Who wouldn't think being able to make an income while also staying home to raise your children wasn't the perfect situation? While you work on your computer, your well-behaved toddler happily entertains himself at your feet. Or you can be closing that big deal over the phone with a client while also icing your child's birthday cupcakes. Those are some of the idyllic situations everyone seems to picture when they first consider working from home. It's perfect. You can have it all without any fuss, right?



The reality is something quite different. You sit down at the computer to work on that project, you child chooses that moment to spit up. Two minutes into that conference call, the children start fighting and the screams can be heard all the way to Tokyo.

Unfortunately, very few things are as easy as they first appear, escpecially when kids are involved. So how do successful women balance working from home and being a mother? And what are the pitfalls that they have learned to watch out for?

First, you need time to get the work done. In order to do this, you may want to consider hiring a babysitter or nanny to watch after your little ones while you work. The babysitter or nanny can keep your kids entertained and safe. However, this is an extra cost that can severely reduce your earnings. If you have an older child, you may be able to enlist him or her to watch the younger ones. This isn't a perfect solution. You will still be frequently called upon to break up arguments and soothe hurt feelings whenever the siblings don't agree.

Children aren't the only ones who will interrupt your work. If you have pets at home, you'll often be pulled away from your desk to tend to their needs as well. One mom who runs a lucrative business with on-line auctions quickly learned that her dog would go crazy whenever the delivery van would come to the house. She would have to settle down her dog down, who was barking loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss, while also having to deal with the delivery man and keep her children happy. But what can she do? Her children love that dog. And so does she.

One solution to the problem of finding time to get the work done is to work at night when the kids are in bed. To do this, you will have to find a position that doesn't have set work hours, such as bookkeeping or a position with flexible customer service calls hours. At night, the house is usually quiet and interruptions are rare. However, in order for this to work, you need to be a person who doesn't require a lot of sleep or who can recharge with your children when they take their naps. Otherwise, you'll be drowsy and cranky the next day when you have to put in a full day of taking care of your children.

Depending on the job performed, there are other pitfalls of working from home and being a mother. Pay can be low: sometimes work-at-home moms are not paid for their work. Sometimes employers find ways of rejecting the work claiming poor quality. Benefits such as health coverage and pension plans are scarce. But the work-at-home mom knows that those children she has raised can be counted on to take her in and car for her in her elder years.

I saved the biggest pitfall of working from home to the last. And that's pitfall of no adult contact. You don't get to spend time at the water cooler chatting with coworkers about office gossip, last night's television shows, or life in general. Your day is spent solely with your children, the bugs they found outside, that annoying kid's shows, and your children's sticky candy kisses. Fortunately, it's a pitfall many moms welcome.