Family Time

Ways to find family time, and ideas for keeping the family strong in the midst of change.

Integrating a Business with a Family

You have three choices in this: Hire a sitter, and catch time between work tasks or appointments, work when your family sleeps or when your husband can tend the kids, or work on and off during the day with the kids around you, stopping to tend to them as needed. Either way, you need to figure out where the business fits, and what priority it has. How you do it depends on how you work best, and how you interact with your children. I work with my kids around me, but that does not work for everyone!

Scheduling Time Together

You cannot schedule all the important moments. And scheduled moments do not replace spontaneous ones, but scheduled times with the kids or husband, when you are concentrating fully on them are important. We hold personal interviews with our kids once a week, and I schedule a bike ride with them daily in the summer. School time also gives me important time with them, as do family meal times at the table. Fitting in times like these throughout the day, and making them the priority when it is time for them establishes a sense of steadiness when the business makes life unpredictable.

Quality Versus Quantity

You cannot plan quality time and expect it to replace the moments you missed simply because you were not there. Yeah, I miss a lot, because I am concentrating on work, but I catch a lot, just because I am there, that I would miss otherwise. If you choose to work in any way, you will have to compromise here, but women have done this since the dawn of time. They used to have to keep a kitchen garden, raise chickens and pigs, spin, weave, knit, mend, and wash by hand. All those things took massive amounts of time, and they did them with the kids around them. Sometimes they had an older child watch a younger one, like having a babysitter now. Today, instead of weaving, mending, raising chickens, and milling flour by hand, we pick up a little extra selling our "linen" in the "marketplace", by working at home. The kids don't need ALL of your time. They just need more than if you are gone thinking about someone else's needs all day.

Working with a Babysitter

For some mothers, a babysitter is a must. But it comes with drawbacks. First, you have to make more money to pay for it. Second, you may not catch much more time with your kids than if you worked outside the home. If you work in one room of the house with the door open, it may be hard to find a babysitter who understands that she has a job to do, and you are not supposed to have to get the kids a drink of water, that is what she is for! If you can make it work though, it can be preferrable to working outside the home, especially if your at home job requires making appointments. You can spend time with the kids between appointments, catch lunch with them, enjoy snack-time or story time with them, and still put them down for a nap if you want, while still maintaining the ability to conference with clients or attend to meticulous work during which little hands and voices would be a major disturbance!

Hiring More Help

At a certain point you will be ready to hire an assistant. At that point, you can either stop the growth and keep the business small so you can handle it, or you can start to phase in an employee or contracted help. Establishing systems for repetitive tasks helps ensure that you can successfully train helpers. The paperwork gets harder with employees, but for some people, it also begins to free them up to handle only the more demanding work so they can spend a bit more time with the family.

Fun and Games

Take time for family fun. It is easy for a work at home mom to enjoy her business, or be so wrapped up in it that she forgets to have fun. If you forget to have fun, and either get so stressed that you feel like the business is eating you up, or if your family complains that you never do anything with them anymore, then it is time to go take the kids to the park and have a marshmallow fight.

Meaningful Moments

In between all the muck, you need to be able to tell when your family just really needs you to stop what you are doing and give them a moment of your time, without reservation. There are a dozen times a day when a child just needs a second of your time, then they are content to go back to playing with their Legos. Those tiny times, when you stop to give someone a hug or look at the thing they made can make the difference between having your children feel neglected because of your business, and content with just another part of life.

Refilling Your Bucket

You have to take time for yourself occasionally, but for the most part, a woman loves her children more, the more she is around them. A good way to tell if you need more time with the kids, or more time with yourself is this: If you go to the mall by yourself, and come back grumbling about the kids and the house, you need to give the kids more attention. If you go out to lunch with a friend and come back feeling refreshed, then you needed the time away, and you are spending a good amount of time with the family. It sounds backward, but it is not. Motherhood is basically an unselfish quest. The more unselfish we are, the more we feel filled. Yet occasionally we still need to take a little time out to get a bit of perspective. Too much time away though, and we start to feel selfish again, and to feel grumbly about the demands of the family. The key here, again, is balance.