5 ways to survive a home business as a stay-at-home parent

This post is part of eMom’s great Second Group Project, answering the question: “How to leap from the security of a day job to a home business without collapsing under a punishing startup pace?”

There’s already a ton of resources on how to start a home business, so instead, I’ll focus on the top 5 ways to enjoy being a stay-at-home parent and startup founder.

Why am I qualified to be writing this? Well, with a Ph.D. in psychology in my back pocket and a child on the horizon, I left the budget-less comforts of working in a multi-billion dollar company to found and run an educational startup that creates personalized DVDs for kids.

It has been an amazing adventure getting Cuvid.com off the ground while raising my 18 month-old daughter, and here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way:

1) Be realistic. You'll have to face it, juggling babies and business means you are going to be less productive than you were in the classic business setting. Accept it, and find ways to maximize your work time, and be flexible. For example, a child’s nap time is golden as fertile work time, but as kids naturally adjust their sleep cycles and nap times, adjust your work schedule accordingly.

2) Get help. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, either on the business side or child-care side. The biggest up-tick in my productivity was when I began trusting others with my daughter. There are lots of solutions out there: day care, nanny share, babysitting neighbors, in-laws, friends… don’t be afraid to use them. We also started getting a cleaning service to help cleaning the house--- so cleaning time turned into work time… there’s only so much time in a day, so prioritize and outsource what you can.

3) Stay social. Social networking websites and online chats may seemingly replace the need to 'talk' to other people, but it is so easy to lose sight of how important real human contact is. Honestly, the biggest unexpected struggle for me in adapting to working at home (and parenting) was dealing with isolation. Regardless of what you think about your co-workers in a business setting, human contact is vital to feeling normal and improving your creativity… When I found myself having conversations with my chocolate Labrador and non-verbal 1-year old, it dawned on me I was missing people. Try using VOIP to talk to colleagues, and ...

4) Go mobile. Another huge productivity boost for me was going wireless. It was impossible to do anything on a desktop and maintain any reasonable type of parenting. Invest in a wifi-enabled laptop which will allow you send email while chasing your toddler. But more importantly, it will help you get out of the house and get into to a café so you can work and get some much needed human contact.

And since I couldn't get this post in on time for e-Mom's Second Group Project, the lesson that jumped into my top 5 is:

5) Stay disciplined. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Besides all of the business, personal, and child-related events that can interfere with running a home business, is easy to get distracted with blogs, social networks, news-sites, and content-sharing sites, so keep your eyes on the prize, and make sure to schedule these online time–sinks into your allotted day’s activities.

This post has been great because it’s provided the fodder for a bunch of other posts on the art of balancing parenting and business, so stay tuned!

Working Parents: Can TV be good for babies?

A favorite Business Week writer James Mehring on the Working Parent's Blog wrote a piece "Watch and Learn" and asked "Can TV be good for babies?"

An excerpt of my reply:

TV should never be a substitute or proxy for human interaction, and whenever possible, kids should be spending as much time as they can with their family.

However, watching high-quality programming with adults in an interactive way can make TV a social experience rather than an isolating one... Most developmental psychologists recommend kids shouldn't just sit there alone zoning out in front of TV, but should have adult accompaniment and encouragement.

Thankfully, programming for young children has come a long way from the violent cartoons when we were kids.... So a group of like-minded parents at Cuvid.com have set out to create the most meaningful, highest-quality developmental baby videos possible.

You can also read my full comments.

Emotional Development: When is mommy mad?

The short answer is, it depends how old your baby is.

SCIENCE: A recent BYU study published in Developmental Psychology showed that kids as young as 4-months old can recognize different emotions when facial expression and voice matched. However, babies can't recognize emotion in voice alone until 5 months and not in facial expression alone until 7 months.
Toddler: Mommy is mad!
Development: The subtle but important take-home message of this study is your baby might not get the subtle facial clues of your feelings until they reach a critical developmental milestone. It is also another example that the simultaneous pairing of stimuli (in this case, voice and facial expressions) is a critical mechanism of infant development. So while babies can recognize /who/ we are within minutes of being born, it takes them a while to be able to understand when we frown when they spill their bottle or when we grin because they're so darn cute.

You can also read my other blog on Child Development to see how this BYU study supports Cuvid's Developmental Videos.

Now if I can just find a way to get Dr. Flom to use Cuvid videos in one of his studies... hmm....

Baby Develops Great Moves

Baby (Scarlett, 4.5mo): Weeeee! See, I had rhythm at 4.5 months!
Parent: I'm just getting my feet wet with YouTube, but this video was too cute not to share./
Development: This is actually an example of the baby's stand and step reflex... at 4.5mo she's far too young to walk or stand, but the muscles and nerves are getting ready by strengthening themselves.

Baby's gone packing

We're on holiday this week, developing lots of priceless memories and pictures, and we'll be back with a vengeance next week....

Baby's Gotta Dance: Development of Rhythm

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): 1-2-3, 1-2-3

Parent: Our little girl seemingly has amazing rhythm, and has taken a strong liking to dance--- showing a strong preference to show tunes (actually, just Cats) and various contemporary country music. She almost always gets up and dances to music, tries clapping, and even spins around dizzy doing piroets.

Development: It turns out infants are wired to move to rhythm - their auditory system is wired to their sense of balance so that moving to music can strengthen the development of both systems. The importance of rhytm actually extends beyond music, to things like speech. The development of rhythmic patterns in things like children's nursery rhymes help child both learn the cadence of speech as well as when to expect and notice subtle difference in syllabic sounds.

Developing the Terrible Twos: Caught Red Handed

Baby: (Scarlett,16m): says "Up-pah"

Parent: After grabbing mom's red lipstick, we asked her to bring it to us, and she defiantly screamed "No,", and ran full speed across the house.... obviously opening it along the way. When we caught up with her, she dropped it and asked to be picked up once she knew was caught (red handed as it were).

Development: the Terrible two's have started and the best thing to do is try to limit the situations that can set the little ones off... Penelope Leach from BabyCenter.com has some great thoughts about the best ways to deal with with defiant toddlers--- basicallly while they know what "no" means, parents should work harder at not putting toddlers into situations (like leaving off-limit things within reach) where they will fail.

Baby Handedness: Lefty and Loving It

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): "Ice-kah"

Parent: Scarlett eats her first ice cream cone and demonstrates she already knows the word ice cream from other contexts. Of bigger note is her continued use of the left hand. At the very least she is ambidextrous right now--- probably doing about 70% of things left handed.

Development: It turns out handedness usually isn't defined until about 3 years, so it is too early to tell for sure. Actually sole use of 1 hand before 18mo is potentially a symptom of motor development problems. To the right is a picture of baby Scarlett at 16 DAYS, spontaneously doing the "Archer Pose", a supposed indicator of handedness (they do it in the direction of their dominate hand). Strike one up for an old wives' tale? Check back in a year and a half :) As an odd fact, the latin word for left is Sinister... deserving of another post...

Weaning the Baby Bottle: The Joys of Battling Free Will

Scarlett pulls a gallon of milk out of the fridge herself, while asking for a bottle.
Baby (Scarlett, 16m): "Bah-bah!"

Parent: Our first attempt to wean Scarlett at 13mo was a miserable failure--- as a work-at-home-dad, I just couldn't do manage the stress of doing it alone. My wife and I had much more success lately, so now the little one is down to 1 bottle right before bed. It is incredible to watch her shift towards knowing exactly what she wants. So now, she will open the fridge (with our supervision) to get cheese or blueberries or what ever she wants to fill her cravings. Unfortunately, she's so smart, once she saw the milk, she started demanding a bottle and will now drag a gallon milk container across the kitchen over to where we keep the bottles, demanding a bah-bah (bottle) in the middle of the day. Time to disguise the milk!

Development: The span between 12 and 24 months is an incredible period in which children start out with predominately baby-like characteristics and leave it resembling a much older child. As children gain their increased mobility, they start to become increasingly more aware of their surroundings. They begin demonstrating greater and greater independence, even frequent out-right defiant behaviors. Toddlers are just starting to be able to understand and act upon their own wants, but don't yet have the ability to understand that other people might have different desires than their own --- this leads to intense frustration (i.e., tantrums). It turns out terrible twos actually start much earlier-- -at about 16-18months--- more on that in a future post.

I came across a great article on "stealth vegetables" which I'll get to later in week. Also, make sure to see my other blog entries on child nutrition and television.

Baby Development is Not a Race

KB in CA writes: "I need to stop myself from playing that "developmental derby" game of comparing my granddaughter to other kids. But when I do see other kids her age and even much younger with full heads of hair, talking, and lots of baby teeth, I start to slip and compare. How can I relax and not fall into that comparison game?"

Grandparent: "When is she going to get teeth like all the other 17 month olds I knew?"

Baby (Jordan, 17m): Relax Nana, I’m understanding a lot more than I lead on.

Development: It turns out there is really tremendous variability in child development in general, and tooth development is no exception. Believe it or not, Jordan's tooth development is still within the perfectly normal range... some kids don't get their first teeth until 18 months! To read more: [click here] .

Other development steps like locomotion and language are equally as variable. Crawling, for example, is so variable, it isn't even a real milestone. In terms of language, there is a meaningful difference between language understanding and language production (the two processes are even supported by completely different parts of the brain).... as long as your children are making some babbling sounds, eye contact, and are showing signs of understanding, delays in language production are almost never anything to worry about. To read more: [click here], and ultimately, your pediatrician can give you the best guidance.

Anyway, I know it is hard not to compare to other kids, but parents and grandparents tend to focus on developmental differences in kids, while ignoring all the similarities that are actually much better indicators of healthy development. Just keep in mind, as much as we want our kids to hit all developmental milestones early, we should all just enjoy their baby-ness while we can, because nobody really wants them to grow up too soon!

Baby Blue Eyes are Better Than You Think

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): things look different but the same.

Parent: She's a total ham. We started playing peek-a-boo (another post, for sure), and she didn't understand at first how I could see her when she hid in her blue translucent play house... but then she became fascinated with how the world looked all blue.

Development: Baby visual accuity is much better than most people think. Urban myths about not babies not seeing in color or seeing everything out of focus are totally bogus. Babies see in vivid color and the only truth is new born infants are extremely near-sighted, having maximal accuity at about 12 inches (which just happens to be the distance from the breast to mom's face). But beyond accuity, a lot of what kids in the mid-teen months are doing are experimenting with their world and new sensations. So being able to see the whole world with a blue tint, must have been a great experience. She's also been experimenting with spinning and getting dizzy (but that's another post).

Next week we'll focus on the terrible twos, nutrition, and stealth vegetables!

Baby Teething: A Pain in the...

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): says "Tylenol"

Parent: She's said "Owie" a few times and pointed to her mouth (since she is getting 3 more teeth in at a time), and we were really impressed. Now, apparently, she's stopped messing around, going straight for requesting pain meds by brand! We've probably only used that word a dozen times around her--- it is the second most complicated word she has said behind "caterpillar". Dealing with intense teething is one of the hidden monsters of parenting, and deserving of another post.

Development: In actuality, she's probably associated the word "tylenol" with mouth pain as opposed to something that will releave pain in the distant future (that would be a very sophisticated multi-step concept for her age, though deserving of another post).

It turns out children are master associative learners... that is, they easily learn when two events are paired together... use every opportunity you can to pair a word with an object or action you do repeatedly... try narrating out loud as you do things. A lot of language production in children is delayed, but they are still learning words left and right, even though they can't articulate them yet... wait for the language production explosion around 18m (deserving of many future posts!)... but as they learn more, they will be able to better communicate what they want, making everyone's lives easier.

Developing Table Manners?

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): Like this grandma? I understand.

Parent: Mom, are you kidding me? I get busted my whole life for my crummy table manners and then she teaches you to slurp your spaghetti? Although, the sound is pretty cute, I guess.

Development: Mimicry is one of the common tools young children use for learning. Here, she saw my mom do it a few times, and then decided to try it on her own once my mom left the room --- it is really an extension of drinking from a straw which she developed from suckling, but that deserves another post :)

Baby Diet & Nutrition: Hot Dog!

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): says "Hot Dog"

Parent: Sweet, take a bite mommy's candle, it'll make a great dinner party story.

Development: Over-generalization is a classic sign of early language usage. It's hot-dog colored and about the right shape. Use it as a moment to introduce a new word... praise them and affirm it looks like a hot dog, but is a "candle".

Baby Development 101: Welcome to BabyThoughts!

Welcome to Baby Thoughts! Our Baby Thoughts blog uses cute baby photos to illustrate funny and important events in child development from the perspective of the child, parent, and cognitive psychologist.

Baby (Scarlett, 16m): Great Idea Daddy!

Parent: Not sure when I'll find the time to do this everyday with being Mr. Mom and Mr. Startup

Development: Babies have solidified their ability to attach names to objects, so even if they aren't talking yet, they know you're someone special.

Here's how it works. Most days we will use relevant pictures of my daughter's daily development, try to give some insights into what she is thinking or saying given her 16-month-old world view, and then try to explain briefly, what I as a dad and cognitive psychologist thinks is going on. Feel free to submit your own photos (include a picture, child's age, and what they said or were doing) and I'll give you my take on what's going on.