Balancing Work and Family - The Work at Home Mom’s Dilemma

December 23, 2007 | No Comments

Motherhood, if you ask me is already a full time job and having to attend to work along with is indeed a tedious job. Working mothers, as it is, have problems with managing their time between family and work. And mothers who work at home are in a still more disadvantageous position as they have to face distractions all the time.

All difficult situations have solutions and managing time between household chores, parenting, and your work too comes easily if you apply your mind to it.

If you come down to thinking about it, it is just matter of identifying free time and increasing working hours by simple methods without having to cut short on anything else. For example if you are an early riser or a late to go bed types, you can increase your working time by getting up an hour early or use the time when every one else has gone to bed. You can utilize that little bit of extra time to organize your schedule for the day or focus on your work or say, to check up on your mail.

The day will always have only 24 hours. There is no way that you can increase them but within those 24 hours you can definitely find blocks of fifteen or twenty minutes when you are not doing anything and not even resting. Even when you go to pick your kids from school, the time when you are waiting for them to come out of the class can be utilized for simple tasks like returning business calls. A set of wireless earphones attached to your cell phone, provided you can talk on the phone while driving, will be a sound investment and also give you some more time on the phone.

Work at home moms often feels guilty about ignoring their children while working and the other way around. The best way out of this type of feeling is to seek help from the children. Depending upon their ages, children can prove to be a great help in doing simple jobs and/or what they are good at. If you ask your teenager to help you in data entry jobs, you will find that he/she will not only be happy to do it but also feel proud at being of help to you. Similarly, younger children can do odd jobs like fixing stamps, pasting mailing labels or fixing flyers.

Again, there are lots of "kid friendly" recipes that you can find and involve your kids in the kitchen too. This way you are actually using your time to do two things at a time: parenting as well as the household duty or work.

Work-at-home-moms are in a typical position where they cannot ignore either of the two priorities they have in life. What is being suggested here is to strike a balance in away that you manage your time between the two and at the same time do full justice to both. Strive to let the kids know they come first and at the same time do not ignore your work.

Written by Radhika V. Rao.

Posted in Work at Home Moms