Why Starting a Preschool May Be The Perfect Job For You

If you’re thinking about starting a daycare, I’d highly recommend you consider starting a preschool instead.  I was in your same shoes five years ago, when I was struggling to make ends meet and needed to find a way to make money while still staying at home with my children.  I quickly found out, though, that I only had two options to make the money that we needed: go to work or start a daycare in my home.  But to me, those weren’t even options.

I didn’t want to go to work!  Where would my kids go?  To daycare?  I was a stay-at-home mom after all, so I didn’t need childcare.  I’d also chosen to stay home with my kids so I could help teach them at home.  I definitely did NOT want to go to work!

And when I considered doing daycare in my home, I felt overwhelmed by the long hours I would be taking care of other people’s children.  Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE kids, but it’s difficult to maintain my composure with my own children for 12 hours a day, let alone a handful of other people’s children!  After considering the long hours and the little income it would produce, I decided that I didn’t want to start a daycare either!

So then I was back to square one, still just as broke, and more frustrated than ever!

create the job you want

After thinking long and hard about what I DIDN’T want to do, I finally started thinking about what I DID want to do.  “If I could have the perfect job, what would it be?” I thought to myself.  Then I started writing down all the things I needed—and wanted!—in my perfect job.  The list looked pretty close to this:

• Stay home with my children
• Work for only a few hours
• Work when my older children are in school
• Take off summers and holidays
• Set my own schedule
• Make a supplemental or full-time income, depending on what I need at the time
• Spend time WITH my children while I work

The last item on the list was definitely the most important to me, as I didn’t want to keep shooing my children out of the room to say, “Mommy’s working.  Go play.”

And that’s when it hit me!  I should PLAY with my children while I worked!  Or rather, my work IS to play with my children –and- to teach them too!  After all, they were ages 2 and 4 at the time, ready for preschool!  And that’s when I decided that starting a preschool (not starting a daycare!) was the perfect job for me!  I could stay home with my children, follow the school district schedule, teach other people’s children (including my own!), only work a few hours each day, and still make a supplemental or full-time income!

I immediately started the process of finding out exactly how a preschool business was totally different than a childcare business.  I was so excited to find out that when you teach preschool, you can choose your own schedule, and work only when you want to work.  So if you want to teach during your baby’s naptime, that’s when you schedule your preschool class!  Or if you want to teach in the morning, then you schedule a morning class!  And if you want to make more money, you just teach more classes!  I couldn’t believe how perfect it all seemed!

I love my job!

But it wasn’t until I started my own preschool that I realized how much I would truly love my job.  Being able to stay home with my children, and play with them, and teach them, and prepare them for Kindergarten…  that is worth more than any money I could ever make teaching preschool!  So if you want to stay home with your kids, and you’re considering running a daycare, be sure to check into starting a preschool instead, because it may just be the perfect job for you too!