Feeling Parent Guilt When Building Your Business?

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As parents, we often feel guilty when we take the time to do something for ourselves. Those natural nurturing feelings built into our DNA constantly concern our family and those around us. When it decides against running our businesses, we have seen entrepreneurs, more often females, worry how everyone else will succeed if they devote their time to a business. Parent guilt sets in.

Seeing so many others multitask gives us a roadmap for successfully approaching work responsibilities with family responsibilities.

How to Overcome Parent Guilt

Unlike having a traditional job where your kids won’t see you, you can typically run a network marketing or small business from home. This provides an excellent example for your kids about how a company runs and what goes into making it a success. We include our kids in just about everything we do. Whether joining us at an event, on a company trip, watching us make our notes for Facebook Lives, or taking a call, they are part of the process.

This is a great way to spend time with your kids. It makes them feel a part of what you are doing. Additionally, it ignites their entrepreneurial ability and starts them off on the right foot. They can also build work skills by typing, video editing, social media, and more at an earlier age. These skills are transferable whether they join our profession or not. They are the things that aren’t taught in schools (yet) and are ones that will last them a lifetime.

Lean into Distraction

Think of the last time you were right in the middle of something, and you heard ‘mommmm!‘ Chances are, your response was something like, ‘not now, mommy is busy!’. Think carefully about what happened next. We would bet the answer from your child wasn’t, ‘oh, OK!’. Instead, it was a dialogue that repeated a few times.

We found this with our 2 for sure.

So, what we found was ‘leaning into distraction’ saved us a ton more time. Because when we started answering their needs sooner than later, it was over faster. They may need to tell you something super quick, so the distraction was over in less than 30 seconds. At the same time, the back-and-forth dialogue may have gone on for several minutes.

Please know we do not mean to drop everything and run the solution either. So naturally, use your judgement, but we have found that learning it has saved us considerable time.

Create Moments Worth a Million Dollars

Quality can often be more critical than that quantity, and that’s true when it comes to relationships with family, especially your children. So even if we spend every waking moment with our kids and are stressed out and resentful, are we doing them a favor?

Looking back, have you ever had a moment with the kids where you might say, ‘I wouldn’t trade that for a million bucks?

You’ll notice a common thread if you focus on some of your favorite moments. It could be a moment where everyone was playing with lego or when you were enjoying something beautiful outside.

You can start creating more of these experiences when you know these moments. So even if all you have is 5 minutes, you can still inject those feelings of warmth, acceptance and playfulness into time with your kids.

When you plan your schedule for work time, be sure to include a conscious effort to plan moments with the family. This does two things;

  1. It helps you build in that necessary time and,
  2. Gives your children (and family) a clear picture of your time.

Involve your Children, Often

Involving our children in the business is one of the most significant ways we overcome our parent guilt. Although your children are still relatively young, applying them has helped them better understand when the business does pull us away.

When you operate a multi-million dollar business, it has its demands. They may include long work hours, company events that involve travel, lots of time spent on the phone, etc. And so, when your children witness these sacrifices needed to keep the rewards later, without question, it helps them see the whole picture.

And the beauty of the network marketing profession is that it also helps your children realize there is nothing more rewarding than helping others.

Relationships are the lifeline to a beautiful world.

Revisit your ‘Why’

Think back to when you first started your business. Then, something drew you to it – the need or want. Some of these reasons are as simple as expanding your shoe collection or wanting to travel more, but …

… for those of us who are parents, children were likely a large part of that decision.

It could be to spend more time with them, travel more, show them what’s possible, etc. But they were the reason; they were and are the why. So, when that parent guilt starts to kick in, remind yourself why you started. Yes, it can take a toll when you feel like the reasons you decided to build a business are taking a back seat – but we challenge you to think bigger.

Think long-term.

If you knew that you had to sacrifice some time for the next 3-5 years to live out the rest of your years … 40, 50, 60 years … exactly how you wanted to, would it be worth it?

Heck, yes, it would!

Especially when you implement the other suggestions for overcoming parent guilt mentioned in this post.

Overall, an essential piece of advice we can give you is to be easy on yourself, even with the enormous challenges that starting and running a business and having children simultaneously can bring. Parent guilt is a natural, maternal or paternal emotion — There are ways to overcome and manage it, but nothing is more rewarding than involving them.

Consider checking out this blog as something you could do as a family too! (click here)

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