For homeschooling parents: Do you have a homebased business?

Question

Hello homeschool moms and dads. Do you have a homebased business? What is it / what do you do?

How do you involve your children in the business?

Answer 1

I was a professional illustrator before the kids came along. At various points over the years I have done portrait commisions in watercolor, pencil, and digital. Unfortunately, there are not many ways to involve the kids in this type of work; although, all of them are artistic in one form or another.

I am spending most of my time right now with teaching online. Though I do it as a volunteer, I can easily see it as a potential income in the distant future (after the kids graduate homeschooling). I am exploring the possibility of replacing the speech class next semester with a teaching class. Instead of disparate speeches, I thought it would be more useful to the kids to have them select a subject to teach and have them research and develop a series of unified instructional presentations that would represent a full course. Once the class is done they would have speech experience, research skills, slide/image design, teaching materials in their course of interest, as well as a potential teen income if they get a vRoom and offer the course to other homeschool teens. Course that the kids seem to be leaning toward are one such as "How to use Blender" (a powerful, free, 3-D Animation program), "How to do Game Mods" (modifying commercial PC Games to create your own game), "HTML Basics", etc. It is just an idea at this point.

Answer 2

No homebased business here.  We are a two income family.  Husband takes son to work to supervise assignments that I have explained and 'taught'.

It works for us.

Answer 3

I tried a phone calling distribution thing.  

It was a great business and I was successful at it.

However, I found that I can't do it and home school, and run my house, and tending my infant, and driving my ten year old to her already scheduled life, and being a wife, and, and, and...

My coach often says things like "well, it has been nice chatting but I have a business to run,"  or that she tells her friends and family that she can't do something because "she has a business to run..."  When I left I told her I can't keep up with this because I have a family to run!