You can choose to have it all

How to have both career and children

By Emma Jones, Enterprise Nation

I have just read three articles debating whether the stay-at-home or working Mum is the better person. It surprises me to see that this debate continues when women up and down the UK are increasingly choosing to have it all; to be a stay-at-home-working Mum.

Friends reunited

There is evidence to back this up. eBay report more women starting home businesses than men and increasing numbers of women are requesting flexible working from their employer. Aside from the surveys and reports, it is useful to pull on real life experience which is why I recount one now.

On a sunny Friday afternoon last week I found myself re-acquainted with three school friends who I had not seen for more than ten years. At school we had different skills, hopes and ambitions yet, round this table, all four of us sat as homeworkers. The occupations varied; besides myself, there was a home-based florist, a home-based painter and a homeworking employee of the Royal Mail, who shares a house with a homeworking husband, employed by a US software company.

I was the only one who was childless but the others certainly made up for my lack of attention to relationships. Between the three of them, they have six children. The conversation moved easily from talk of business development and marketing techniques through to helping the kids achieve good grades.

These confident and able women are earning their way and taking on family responsibilities, eased by the fact that they do all this under one domestic roof.

Role model

The time saved in giving up a daily commute can, instead, be spent enjoying lunch on a glorious afternoon, without feeling any guilt that someone is being neglected. Work left undone can be finished off in the home office when the sun goes down and the children are safely sleeping. Not only does this way of working work for Mums, it also means children get to see a true entrepreneurial role model in action every day of the week.

�There is no reason why you can't have both career and family.�

So, if you are a Mum, whether you are working or considering it, don't feel the choice has to be one or the other; work or family, career or children as there is absolutely no reason why you can't have both. Work from home and, rest assured, it is a way of working life that you will never turn your back on.

What next?

•	Working with your spouse does not always lead to divorce! Enterprise Nation's Emma Jones explains the connection between happy families and home enterprise.