The Main Challenges of Being a Parent AND an Entrepreneur

If you are in a situation where you have a baby or child to look after, as well as a business venture to run, that can be a very exciting place to find yourself in. However, that is not to say that it’s necessarily easy. Very often, you’ll find you have a lot of stress and trouble when you are in this situation, and it’s certainly something which you will need to try and get right. As it happens, there are a lot of things you can do to help this along nicely.

In this post, we are going to take a look at some of the main challenges of being a parent and an entrepreneur at the same time. Understanding these challenges, expecting them before they happen, and having a plan to deal with them, can be hugely effective, so let’s look and see what you might want to bear in mind here.

Time Management

Having a child and running a business requires a lot of time, and it’s important to try to make sure that you are doing all you can to look after both. This means that you need to have a really good approach to time management, this is something that a lot of people find they need to learn to get good at it. You might not be naturally able to manage your time effectively, after all, so you’ll want to make sure that you are doing all you can to improve upon this.

There are many ways to achieve this. One is to simply make sure that you have a sense of how much time different tasks tend to take. If you can figure that out, it should mean that you are going to be much more likely to actually know what’s coming, so you can plan for it as effectively as possible. Beyond that, you might want to try and gain a better approach to making use of that time - a lot of people feel they don't have enough time in the day but actually waste a lot of it without realizing it.

A big part of this too is making sure that you are making use of little snippets of time here and there, rather than waiting for a big chunk of time to come along - which just rarely happens as a parent, especially if your child is still a young baby. If you can do those things and change your approach slightly, you should find that you have much better time management all in all.

A Crying Baby

There is no doubt about it: it can be hard to get down to work when you have a crying baby in the next room. So if you find yourself in this position, you may want to think about some of the things you can do to improve that situation, and it’s actually something that you are going to need to approach in a unique way. Of course, you are not going to ignore your child, so it’s all about being able to attend to them while also being able to do your work, which might mean soothing them at the desk or any other number of approaches.

If you have a crying baby to deal with, you’ll soon learn all sorts of ways to soothe them and to stop the crying coming back. There are of course a few most common reasons why babies cry, and if you are able to manage those specific situations, you will find that this helps a lot. For instance, it might be that they are crying because they can’t get to sleep, a very common occurrence for babies. Perhaps they have been sleeping well but have now regressed. There are plenty of tips from the experts to help with this, and it’s a situation that you should be able to get through easily enough with time.

Or perhaps they are in need of feeding, which again is something that you may or may not be able to do while working. It’s all about trying to find that balance, so that you are able to attend to your work while also caring for your baby.

Double Responsibilities

In general, a major challenge of being both a parent and an entrepreneur is that your responsibilities are doubled. Not only do you have a business to look after, you also have a baby to care for, and it’s going to be essential to make sure that you are thinking about this in particular, and that you are as prepared for it as possible. Essentially what we are saying is that you shouldn’t expect it to be easy, and as long as you are aware of that, you should find that you can achieve it much more readily.

Dealing With Stress

There is no doubt that you are going to experience your fair share of stress when you are running a business like this, so that is something that you should definitely make sure you are aware of. The truth is that having both a business and a child to care for can feel like triple the stress, so it’s something that you should make sure you are prepared for, especially if you are trying to figure out how you might be able to make both of them work out as well as possible.

This means having your own methods for managing stress in your daily life, whether that means you need to try and figure out a means of relaxing each evening, or whether it means having a more mindful approach to how you feel in general. However you do it, ensure you find a good way to deal with stress. That is going to help this entire situation a lot.

As you can see, there are a few things to think about here, but it is possible to balance them out.