The Economic Costs & Benefits of Staying at Home with the Kids or Working Outside the Home

After college, I was ready stop hitting the books and throw myself into my career- and I did. I taught, freelanced as a writer and enjoyed the work and the challenges of being in the working world until, inexplicably, I was hit with a medical crisis and had to pull back. Nearly thirty years old, I was trying to get pregnant and was caught up in the whole infertility struggle. Becoming pregnant became my second job and then it became my complete occupation when the pregnancy was deemed high risk. Bed rest for me. No more work, at least not for awhile. At that moment, with a family history of infertility, I knew it could be now or never when it came to having I child. So everything else went to low priority and hanging onto this baby was my goal. Besides, in between bed rest, I was living in hospitals, hooked up to monitors, determining if my baby was moving enough. It was exhausting and stressful.

As I lay in bed or in the hospital, I was also figuring out how to reach a new normal, not an easy thing for me, I started to make a list of the pros and cons of working. I even went through the economic realities. When I weighed all the factors, it was clear that working was not going to make economic sense for our family when my son was young. Daycare costs alone would wipe out a huge portion of my paycheck. There were the emotional factors, the satisfaction of being in the workplace to consider but once again life intervened as I faced emergency surgery due to my body's inability to recover quickly from pregnancy complications.

That was when I decided to try to work from home, fitting my hours around my son and, later, his younger brother.