Tips to Help You Become a Work-at-Home Mom

Women are currently leaving the workplace twice as fast as men. Whether for the desire to experience independence or to catch those first steps instead of letting a daycare worker cheer them on, there are hundreds of women who are deciding that they want to leave the workplace.

It’s hard to be a mother and an employee. As a single mother, this struggle often became even more important to me – I desperately wanted my daughter to be with family, instead of with people who are paid to keep her. On the other hand, I didn’t have the support of a second stream of income coming from a partner, and the instability of any work-at-home job terrified me. What made things more difficult is the confusing information available; some websites claim to have made moms hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the next article I read contained nothing but horror stories.

If you want to become one of those work at home moms you’ve been hearing about, I can at least offer a sliver of hope: I’ve done it. I’m not rich, nor will I likely ever be – but I am able to work on my own schedule, and grow with my daughter in ways that a traditional job would never let me. So what are you going to do, and how to you prevent being scammed? That’s what this article is all about.

First, A Warning

In printed material and the digital page, there are a lot of scams out there. The desire to spend time with your children and work from your home to support your family can be overwhelming, and there are a lot of people who have discovered they can take advantage of what they see as a weakness. Rule number one? Don’t believe in get-rich-quick schemes ... they’re just as ridiculous in cyberspace as they are in the “real” world.

These red flags should also immediately put you on guard to a possible scam:

Hype: If they say the same thing over and over, with so much enthusiasm that they put the hometown cheerleaders to shame ... watch out. The old cliché “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is” definitely applies here.