interesting post! Did you see Work At Home Momma picked up on it?

hmmmm… I can’t really disagree on any of your points! This is definitely food for thought.

No I didn’t see. I’ll check it out. Thanks for mentioning it.

I think you have a valid point. There’s no arguing that moms can run a successful business and manage a family at the same time. No. Not all WAHMs are unprofessional, but a few are, and they’re the ones who give us a bad reputation.

When I receive letters from people asking me how to be a freelance writer or professional blogger, I always tell them to do their research first. Not too many people want to take that kind of time. Plus many feel that you can’t devote hours of work because of the kids.

If you can’t launch a successful business because you have children then it’s either not the right time for you or somethings wrong. I’ve been waking at 4:00 AM for the past five years in order to balance out work and family. There are ways to make it work.

Now the disclaimer: This isn’t to mean in any way that all WAHMs are unprofessional. Indeed f my fellow WAHMs are the hardest workers I know. There are a few as mentioned in the above post who use the WAHM card as an excuse for it not working. That’s where I take issue.

[...] Are Work at Home Moms Unprofessional? at All Diva Media. [...]

As a work-at-home mom I’m not sure how I should respond to this. I found working fulltime in publishing very anti-mom, which is why I now work from home. (Since the invention of email, I fail to understand why my physical presence is required in a news room after a school board meeting.)

But, I am wearing very unprofessional attire at the moment - my yoga pants and my hair isn’t done. So in that way I’m totally unprofessional.

I think your issue isn’t about professionalism as much as about negotiation tactics you don’t appreciate.

Everyone wants you to lower your price right? Especially as a writer.

There’s always a “start-up” with no budget so write the first 5 articles for free and we’ll consider paying you later when we make it a success? Or, here’s your big “in” to our magazine - we pay in copies. Or want the opportunity to write for our website - we don’t pay our writers, of course. Or how bout - we don’t accept simultaneous submissions - we’ll get back to you with a rejection letter in a year.

These are all negotiation tactics to get me to lower my price. But they aren’t about the mom-thing.

Be careful with your mommy karma. You may actually one day have some children and need to use the card yourself a time or two. I think I used mine once when I was 8 months pregnant and didn’t want to fly to Philidelphia for a long boring conference. “Sorry, no flying in 3rd trimester - drs orders.”

My problem in 05 or 06 (whenever the show aired) was people who don’t treat business like business. I actually still have that problem.

At the time, most of my experienced centered around work at home moms because I wanted to network with women who worked from home. However there were no groups that catered to that. Everything was WAHM so that’s what I went with and I was a networking queen.

Being pregnant and not wanting to fly is different than not completing an assignment because Johnny’s party at Chucky Cheese ran over a little bit.

Not getting dressed and combing your hair when no one but your family will see you is hardly unprofessional. Throwing up a business website with dancing babies and merengue music is.

Sometimes a few bad apples spoil the bunch and that’s unfortunate. But that doesn’t mean the issues shouldn’t be discussed in a well balanced way.

The issue is that in certain sectors of the work at home mom community, unprofessionalism is rampant. I am not alone in those sentiments. Are other people who work from home unprofessional as well? Of course but that wasn’t the focus of this piece.

My hope was that people would read this and say “hmmm, am I doing anything that could hurt my business?” and so far that’s been the reaction.

As for needing to pull the mommy card myself, I stated: “It can’t be all business, all the time. Life happens, kids need attention, and people need to start valuing family. Still there has to be a standard of professionalism in place or else everything goes down the drain.”

I’ll always stand by that. Family comes first, but that doesn’t mean that professionalism has to go out the window. They aren’t mutually exclusive.