The Ultimate Guide to Stay at Home Mom Jobs

More and women are deciding to become stay at home moms, a trend which is on the rise in the last few years after decades of decline.

There are quite a few reasons why women are leaving their work to become stay at home moms. They include:

Try our online invoicing software for free

Send professional-looking invoices
Accept online payments with ease
Keep track of who's paid you

Start sending invoices

• a lot of stress related to managing a (usually young) family and a career
• mothers not wanting to leave their babies to return to work
• the husband or partner being financially capable of supporting the family
• to improve their marriage
• flexibility required if the child is sick or an emergency occurs
• save on babysitters or other expensive child care

There are probably lots more reasons to be a stay at home mom.

However, if you think that you can earn some cash while you’re staying at home with your children, you may be wondering how and where to find the best stay at home mom jobs.

In today’s guide, we’ll explore all those opportunities, including the pros and cons, proper scheduling, types of jobs perfect for you, and links to the best online resources.

I. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Stay at Home Mom Jobs

Being a working stay at home mom (SAHM) can often seem like you’re getting the best of both worlds.

However, in order to set yourself up for realistic expectations, we need to look at both the pros and cons of stay at home mom jobs.

1. The Advantages

Stay at home mom jobs can offer lots of benefits that will make your life productive, lucrative and more enjoyable.

You get to spend time with your children

Of course, the number one reason for being a working stay at home mom is that you get to spend time with your children.

You will always be there when your child needs you and you can spend quality time with your child while you’re working.

This is a much better alternative to being stuck in a cubicle all day, only to see your children for two hours before they go to sleep.

You’re at home

Staying at home also means you’ll be able to…be at home. This is logical, but it means that you have the comfort of your own home.

For some, this can be problematic, but for many productive stay at home moms, they find it even increases their productivity.

When you’re at home, you can take care of your house, eat better, and avoid time-wasting water cooler conversations.

You’ll cut time and costs

Having a stay at home mom job means you can cut out costs for child care, gas, lunch, car maintenance, and all the other things related to working.

You will also save time driving to and from work, which means you have more time to focus on your work.

You’ll have consistent scheduling

Being a working stay at home mom means that you can have a pretty good routine. You know what time your child will wake up, when to organize the home, when to have lunch or make dinner.

You also avoid all those work related problems, such as coming into work early or staying late for a meeting or to finish an urgent task.

2. The Disadvantages

Of course, all those things I’ve mentioned above are great and they are realistic. However, these cons are also quite realistic, and it is something that you will most likely have to face at some point.

Don’t worry—I’ll go over how to tackle these disadvantages in the next section.

It’s difficult to find ‘me’ time

While you’re spending a lot of quality time with your child, there isn’t much time to be alone.

You will generally spend all the time with your child. The exceptions are when your child is napping or sleeping.

However, at those times, you’ll need to start working and catching up on tasks.

What this means is that you won’t have that much time for yourself—relaxing with a book or catching up on your favorite TV show.

You’re always at home

Being at home has advantages, as I mentioned above. But it can also feel like you’re stuck inside your home sometimes.

The lack of interaction is a big cause of this feeling, mostly because the presence of other people causes a dynamic element to your daily routine.

Without others around you, you might begin to feel trapped inside your home.

Lack of adult conversation

Although many people at traditional jobs have juvenile conversations, it is still great to talk to adults sometimes.

When you’re a working stay at home mom, your conversations will be with your child. You won’t really get to have adult conversations until your partner comes home.

Routines can be bad

While you do have a consistent schedule, sometimes that consistency can start feeling inescapably boring.

You will have such well planned out days that you may feel that you’re stuck in a rut with everyday essentially feeling exactly like the day before.

II. How to Avoid the SAHM Job Pitfalls

The negatives can be bad, and if you’re not particularly careful it can lead to serious burnout.

Burnout might sound like a relatively small, simple and straightforward ailment that affects people from time to time.

However, if it goes unchecked it can lead to chronic anxiety, loss of appetite, depression and much more.

So to avoid that, let’s look at what you can do to be productive and happy as a working SAHM.

1. Get a dedicated working space

One of the most important things you can do is to get yourself a dedicated, work only space at home.

You and your entire family should understand that this is a space only for work. Not for play, not for relaxation, not for taking naps.

Even better if possible: get a working space with a door that closes.

Stephen King wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot in the laundry room of the trailer he lived in with his wife. But the room had a door that closed, and it allowed him to work more effectively.

2. Get dressed up

This can be summed up pretty easily: don’t work in your jammies. Although it is a nice feeling to do your work in your pajamas, you should have a routine where you’re getting (semi) dressed for work each day.

Don’t fall back on your mommy jeans either. Although they’re comfortable and they look very nice, the purpose of dressing up a bit for work is the effect clothing has on your brain.

You don’t want to be too comfortable at home, and therefore you should dress up a bit to face the working day more productively.

3. Get outside every day

In your stay at home mom schedule, you need to dedicate some time for you to go out and get some fresh air.

This can be a great time to take your child out for a walk regularly, for example, before or after lunch. If your child allows, you can even stop at Starbucks for a quick coffee.

Even 30 minutes outside will do the trick, so that you’re not cutting too much into your work schedule. Taking a break from the home setting everyday will help you avoid burnout.

4. Exercise regularly

OK, this is pretty much pushing it, I understand. With taking care of your child and having to do your work, how do you go about squeezing in time to go to the gym?

Well, that’s the great thing about being at home. You can do plenty of exercises at home. You rarely need expensive equipment—or any equipment at all.

Even better, children love activity and you can get your child to join in (and laugh with you) as you do your workout.

5. Use the traffic light interruption system

One popular way that women are effective at their work at home jobs is by setting limits on when their children can interrupt them. Interruptions may seem insignificant, but many of them for a long enough timeline can lead you to not getting much done at all.

One great way to set those limitations is by using the traffic light system. Set up green, orange or red signs (a nice activity you can do with your child).

Green means it’s OK to interrupt mommy and noise isn’t really a problem.

Yellow means that mommy can help if they really need it, but try to keep the noise down to a minimum. This is the most used sign.

Finally, red means that mommy can’t have any interruptions and the noise should be low—quiet if possible. Red is usually for conference calls or other very important, urgent deadlines.

6. Set a schedule or list of tasks

We go over this further down in this article, but it’s always important to have yourself a set schedule or lists of tasks you want to complete.

Set yourself two lists: one that is priority, and another that is a general to do list. If you can have one of these for each day, even better.

Before anything else, do the priority tasks, and then only when you’ve finished those, move on to the general list.

7. Eat healthy

Lastly, working at home means you have the comfort of home: free coffee and free whatever-snacks-you-have. Is it chips? Ice cream? Lots and lots of cookies?

Eating bad food will just make you feel bad. It’s a human thing. While this requires more planning, you can’t just eat what you have lying around. You’re not a Roomba.

Your body needs quality input (healthy food) to provide quality output. Eating healthy is more than just about your waistline, and the psychological and productivity benefits are well-studied.

While it’s OK to indulge from time-to-time, that should be the exception, not the rule. Exercise goes with nutrition, so keep those two at a good daily balance and you’ll be much happier at home.

Even better, it will help you teach your child good eating habits, so that’s a win-win on both ends.

III. Things to Consider about SAHM Jobs

When you decide to get stat at home mom jobs, it can be quite exciting to think of all the time you’ll have to take care of your child and do work.

However, there are a few things to consider about being a working SAHM that will impact your job prospects.

1. No full time (without a babysitter)

Depending on the age of your child, you probably won’t have much time to do a full-time job. This is largely true if you are taking care of your young child (baby or toddler) by yourself.

Your child will need attention, and some nice activities to stimulate their learning. Many SAHMs find time to do work while their children are napping or engaged in other attention-grabbing activity.

However, most realistically, you’ll have nap times and sleep times to do work, which means full-time work will probably be out of the question.

That is, unless you employ a babysitter. Then, you can have as much time as you hire the babysitter for: half a day, full day, etc.

However, many SAHMs became SAHMs in order to spend time with their children and cut expenses, so for many employing a babysitter may be a non-starter.

Therefore, the better option would be smaller jobs that you can do in those quiet times.

Jobs that are flexible in their deadlines (should be done within a week/10 days/monthly) rather than hourly or daily would be perfect.

2. Remote in nature

Almost all of the work that you’ll be doing will require you to work remotely. This can be as simple as writing content for a website or proofreading/editing others’ work.

It could also mean taking care of people’s social media presence (a la VA work) or answering their emails.

You may also be doing phone-call work (customer service, sales, etc.).

Nonetheless, a majority of your work options will be doing remote work—work that requires sitting down or talking for a majority of the time.

While this is OK for many stay at home moms (who are used to being on their feet all day), it may become tedious for others.

Be sure you’re fine with this type of work before you begin.

IV. Setting Your SAHM Schedule

If you’re any type of person working outside the office (including freelancers and regular work-from-homers), then you need to set a schedule.

The important thing to do when you set a schedule is to make sure you prioritize.

As a stay at home mom, that means your first priority will be your children. If you have a young child, then that means you need to work around his or her schedule and you’ll therefore have less time for your own work.

Beyond that, you will also need to make sure you have some time for yourself and your partner.

This can include scheduling one or two hours in the evening to spend time with your husband and child(ren), as a family.

Beyond that, make sure you ink in the highest priority tasks during your most productive time. That could be before your children wake up or while they’re at school.

People are often less productive in the afternoons (but that could be different for you), so it’s a good idea to do more manual tasks then.

It’s usually time to prepare for your family coming home, so you’ll need to have tasks where you’re more flexible.

Here’s a great stay at home mom schedule from MeetPenny.com:

V. Types of Stay at Home Mom Jobs

As I mentioned above in things to consider before you start working, the types of stay at home mom jobs available are limited in a sense, but there are still lots of great options.

Let’s look at some of the most popular jobs for SAHMs.

1. Blogging

This one is both popular and unpopular in a way. First of all, it’s popular because you have no boss or client to answer to.

You’re essentially blogging for yourself and your audience, and you’re hoping to make a return on that investment. It also doesn’t require a set amount of time. You can blog whenever you have the time and take breaks as necessary.

Additionally, your options are unlimited and you can blog about the weather, your children, being a mom, cooking, book/film/TV show reviews, and much more.

While that’s great, there is, firstly, a lot of competition. Many other SAHMs are hoping to make money from blogging in your chosen niche as well.

Secondly, it’s a long game without any guarantee of actual income. Some people make money within the first month. Others don’t make any significant money after even a year.

2. Craft

This can be a very lucrative business, and it’s a great option to combine with your own blog (or a well-kept social media presence).

Here, if you have the skills and creativity for it, you can create homemade goods to be sold on websites such as Etsy, eBay and others.

Because it is your craft, you can make money depending on how in-demand your goods are and how well you market your products.

You also stand to make a lot of money. If your products are selling like hotcakes, you can hire someone else (a friend or neighbor) to help you out. If there is still too much work at that point, then you’ve got a hit on your hands and that’s great news.

Then it would also be time to consider hiring a babysitter and going full-steam on selling your craft.

3. Freelance writing

I will separate this from the other freelance section, because it is one of the most popular stay at home mom jobs.

There are a huge amount of websites out there in every imaginable niche. They all need content for various purposes and probably don’t have the time to create it in-house.

That’s where you come in. You can write content for them based on what they need and/or what your experience is.

You can find many places online (listed below) where you can get freelance writing gigs. It may also be a good idea to write to businesses that have blogs and inquire whether they need a writer.

If you don’t have a portfolio yet (a few articles you’ve written online), then you should first try to get at least three good guest posts out there for free. With that, you’ll have more luck with your freelance writing search.

4. Other freelancing

On sites such as Fiverr, Upwork and People Per Hour, you can find a wide variety of jobs that need doing. You are not just limited by writing and editing skills.

You will find a lot of tasks related to the online world, such as software and app development, coding, design, social media marketing, etc.

If you have skill in these, you can find a lot of opportunities (one-time, short-term and long-term) for great, flexible work.

5. Your own business

You may have lots of ideas on your own, and you shouldn’t fear starting your own business.

Most of the businesses that you can do as a stay at home mom involves direct sales. This includes firstly choosing a product that you love (or one that you think will really sell).

Choosing a product you love is often more recommended, seeing as starting your own direct sales business can be very hard, especially in the beginning.

If you have a passion for it and the results it brings, then it’s easier to make it through those tough times.

Furthermore, you’ll also need to really dedicate hours and cut back on sleep. If you have a young, active child that requires your attention, then you’ll have to stay up late. You’ll need to dedicate a good 4-5 hours every day to make a respectable income.

6. Dog sitting or walking

Another thing that you may be able to do is in the care business. The most popular is dog care, where you are walking other people’s dogs on a daily basis.

Although this sounds a bit too good to be true, you have to understand that once you land one or two clients, you can really start earning some money.

This is because those dogs will need to be walked pretty much every day. If you charge a standard $15 per visit at 6 times per week (and about 45 minutes per walk), then you could make $360 from just one dog.

If you have more time, then you can walk more dogs. 3 dogs for $1080/month or 6 dogs for $2160/month.

You can also choose to sit the dogs in your own home, although this of course presents different challenges.

However, you can charge per day and make a good amount of money. At $40/day and 5 days a week, that’s $200/week per dog.

With 2 dogs at the same amount of time, that’s $1600 per month. Easy money if you (and your child) have a great love for dogs.

You can find some great dog care jobs here.

7. Tasks and surveys

There are quite a few websites out there that will pay you to take surveys and do smaller tasks.

While you may have heard of many online survey scams, there are quite a few legitimate businesses out there. Just don’t expect to be able to afford a Lamborghini after your first survey. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.

They don’t pay much per survey, but seeing as you can do them without having to pay too much attention, a few a day can give you some extra spending cash at the end of the week or month.

You can also do other micro jobs/tasks, such as buying groceries for others or running errands.

One Reddit thread discusses how much people make can make using Amazon’s mTurk. Again, these tasks (known as HITs) don’t make a lot individually, but they can be your grocery money for the week, or at least half of it.

8. Teaching

Lastly, another popular thing is to become an online or in-person tutor. You can schedule your hours around the time your child is busy or sleeping.

Many international schools need native English speakers to teach students in China, Russia, Argentina, etc. English.

Most of them offer a teach-over-Skype option, so you can set up a time that’s suitable for you.

Even better, a lot of students simply want to talk to a native speaker about any fun or interesting topic, and they’re willing to pay you around $10 per hour (or much higher) for it.

You can also teach at your home—not just English, but perhaps guitar, painting, or any other skill you have that you feel you can teach.

VI. Online Resources for Stay at Home Mom Jobs

OK—now let’s get to the good stuff. So with all the information I’ve given you here, now let’s put it in action.

If you want to find great stay at home mom jobs, you just need to start applying. This will take time, so prepare yourself. However, some of these, such as the micro jobs, will have a week-long processing time.

Starting today means that within a week you can start making money.

Here are some of the best online resources to find the stat at home mom jobs that will help you earn supplemental income.

Freelance writing

• iWriter
• Expresswriters.com
• Online Writing Jobs
• Text Broker
• Zerys
• Writeraccess.com
• Sponsored Reviews
• BloggingPro Jobs

Other freelancing

• Sologig
• Elance
• Guru
• Logoworks
• Logos for websites
• Arise
• Liveops
• Homeworking
• Mysteryshop
• Find focus groups
• Qualvu

Tasks & Errands

• TaskRabbit
• Guru
• ClickWorker
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Fiverr
• oDesk
• CoinWorker
• UserTesting
• MicroWorker
• CrowdSource
• Clixsense
• EasyShiftApp
• FieldAgent
• Gigwalk

Surveys for money

• Cash Crate
• Vindale Research
• Inbox Dollars
• MySurvey
• IPSOS I-Say
• Pinecone Research
• Swagbucks
• Global Test Market
• Harris Poll
• VIP Voice
• Fusion Cash
• Toluna
• Opinion Outpost
• MobileXpression
• Survey Downline
• Survey Junkie
• Google Opinion Rewards

Teaching

• Wyzant
• Tutorz
• Tutor Match
• Oodle (search for “tutor” or “teaching”)
• Upwork ESL Teaching Jobs
• ESL Cafe Job List (all ESL jobs; search for “online” or “skype”)
• TeachAway Online Teaching Jobs

VII. Summary

Being a stay at home mom can bring lots of advantages, including:

• you’ll be at home with your children
• you’ll cut time and costs
• you’ll have a consistent schedule

But it’s also important to remember the many disadvantages. These are:

• difficulty in finding ‘me’ time
• you’ll always be at home
• you won’t have adult conversations
• you could get bored with the routine

In order to avoid these pitfalls, you should:

• get a dedicated work space
• dress up a little for work
• get outside every day
• exercise regularly
• use an interruption system
• set yourself a schedule or priority list
• eat healthy regularly

Before starting to look for stay at home mom jobs, you should consider:

• there are probably no full-time positions for you unless you have older children or a babysitter
• most of the work will be remote, in front of a computer or on the phone all day

To set your SAHM schedule, you should dedicate time for yourself, your child(ren) and your partners, as well as your job.

There are generally a few popular jobs for SAHMs:

• blogging
• craft
• freelance writing
• other types of freelancing (design, coding, developing, etc.)
• doing your own direct sales business
• dog sitting/walking
• doing micro tasks and taking surveys
• teaching (online or in-person)

There are plenty of online resources to help you find a job in each of these categories.

With the right resources and knowledge from this article, you’ll have immense success, joy and fulfillment as a working stay at home mom.

Good luck!