A work at home parent is an entrepreneur who works from home and integrates parenting into his or her business activities. They are sometimes referred to as a WAHM (work at home mom) or a WAHD (work at home dad).

Entrepreneurs choose to run businesses from home for a variety of reasons, including lower business expenses, personal health limitations, eliminating commuting, or in order to have a more flexible schedule. This flexibility can give an entrepreneur more options when planning tasks, business and non-business, including parenting duties. While some home-based entrepreneurs opt for childcare outside the home,[1] others integrate child rearing into their work day and workspace. The latter are considered work-at-home parents.

Many WAHPs start home-based businesses in order to care for their children while still creating income. The desire to care for one’s own children, the incompatibility of a 9-to-5 work day with school hours or sick days, and the expense of childcare prompt many parents to change or leave their jobs in the workforce to be available to their children. Many WAHPs build a business schedule that can be integrated with their parenting duties.

Types Of Work

Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes include:

  • Stuffing envelopes. The victim sees a flyer advertising a job stuffing envelopes, with “up to 1,000 envelopes a week that you can stuff… with postage and address already affixed!”, offering a payment of $1–2 per envelope. To apply for the job, the victim is required to send a self-addressed stamped envelope for information and a small processing fee. In return, the victim is sent a template for the flyer they had originally seen; the envelopes they stuff are from other people who answer the flyer, and the payment is the processing fee.

  • Assembly of items of some type, such as crafts, jewellery or medical equipment. The worker is required to pay up front for materials and construction kits, and when they attempt to sell the finished products back to the scheme’s organiser, they are told that the products “don’t meet our specifications”, leaving the worker with assembled products and no buyer.

  • Processing medical claims. The worker pays several hundred dollars for medical billing software, but will later discover that most medical clinics process their own bills, outsource their billing to established firms rather than individuals, or have stricter requirements than the purchased software can provide. Forum spamming. Usually advertised as some variant of “email processing”, the worker is simply given instructions on spamming online forums, and told they can make money by selling these same instructions online.

  • Sales of a product or service that is difficult or impossible to sell. This is often done in the form of a pyramid scheme.

Some adverts offer legitimate forms of work that really do exist, but exaggerate the salary and understate the effort that will have to be put into the job, or exaggerate the amount of work that will be available. Many such ads do not even specify the type of work that will be performed.

Some similar schemes do not advertise work that would be performed at home, but may instead offer occasional, sporadic work away from home for large payments, paired with a lot of free time.