Child's play: How to work from home and take care of the kids

Having a home office can be great - there's no commute and you're on your own schedule. But if there's children at home, that can complicate things a bit. Here's how to cope with doing your job and being a parent at the same time.
4/7/2009 6:34:00 AM By: Rick Broida

Whether your boss finally gave you the green light to telecommute or you're setting out to do business on your own, congratulations--and welcome to the wonderful world of working at home.

Good-bye, rush-hour traffic and time-sucking meetings. Hello, extra hour of sleep and big boost in productivity. Cue music from Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory: "I've got a golden ticket..."

Just one wrinkle: the kids. As in so many other areas of life, having a rugrat or two underfoot can make doing what you want and need to do a lot more challenging. Those noisy, messy, curious, demanding little treasures can level a home office faster than Cookie Monster can take out a gingerbread house.

They scream while you're on important calls, pull (and/or chew) every cord within reach of their sticky little hands, bang on keyboards (whoops--there goes the PowerPoint presentation you spent all day building), and generally wreak havoc.

In short, much as you love your kids, they're bad for (home-based) business. Even if you're lucky enough to have a nanny or second parent on hand, kids threaten the success of your telecommuting experience. On the flip side, your home office poses dangers to your kids (imagine your notebook getting pulled off your desk and onto your child's head--on second thought, don't).

Fortunately, there are ways to work around home-office threats, both to children and by children. Here are ten essential steps to take:

Create a separate space.
Set ground rules.
Beat back kid noise.
Install a kidcam.
Kidproof your workspace.
Protect pushable PC buttons.
Lock down your keyboard.
Kidproof your software.
Bookmark kid-friendly search engines.
Block the bad stuff from the Web.

I'll look at what's involved in each of these steps, in turn.

Create a Separate Space

A home office should be exactly that: an office--not a dining-room table with a laptop on it--and preferably it should be an office with a door. If you can keep the kids out of your space (and out of earshot), you've already solved many of your problems.

Your chief goal should be to make your kids transparent to clients and coworkers, meaning that they can't be overheard on phone calls and that they don't intrude on and disrupt meetings.

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