Balancing Motherhood AND Your Busy Work Schedule

When it comes to handling the stress, strife, and competing demands of work-life and mom-life, single moms in particular do it all – solo!

With all these responsibilities it can often feel as though very important things are slipping through the cracks. As work gets busier, your home-life usually feels like it does too!

The day-to-day challenge of feeding, educating, and caring for children is already hard enough without throwing in the added stress of earning enough money to sustain your family and feel satisfied in your career.

All families have their own unique way of handling this work-life balance. This article, however, will serve as a rough blueprint for single moms looking to find a better balance between their work and home life!

Here are five tips to help you learn how to balance motherhood and your career:

Tip #1 Capture the stolen moments.

As a single mother, time is your biggest commodity. Lazy Sundays in bed watching cartoons with your child, pizza and movie nights with your teens. Whatever moments you find most precious – our biggest suggestion it to hold onto them and try to make more room for them. While time is your biggest commodity, it’s also most likely your biggest enemy. Often, it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything you need to get done.

Whether it’s staying up late with your sick child, helping them finish last minute homework, or enforcing house rules, being a single mother is a lot to handle and it requires a lot of juggling! Add in the pressure of work deadlines and office politics, and you’re wondering where your day just went. Because of this you must figure out where you can save time and maximize on the things that matter most.

Be aware that time moves quickly and you need to take advantage of the small, precious moments to connect with your child.

Tip #2 Create a vision of what you want work-parent life to look like, and make that vision a reality!

As with any big project or milestone, having a goal and working to attain that goal enables you to define your mission, set priorities, measure success, and stay on the right path. Every parent has a different vision of what they want their work-home life to look like and so every parent will have their own set of goals and priorities.

The important thing is that your vision needs to be forced into reality. You do this by working everyday to attain your goals and meet your priorities! Want to be home every night for dinner? Make it happen. Never want to miss a soccer game? Add them all into your work calendar. No matter what your individual goals are, you need to constantly be working towards them for both you and your child.

Tip #3 Arrange your work schedule in a way that feels right to you.

As a single parent, you may need to look into night shifts, part-time work, or a work-from-home setup. Although not all single moms have to sacrifice higher pay for more time with their kids, some moms do. Every situation is different so you need to do what feels right to you.

A lot of companies understand that in this modern world a flexible work schedule actually leads to more dedicated and hard-working employees. So don’t be scared to ask for a different work schedule than what you currently have. You can also maximize time with your children by negotiating a part-time or full-time work from home setup.

The big takeaway here is that you don’t need to sacrifice your career goals for a stable family life. In this day-and-age, with all our modern advances and technological improvements, you truly can have it ALL!

Tip #4 Create a village and make it work for you!

The old saying: raising a child takes a village could not be more accurate, especially for single mothers! Your job is to build and manage your village the same way you would manage a group of colleagues at the office.

Get enough people on your team – cast a wide web of teachers you trust, neighbors you like, friends with children of similar ages, etc.

Having this support system will be a huge help when you’re in a bind and need a babysitter while you work late. Plus it’ll also be a huge help in just day-to-day life!

It helps to surround both you and your child with people you carry about who can help and be there for you. You should also make sure all the people in your child’s life are immediately and very easily reached in case of emergencies!

Tip #5 Stop saying YES to everything. 

You don’t always have to be a doer. This is an incredibly difficult concept to latch onto in our modern society, where we all thrive on being heroes and doing everything ourselves!

But in order to thrive as a working parent you need to unlearn this behavior and set into motion new patterns. This includes delegating wherever possible – both at work and at home.

Try passing simple or easy work projects onto assistants or colleagues, and let your friends/family/babysitters help out more at home. The better you delegate the more of a Supermom you can be to your little ones!

Single Mom Spot is an online community for single moms that are seeking real, offline change. We want all of our mamas to live their best lives now as women AND mothers. If you found this article helpful or have an idea you would like to see added to it, please, comment below!

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