A Balancing Act: Parenting and Owning a Craft Business

If you own a craft business and are a parent, you might feel that there’s not nearly enough hours in the day to be a parent and CEO of a craft business. Raising children and owning your own craft business takes an immense amount of time and dedication. When being attentive with your undivided attention to one, you can't help but feel a little guilt that you may be ignoring the other. It is definitely a task to find that happy medium. Fortunately, there are some easy tips that you can use to marry your dual roles as parent and craft business owner.

Scheduling

First thing’s first: develop a schedule. Schedule everything from meal times to appointments. Having the ability to see your day in a tangible way will not only help you feel organized and bit less overwhelmed, but it will also help you to identify an emerging pattern of your daily activities and just where all your time goes. This will eventually help you determine, if needed, where you can cut corners to allow yourself either more time with your children or craft business or both. Once you figure out even just a tentative schedule, you can start combining your roles as parent and business owner.

Play Dates

Most parents already have play dates for children. If you're a craft business owner, depending on the ages of your children, you can utilize these play dates as a way to get some crafting done. This might be most valuable for parents with older children. For instance, for older kids, you can use this time to teach your child and her friends how to do some simple knitting for mittens and scarves for the upcoming winter months. While they're busy knitting their very own colorful scarves, you can take this time to create your own crafts for the business. For younger children, simple glue and construction paper crafts will make them busy as you continue with work. Now of course, while all this crafting is going on, you'll want to make sure you're still supervising the children so the crafting glue doesn't become their lunch!

Make it a family affair

Along these same lines, crafting as a family can be even more fun than just crafting to get business done. Especially around the holidays, kids of any age can contribute to your business (of course while obeying child labor laws!) by creating holiday-themed crafts. These crafts, no matter the genre of your business, can serve as a special, limited time offer. These can range from simple snow globes to unique, knitted mittens. In addition, if you don't plan on selling these kids-made crafts, they can simply be made into stocking stuffers for close friends and family. I'm sure Grandma would love a specially made snow globe from her grandchildren. Who wouldn't?

Mommy/Daddy Groups

With all this time being spent with children, we can't forget about the much needed adult time that parents crave. Creating a Mommy or Daddy group can be just the solution. Pinterest and Meet-ups have an abundance of craft groups dedicated to just parents. Let this be an outlet to not only get some crafting projects done for your business, but to exchange ideas and foster some adult conversation.

Owning your own business and being a parent is no easy feat. But feeling as though you're succeeding at both is an incomparable feeling. Crafting with your children and their friends can not only help you succeed at your business, but will create lifelong memories and cultivate excellent educational opportunities for the children. Just because you're a parent doesn't mean you have to give up your business, and in the same way, just because you're a business owner doesn't mean you have to give up being a great parent. All it takes is some organization and creativity to wear both hats quite well.