home, others integrate child rearing into their work day and workspace. They are considered work-at-home parents.

Many families start home-based businesses in order to care for their children while still creating income.

The desire to care for one’s own children, the incompatibility of a 9-to-5 work day with school hours or sick days, and the expense of childcare prompt many parents to change or leave their job in the workforce in order to be available to their children. Many families build a business schedule that can be integrated with their parenting duties.

Integrating Business and Parenting

An integration of parenting and business can take place in one or more of four key ways: combined uses of time, combined uses of space, normalizing children in business, and flexibility.

Combining uses of time involves some level of multitasking, such as taking children on business errands.

Soon the children are a learning part of the business activities scheduling. A Home Based Business can combine uses of space by creating a home (or mobile) office that accommodates the child’s presence.

Office Normalizing = “gracefully educate” the child’s presence in the business environment.

This can include letting key business partners know that parenting is a priority, establishing routines and rules for children in the office, and even having children help with business when appropriate.

The Benefits of a Home Based Business

Lastly, the family can utilize the inherent flexibility of the work at home arrangement. This may mean working in smaller increments of time instead of long stretches, looser scheduling of day’s activities to allow for the unexpected, and working at non-traditional times.

Pick a Home Based Business model carefully if you are working around children

A business that demands 9-to-5 business hours, a polished office, intense one-on-one time with clients, dangerous materials, or impromptu appointments may not work well for a parent with children at home. Thus, not all professions lend themselves to work at home parenting. Without good organization, the Home Based Business may experience decreased productivity. That can be due to added responsibilities and unexpected interruptions.

The Center for Women’s Business Research, a nonprofit organization, found that Generation X mothers are the most likely to work from home. The center also reports that between 1997 to 2004, employment at female-owned companies grew by 24.2%, more than twice the rate of the 11.6% logged by all businesses.

The concept of the Home Based Business has been around as long as Small Businesses.

In pre-industrial societies, merchants and artisans often worked out of or close to their homes. Children typically remained in the care of a parent during the day and were often present while the parents worked. Societal changes in the 1800s, such as compulsory education and the Industrial Revolution, made working with children around less common.

Entrepreneurship saw a resurgence in the 1980s, with more of an emphasis on work/life balance. The term Home Based Business began gaining popularity in the late 1990s.

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