Parent Time

All I had to do was make one super-quick work-related phone call. Neither my husband nor my part-time sitter was around, so I gave my 10-month-old daughter a snack and a toy, and sat her on the floor of my home office. I dialed the number; I got my guy. While I asked him my one question, my daughter crawled under the desk and deftly snapped off my phone’s power bar.

This is what it’s really like to be a parent who works at home.

It’s not perfect, and it’s sure not easy. Yet, somehow, many parents are still seduced by the myth that they can make good money, spend oodles of time with the kids, whip off batches of homemade tomato sauce, and pay down the mortgage with what they save in gas. Get real. “If you want to make money, you have to treat it like a business or a job. You have to take it seriously,” warns Leslie Truex, a Virginia-based entrepreneur and author of The Work-at-Home Success Bible.

Thinking of making the leap to working from home? Read on for a good hard look at what that might entail.

Originally published in Today's Parent, December 2009