Ask HN: any of the HNers have kids & work from home?

Sorry, not female, but I do work from home with kids. My partner's in school and I watch children during the day occasionally.

My work is mostly from one good freelance contract, and is consistent, which is great. As far as sharing a house, it requires creativity… I often work late or early in the morning so as to NOT have to work when the kids are up and active. It's really hard to get anything done programming-wise when the three (all girls) are up and about, so I often just play with them and clean up around the house when it's my turn to watch. I sometimes put on a show for them and then enjoy the half-hour's respite and get a couple quick work tasks done.

The biggest issues that I run into are: a.) Not having a social life. Between kids and work, I get in the habit of not leaving the house, which makes me stir-crazy over time and makes it harder to work from home. b.) Handling conference calls or work emergencies during the day. I try to limit my availability to mornings in order to avoid having to keep muting my mic in conferences. c.) Again, the stir-craziness. Both my partner and I find that taking turns to spend time alone (i.e., I watch the kids so that she can go out and "have a complete thought" as Bill Cosby says) helps immensely in our relationship and ability to enjoy spending time together as a family.

We've decided that staying home with the kids is worth it and honestly, if I didn't freelance with flexible hours I don't know how it'd work. If you can afford to have either you or your partner work less, then it will give more time and flexibility for watching kids. One of the great things about working for myself is that it gives me control of both the workload and the work hours so that I can try to live a balanced sort of life.

Sorry if this isn't what you're looking for, and I sincerely wish you well in this.

As a non-female parent who works from home. If your intention is to take care of your 18 month old AND work at the same time, I'll say it's not going to happen.

In my experience, you really can't watch an 18 month old and work from home at the same time. It's the worst of both worlds. So, you'll still need some form of child care while you are working.

I have a female friend whom is a developer, mom and work from home freelancer - let me see if I can get her on here to give some information :)

I did for awhile, first for my local employer where my team was in the office and I worked from home, and then from a distributed company. These were both full time, and then I did part time for a different local company.

I had a nanny there watching my kid the entire time I was working. I did get to take little breaks to see what he was up to (and when he was younger, nurse him) and that's what was great about it. However, I really could NOT have watched him and worked AT ALL.

Taking care of a kid really is a full time job and you won't be able to get any work done if you don't have childcare there as well. Even the 1-2 hours you might get in a nap are easily taken up by cleaning up your messes, collapsing in exhaustion and, if you're lucky, checking your email.

If you CAN afford a nanny so that you're at home with your kid, then that is an awesome setup. It's the closest the thing to having your cake and eat it too, in my opinion.

And if you're feeling uneasy about your daycare, get your kid out ASAP! These little gut feelings are all you have, since you aren't there yourself. If you can't watch him yourself or get nanny, then at least find a new daycare. I used to work at a highly praised/awarded day care and based on that experience alone, I will never put my kid in daycare. Like I said, we were one of the better ones, because I've heard horror stories way worse than what happened where I worked. So... that sounds scary and I'm sorry but you have to trust your gut.

I'm not a female, but I feel that asking only females is making this question only artificially "irrelevant to 98% of HN." Me not being from the UK is probably a bigger barrier.

Still, I don't understand. Instead of your child being in a place where they can socialize with other kids and be watched by adults, you want to let them spend all day playing quietly by themselves or being babysat by the TV while you are working on your computer all day with your back turned? And this is your unrealistic, ideal best-case?!

If you don't mean full time, that may work (you can probably squeeze in a couple of hours a day, at the expense of the house growing messier and messier). This is much more reasonable when you aren't paying for daycare.

I'd also like to ask if you really think you could handle being alone all day, constantly juggling 2 stressful jobs at once, every day. A full time mom can leave the house with the kid(s) and socialize, but if you are working that would just be something else to stress over while you try to "squeeze it in".

If you can afford full-time daycare, are you SURE you can't afford to just stay home? (At least you OR your partner)

P.S. I actually am not a big fan of daycare, and my wife is likely going to go back to being a full-time mom after half a year of working part time specifically to let both mommy and baby socialize outside of the house (separately, in this case). Gas prices, tuition hikes, and the loss of alternative care have made it too costly (she was working 3 days just to pay for 2 days of daycare. Seriously).

(Edited to add a couple of sentences, didn't notice Jem's reply until afterwards)

I usually get the financial argument when I ask people with kids why the mother doesn't work: "We wanted one of us to be a full-time parent. <Dad> made/makes more money than <mum>, so it made sense she quit her job."

It seems the situation is reversed for you, but does the argument not still apply?

I would like to know how you handle this, because I am expecting my first child in July (missizii@yahoo.com). I am fortunate that my husband can support our family and if I wanted to, I would never have to work outside the home again. But I don't want to completely give up the personal satisfaction of building interesting software that is used by lots of people. I live in a low-tech area, and there is no such thing as a part-time software engineering position. My current plan is to use a half-day Montessori preschool starting at age 2 and use that time to work on an android application (I'm a jack-of-all-trades, but I started my career in Java). Is a half-day preschool an option for you?

I am not female but have been through this.

Keep the kids at home. The only time to work is at night after everyone is asleep and it is quiet. Time trying to work during the day will be wasted due to constant interruptions and thinking about other things, and you'll be frustrated as well.

This means during the 16 day hours you need to take them 8 hrs and your partner needs to take them the other 8 hours. That means you aren't spending much time together. That's right, that's how this will work.

In the old days professionals made enough cash to hire a professional staff to raise the kids at home, and later off to boarding school. This is not possible now since most IT jobs that pay well are in areas that have such a high cost of living there is no money to hire a staff. Staff is for executive level folks that make $3 million +.

Indeed, as others have posted, I don't see this as realistic. I'm a non-female, but I work from home. My wife doesn't work (at a paying job, at last) and stays home to take care of our 8 month old. Even now, her free time is best measured in minutes, rather than hours. I can't imagine that she's going to have more free time for a long while, which she says is certainly the case (my first, her 3rd).

I'm a male with an 18 month old. I've found it next to impossible to work from home with child around. I felt guilty not giving my daughter the attention she wanted but also felt guilty not being able to focus on work. A good compromise (IMHO) would be to adjust your working time to perhaps 4-5 hours during the day (around nap time) then another 4-5 hours after baby goes to bed.

I would highly recommend checking out a co-working space if available. They give you a separate place to work free of distractions and are much cheaper than renting an office. Good luck!

I've been a stay-at-home dad for about 5 years now and can relate. My oldest son (14 months at the time) was always getting sick at his daycare and he twice got so sick he ended up in the ER. After that we decided one of us was staying home. Best decision we ever made. I know later in life I will look back at these years as the "glory years" because of all the memories and time spent together.

When I'm not on daddy duty I develop and support two web apps on the side. The only real work I've been able to consistently get in is during nap time (usually 2 hours per day after lunch), a 6-hour chunk on an odd Saturday or Sunday, and at night when they are sleeping. I can also fire off an email here and there throughout the day, but for the most part the "business" comes second to family responsiblities. When I'm with the kids I try not to let the business take up too many brain cycles so I can be fully "present".

A small plug for the hn-parents google group!

I'm a dad with a 5yr and 10mo old. There is no way you can care for a child and get more than 1-2 hours work done at a time. Tough to get in the zone/flow for sure.

We do a nanny-share. Another family brings their daughter over, and we have a nanny come from 8-5. Sometimes we switch and use the other family's house, but not often. It's about the same cost as day care for this arrangement, maybe a little more. My wife works full-time out of the home.

I like that I can see the kids during the day sometimes and generally keep an ear on things. Also nice that I'm here in case nanny is sick and has to go home for the day. My house has a separate room for a home office, which helps a lot.

EDIT: to clarify, I work full-time from a home office.

Although I agree largely what is being said here, I must add something in that is unrelated to work and looking after children at the same time. My little boy excelled when he was in the company of other children, socially. I found that when he was on 1 to 1 with my parents, he didn't know how to play with other children. I also find this true of people who stop at home and look after their children.

I also find they become quite needy as you are the only one they have interaction with. Sorry if this is off-topic from your true question.

We've never had a problem with child care, mainly because we send them to people we trust.

I was a stay at home dad (I prefer 'trophy husband', btw) with an infant son while I built my first product. I got by on too little sleep for too long, taking care my son during the day and working during naps and evenings, often late into the night. It wasn't easy, but we had a great time.

Now for the bad news. While this was all possible working on my own product, on my own schedule, there is just no way that I could have kept any external commitments. Some weeks I got a lot done, and some weeks I didn't get anything done. If you're going to try this, I would suggest scaling daycare back to half days, or maybe just a few days a week at first to see how well you can make it work out.

My sister-in-law has two kids (2.75 years and 1.5 years) and works from home. She has two or three girls set up on a rotation that come over and watch the kids for a number of hours most days of the week so she can get some work done. It would be impossible to do anything otherwise, especially as the kids don't often nap at the same time.

They live fairly close to a local college, so it's worked out well for them to find people for the position. One even stays in a secondary building they have on property with a portion of the rent traded for the babysitting.

I'm not female so presumably my opinion doesn't count, but I'll give it anyway 'cause that's what I'm like.

I do some web design/dev work alongside my other occupation and my wife and I alternate childcare/household duties and work (and have for both our kids except for the -2 to 6 months age range). Our youngest just turned 2.

Basically I came to the point, about 6 months ago, where I can no longer do any useful work (before bedtime c.8pm) and look after the little one. He does have a nap for up to an hour a day and that's the most time I can hope to gain. But then he's also up at 6am and I'm a night owl so I often need a little nap myself. He can of course play independently in the house or mess around in the garden but I find context switching to be extremely hard. Whenever I try to use the phone he's there or he’s calling me or fallen over or something.

After our first child when I first started professional web design work I'd simply work in to the night. It's possible to do the actual work but what I couldn't do was go out and find new work easily.

We started our own business(es) and took a huge cut in our income, then had kids ... I wanted kids. I want to raise them and spend time with them, as much as possible really.

In short raising my own kids is mostly joyful and rewarding; I don't really understand having children and then getting someone else to raise them for you. If you have a ready source of [PHP] work then I think it's eminently doable, if you have to seek for work, win clients, etc., then I think it's going to get very much harder.

/rambling

I'm a father (still pretty new) working from home with an office in an outbuilding. My wife stays home with our crawling 10-month-old. She has asked me to watch the kid while I work from the couch so she can be free to make dinner. It doesn't work. It didn't work before the kid learned to crawl. It won't work until the kid can be unsupervised. You can't supervise a kid and work at the same time.

So what? You can still find a way to be home with your child more of the week and get by. We sacrificed a decent second income (my wife's) and money is tighter but it's worth it.

Maybe you'll work fewer hours and hire a nanny for your working hours. Best case scenario: one of you finds a better income so the other can stop working.

I'm a dad with two kids, one went to nursery 3 days a week from the age of one while mum worked, one didn't (the income/childcare cost maths on 2 kids didn't work out) and I doubt you'd see any difference in their demeanour. Nursery is not some kind of punishment for your kids, in fact it's probably the opposite, especially if the alternative is being looked after by a stressed mum who's trying to do two incredibly taxing jobs at the same time!

From your post it sounds like the issue is your nursery, if you're not happy with it try looking around for a different one didn't. Speak to friends & acquaintances, do the legwork and visit some in the day and find one your comfortable with. I've seen quite a few people give up on nursery because the first one they tried didn't fit, don't let an implementation put you off the whole concept.

Working from home is hard with kids, I do it 2 days a week and I find it challenging to concentrate even though I'm not looking after them (headphones are your friend!) May be worth talking to your present employer and seeing if you can reduce your hours or become more flexible, say go down to 3 days a week with 1 work from home. In that situation your probably not going to make that day up while your kid is awake, but spreading a couple of hours a day in the evening or while your partner plays mom across the remaining days is doable.

Your kids most pressing need is some happy supportive parents (or parent) so don't beat yourself up about your decisions if your kids are smiling and happy. Parenting is a minefield these days, mostly because the natural parent emotions (panic, worry, paranoia) have been turned into multi-billion dollar industries. Trust your judgement and remember, it gets easier(ish) when they're a bit older ;)

I work from home and have a 6 month old daughter. My wife looks after her full time though. I had to convert our garage so that I could lock myself away and actually do some work.

If you're planning on working and looking after your child it won't happen. The only way it works for me is that my wife is there to support the family.

However, if you can move back home then it's amazing to get 20 minute breaks and pop in to see your child. Breaks up the day nicely :)

I did. And the way I played it was to work through the night so my wife could have a full night's sleep every night (in preparation for a full day!) That way I could work all night in peace (mostly) and deal with the baby when necessary.

Now that my daughter's solidly into toddler territory, though, my wife was keen for me to be awake at "more normal" hours so I've rented an office ;-) There's just no way I could be in the same house with a demanding wife and child.. not necessarily because of their active demands, but because I kept getting lured into playing or doing stuff with them.

A woman on my team works at home with her 2 very young kids. She has a sitter come in every morning and stay most of the day. I think this is the only way to make it work if you have a job that requires any sort of time commitments.

The upsides end up being the same as most work at home jobs. You save time not commuting and you can see your kids at lunch. She's also there if an emergency arises.

Another friend of mine works at home and she does something similar. It's funny to hear hear 5 year olds say that they can't bother mommy when she's in her office because that means she's working.

In my experience, kids that age can sense when you're working on the computer. They'll happily play by themselves when you're doing things like cleaning, cooking etc., but the moment you turn on the computer they'll be on you and won't let you "dissappear" into the machine. At least, that's my experience.