Blogging With Kids at Home: Build a Business That Fits Your Family Life

For parents who work from home, "Take Your Kid to Work Day" can feel a little funny. The kids may already be at work with you every day.

Blogging while caring for children is not simply a productivity problem. It is a constant exercise in matching the kind of work you are trying to do with the attention, time and energy actually available to you.

The original version of this Building Better Blogs article focused on routine, special activities, preparation and deciding which blogging tasks could be done while children were awake. Those ideas still have value. But there is a larger lesson worth adding now: your business has to fit the season of life you are actually living.

Build a Routine, Not a Perfect Schedule

Children often benefit from predictable rhythms, and so do adults. A routine can create recognizable windows for work without requiring every day to run exactly on time.

Depending on your family, that might mean writing before children wake up, handling email during quiet time, doing simple administrative work while they play nearby, or reserving concentrated work for another adult's available caregiving time.

The important part is predictability. If you know roughly when your best work windows occur, you can stop expecting yourself to do every kind of task at every hour of the day.

And when the routine falls apart because somebody is sick, a nap disappears or family life simply happens, the business does not have to be considered a failure for the day.

Match the Task to the Attention You Have

Some blogging work tolerates interruption. Some does not.

Tasks that may fit shorter or interruptible work periods include:

• answering routine comments;
• organizing photos;
• making a short task list;
• checking links;
• brainstorming headlines;
• doing light formatting;
• collecting ideas or research to review later.

Tasks such as writing a complicated article, negotiating a contract, recording audio, analyzing data or solving a technical problem may need a more protected block of attention.

Planning around that difference can be far more effective than trying to squeeze "work" into every available five minutes.

Preparation Still Saves Time

The original article recommended keeping frequently needed child-care items near the workspace. The specific examples reflected life with babies and young children, but the larger principle remains useful: reduce unnecessary transitions.

Prepare what you reasonably can before a work block begins. That might mean having snacks or water ready, setting out an age-appropriate activity, charging the laptop, gathering the notes you need or opening the documents you intend to work on.

The goal is not to engineer children out of the workday. It is to avoid spending a precious 30-minute window searching for everything you need before you can begin.

Special Activities Can Create a Useful Work Window

The original post suggested keeping certain books, puzzles, coloring supplies or toys specifically for times when a parent needs to blog. That can still be a useful idea for some families.

It does not need to become an elaborate system. A small rotation of activities that a child enjoys independently may create a predictable period when both parent and child have something of their own to do.

Age, temperament and supervision needs matter. What works beautifully for one child may be completely unrealistic for another.

Stop Measuring Your Workday Against Someone Else's

A parent with a toddler at home does not have the same workday as someone with school-age children. A single parent does not have the same support structure as someone sharing caregiving with another adult. Homeschooling, disability, elder care, employment outside the home and dozens of other realities can change what a workday looks like.

That is why generic advice such as "just wake up at 5 a.m." or "time-block your whole day" can be frustrating rather than useful.

Use productivity ideas as tools. Keep the ones that make your life easier. Discard the ones that require pretending your circumstances are different from what they are.

Let Children See That Work Has Value

Working from home can give children an opportunity to see that creative and entrepreneurial work is real work.

Depending on their age, they may be interested in what you are making, why you take photographs, how a website works, where a book comes from, why businesses answer customers or how an idea becomes something other people can read or buy.

That does not mean children need to become part of the content or the business. They can learn about your work without becoming your public brand.

Be Careful About Putting Children Online

The original article ended by suggesting that children seven and older might start their own blogs. In the early blogging era, that could sound like a simple creative project. Today, it deserves considerably more thought.

A child can absolutely learn writing, photography, design, coding and digital publishing skills. But learning those skills does not require immediately creating a public identity or publishing personal information for strangers.

Parents should consider privacy, platform age requirements, account ownership, location information, photographs, comments, data collection and the permanence of a child's digital footprint. A private family site, offline document, supervised project or other limited-audience format may provide the creative experience without making everything public.

Most importantly, a child should not feel obligated to become content because a parent works online.

Protect the Difference Between Family Life and Content

When blogging happens inside the home, the boundary between living something and documenting it can become surprisingly thin.

Not every funny thing a child says needs to become a social post. Not every difficult family moment needs to become a personal essay. Not every outing needs to double as content production.

You can have a personal voice and share family experiences while still deciding that some memories belong only to the people who lived them.

That boundary can also help the blogger. A life in which everything must become useful content can make it difficult to ever truly stop working.

Build Systems That Help You Stop

One of the goals of a sustainable blogging business should be making it easier to close the computer.

Templates, checklists, editorial calendars, scheduled content, reusable workflows and clearly defined priorities can all reduce the amount of mental work that follows you after the workday ends.

A short list of three important tasks can sometimes be more useful than a giant master list that guarantees you will finish the day feeling behind.

A Simple Work-at-Home Parent Planning Exercise

Instead of designing an ideal week, look at the week you actually have coming up.

1. Identify the two or three work blocks when you are most likely to have focused attention.
2. Choose the tasks that genuinely require those blocks.
3. Create a small list of interruptible tasks for less predictable periods.
4. Prepare anything that will make those work windows easier to use.
5. Choose what you are not going to try to accomplish this week.
6. Decide when work is finished so family time does not automatically become leftover work time.

That final step is easy to overlook. Productivity is not only about getting more done. Sometimes it is about deciding that enough has been done.

Your Blog Should Fit Into Your Life

There will be seasons when you can publish frequently and seasons when keeping the essentials running is an accomplishment. Both are part of building something over the long term.

If you are blogging with children at home, the goal is not to recreate an uninterrupted office day inside a family home. It is to build routines, priorities and systems that let meaningful work happen without expecting family life to disappear around it.

That fits the larger purpose of Building Better Blogs: build a blog that supports your life-not a life consumed by your blog.

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From the Building Better Blogs Archive: The Original "Blogging With Kids" Post

The original article is preserved below because its practical advice about routines, preparation and matching tasks to available time remains part of the conversation. The recommendation that children start public blogs reflects an earlier era of blogging; the updated article above adds current privacy and digital-footprint considerations. The four original reader comments remain attached to this post.

In honour of Take Your Kid to Work Day (Nov 5) I wanted to talk about tips for working on your blog when you have kids at home that can't take care of themselves. For some of us, every day is take your kid to work day!

Routine

Get in a routine so your child can get to know your routine and know what to expect and when. Whether it's work during nap times which are consistent because wake time and meals are consistent or after lunch is work time and the child has a set activity to do then, there needs to be some sort of routine.

Special Activities

If you are going to have to blog during times other than nap or bed time, you are going to need some special activities that your child uses only when you are blogging. It might be a certain toy, set of books and puzzles or colouring book or a combo of all of them but these activities can ONLY be used while you are blogging. As soon as you finish blogging, those activities go away until the next time you blog. That way they will keep your child's interest longer.

Preparation

This is especially important for the younger kids. Have everything you will need to take care of your baby or young child within arms reach of your desk whenever possible. Have bottles premade in the fridge so you can grab and go or have your nursing pillow and receiving blankets on hand next to your chair. Have your blogging only toys handy (see above). Make sure you have anything you would put in a diaper bag, in your office such as diapers, wipes, change of clothes, blankets, toys, etc. Save time from having to go get things.

Plan

Plan which blogging tasks you can do with the kids around and which ones you absolutely can only do during nap or bed time. Figure this out beforehand so you know what to work on when.

Encourage Older Children to Blog too

If you have children 7 and older, why not encourage them to start a blog too? You can set it up for them and get them going but they can write posts on their own and take their own photos with just a few moments instruction and then they are off!