There’s a lot of great information out there to help you be a better work at home mom or dad, from how to start working at home, to running a home business, to dealing with the kids while you’re all home. Here are 20 suggestions to get you started.

Work at Home

1. Work at Home Now: The No-nonsense Guide to Finding Your Perfect Home-based Job, Avoiding Scams, and Making a Great Living by Christine Durst, Michael Haaren
By the folks who run Rat Race Rebellion, this book provides resources to help you find a work at home job while avoiding scams.

2. The Mystery Shopper’s Manual by Cathy Stucker
Want to become a mystery shopper? Here’s how, without all the hype.

3. Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home by Kate Lister, Tom Harnish, Jack M. Nilles
Learn about the types of work at home jobs available, what they require, how to find them and more. Starting a home based business and freelancing are also covered.

4. Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
If you want to be a remote worker for an employer, this is a good read. You could get some ideas to help you convince your current employer to allow more remote work, and learn how to make it work for you.

Home Business

5. Craft, Inc. Revised Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Turning Your Creative Hobby into a Successful Business by Meg Mateo Ilasco
If you love doing crafts and would like to turn it into a business, here’s a good place to start. It includes internet resources to help you build your new crafting business.

6. The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with Adsense by Joel Comm
AdSense can be a nice little money maker when you run your own website. This book helps you understand how to improve your implementation and improve your click through rate.

7. The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott
Marketing your business well is vital to your success. This is one of my own weaknesses, and a book I’m strongly interested in personally. It’s on my own reading list for this summer.

8. Own Your Niche: Hype-Free Internet Marketing Tactics to Establish Authority in Your Field and Promote Your Service-Based Business by Stephanie Chandler
Marketing strategies for online businesses in a more down to earth manner. The book starts with choosing your niche, and works through areas such as building authority, engaging your community, SEO basics and much more.

9. Making Work at Home Work: Successfully Growing a Business and a Family under One Roof by Mary Byers
Balancing working with being at home is one of the major challenges of running a home business. This book will help you better fit your family life into your business as your business grows.

10. Mogul Mom – How to Quit Your Job, Start Your Own Business, and Join the Work-at-Home Mom Revolution by Andrea Clayton
The best part of this book is the profiles of successful work at home moms it includes. Reading about what they do, the challenges they’ve faced and how they overcame them. But it also covers the basics of running a business from home, which is something we all need to learn when getting started. There are other books in this series on subjects such as selling on Etsy and making a living as a writer.

11. Mom Blogging For Dummies by Wendy Piersall, Heather B. Armstrong
If blogging is your interest, this book is a great place to start. It will help you figure out how to get started, teach you about ethical standards for blogging, working with brands, earning money and more. I read Wendy’s blog back when she got started, and while she has moved on from that site, she definitely knows what she’s talking about.

12. The Relationship Edge: The Key to Strategic Influence and Selling Success by Jerry Acuff, Wally Wood
Understanding your audience and building a relationship with them is hugely important when making sales. This book will help you learn how to build those relationships within your business.

13. Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet by Jay Conrad Levinson, Shel Horowitz
Want to learn frugal marketing while being eco friendly? This is your book. You’ll learn how to get vendors, customers and more telling others about your business for you, how to use social media and more.

14. Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff by Mark Hughes
Want people to talk about your business? Buzzmarketing will help you learn how to get buzz going about your business. You’ll learn what kinds of things get people talking and how to use that in your business.

Lifestyle

15. Take Time for Your Life by Cheryl Richardson
A popular book on learning to manage the quality of your life. Working at home can be stressful with all the demands pulling on you. This book takes you through seven steps to improve the quality of your life.

16. The Have It All Woman by Susan Sly
Having it all sounds difficult, but with the right foundation, you can make your life better.

17. Back on the Career Track by Carol Fishman Cohen, Vivian Steir Rabin
After being a stay at home mom for a number of years, many want to go back to work. Picking up your career again isn’t always easy. This book may help you find your way if that time comes for you.

Kids & Family

18. Raising Financially Fit Kids, Revised
by Joline Godfrey
Teaching your kids how to manage their own money will help them be more financially secure as adults. Nothing to do with being a work at home parent – this is a book you should consider no matter what you do.

19. Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) by Lenore Skenazy
A favorite of mine. So many parents keep their kids from being kids due to the fears the media promotes, even though for most families, there’s no need to overprotect our children so much. It’s not just fear of strangers, it’s when parents don’t even let their kids do normal things such as learn to use a kitchen knife or otherwise do too much for their kids that children should do on their own.

20. Even June Cleaver Would Forget the Juice Box: Cut Yourself Some Slack (and Still Raise Great Kids) in the Age of Extreme Parenting by Ann L. Dunnewold
Another great reminder that we don’t have to get it all right all the time. Quit feeling as though you’re in a competition with other parents and just be the parent you are.

The post 20 Great Books Work at Home Moms and Dads Should Read appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I just realized that I’ve been doing this Free Fun Fridays thing for over a year now. Not quite 52 posts of it, as I wasn’t too regular at first, but still quite a number of posts.

This week’s suggestion I can’t believe I haven’t made before. Read together.

With younger kids, you can read to them. If they know the story from having it read so often, encourage them to fill in the lines by pausing at points you think they know.

Take turns reading with older kids. It can be sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph or page by page, depending on what you think will work for your child’s skills.

The post Read Together – Free Fun Fridays appeared first on Home with the Kids Blog.

I’ve been reading posts at the Free Range Kids website for a while. The writer has a lot of really good points about letting your children have a lot more freedom than many parents are currently willing to allow. You may even remember hearing about Lenore Skenazy a few years back. She’s the mom who let her 9 year old ride the New York Subway alone. The world out there isn’t quite so scary for kids as the media would have you think, after all.

I just found out that her book came out late last month. I’m betting it’s a great read. No, I don’t have it just yet.

If you’re not sure you’ll like the book, start out by reading the blog. You’ll get a feel for the parenting philosophy and decide if it’s something you need to learn more about.

The reader reviews so far are every bit as good as I’d expect for this book. That is, enthusiastic. I’m sure people who like it less will come around, as many parents can’t stand the thought of giving their kids this kind of freedom. But if you want to teach yourself to not give in to your own fears as a parent, it might help.

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