Can you imagine trying to teleconference with that potential star client while your toddler throws a tantrum in the background? How about proudly pulling out a professional proposal at a meeting only to discover a crayoned masterpiece on the back? Most work at home moms have been there.
Although the flexibility to spend more time with young children is one of the major motivations for most mothers to take their career home, expecting to work full time while supervising a family is not fair to you or your children. If you have preschoolers, someone is going to have to care for them… but who? And, just as important, where?
In-Home Caregivers
If you want the flexibility of a stay at home mother without 24/7 responsibility, an in home caregiver may be the perfect solution for you. In home caregivers, such as nannies and au pairs, offer individual attention in a familiar atmosphere. The parent can see her child throughout the day and have special daily traditions like eating lunch together. If you hire a nanny, you are the boss, with ultimate control of issues like diet and nap times as well as the flexibility to determine what hours would best suit your schedule. As an added bonus, your in-home caregiver may be enticed to care for older children occasionally or to stay late (with paid overtime, of course) when work demands.
Sound like the perfect solution? First, consider the wear and tear on your house and your nerves. If you have ever tried to keep a small child quiet and neat for any length of time, you know that there is bound to be a great deal of noise and mess in your home. This may interfere with your ability to work and to professionally communicate with your clients and your employer.
Your child will not receive as much socialization as a traditional daycare would provide, and you will have to arrange for back up care when your care provider is sick or on vacation. Using a nanny is also often more expensive, and having a stranger in your home every work day will mean less privacy for the family. A work at home mom already wears so many hats – receptionist, secretary, bookkeeper, and benefits coordinator, among others. Are you ready to add childcare supervisor and human resources specialist to that ever-growing list?
If you decide in-home childcare is the route for you, having a separate and defined office space is a must, and you may even need an individual entrance to prevent drama as you come and go throughout the day. Also, you will be an employer, with all the complications and tax issues that entails.
Daycare
Out of home childcare presents its own list of pros and cons. Your children will learn to co-exist with other children in a space that has been especially designed for their personal growth and entertainment. Many facilities offer a kindergarten prep program or curriculum that prepares children for elementary school. Issues such as staffing, cleaning, and human resources are simply not your problem. You drop the munchkins off in the morning and pick them up after your work day; someone else handles the time between.
On the other hand, are you comfortable leaving that huge stretch of time to a virtual stranger? When a child attends out of home childcare, the parents are not included in decisions as minor as what to serve for snack and as major as whether to hire a classroom assistant who has no experience working with children. Even if you agree with the facility’s general philosophy, the management and employees are sure to make judgment calls you don’t necessarily agree with.
Transportation and sick child care are two other major issues that arise when children attend daycare. You will have to pick up and drop off your child within set windows of time. Most work at home jobs allow for that kind of flexibility, but what about sick care? Children in daycare situations become ill more often than their stay at home counterparts, and, unlike a nanny, your preschool teacher can’t be bribed to care for them anyway.
Many work at home moms experiment with several different types of care before they settle on the one that is right for them and their families. The freedom to choose and the flexibility to keep looking until you find that ideal situation is one of the major benefits of working at home. With such a variety of options, there is bound to be an ideal, or at least almost ideal, situation for your family. Whatever you decide, the most important issue is that you and your children be 100% comfortable with your childcare.
Emily Marshall - I am a freelance writer and mother of eight. Although my educational background is in Developmental Psychology, I worked in Development at ...
