How to build a career & income as a single parent of special needs kids?

I personally have my own special needs right now and I am trying to build a business while caring for my own needs. My kid is just fine, so my situation is not directly analogous, but hopefully I can share some insight about careers and special needs. I am working on letting go of my career identity. I took great pride in being an income earner and I totalled my own health in the process. Right now I am participating in a weekly meditation circle to help me manage my day-to-day existence in this. It's scheduled in the middle of my child's school day. In the meantime I am trying to not worry about whether or not I will succeed in my business, and simply keep plodding and prospecting to the best of my ability. Honestly this is the most useful thing I have done to help me build my business. I will assume you have the same things I have, which are marketable skills, a network, and a willingness to work. Simply work those every day and do not worry about the outcome. Learning not to worry is the core skill you need right now. I also don't have a stable child care arrangement. I have the benefit of extended family in the area and a support network. Although in the past I thought I was the only person capable of arranging child care, when I told my kid's father (who is my husband, which makes the relationship easier) that it was not possible for me to do so any longer dad stepped up and made the arrangements. Once I stopped being the gatekeeper on everything that has to do with my child, life got easier. I had to learn to manage my own worry and reaction to the things that happened, and trust that the child care would show up. It showed up. I am not going to worry too much about the future. I have no reason to believe that I won't earn and have a career identity again one day just because I don't have it today. I just work. I just do my best. This is what every business person does, and this is how businesses are built. I know you asked for alternative advice, but honestly taking care of yourself is the most practical first step. In my experience the other pieces will fall into place. Since I infer from your post that you are not starving, your housing is stable, and you have appropriate medical care, I implore you to take the time to do this. You don't have to be successful today, you don't have to have a grand plan today, and you'll find that a career identity simply falls out during the process of working, however it is you happen to do it.

Well if you can't hire a nanny, who can you hire to take other things off your plate? Do you cook? Do you clean the house? Do you pay the family's bills? Mow the lawn? Those things can be outsourced. Make a list of everything you do each day, each week, each month, and see how many things you can get onto someone else's To Do list. That might make it so you can do the stuff you can't let go of -- the doctor appointments, the morning/evening routine, etc -- but still have time to run your business.

I do not have special needs children, but I am a single mother of two small toddlers and many of the questions you pose are ones I've had to answer for myself. 1) I can't work at night anymore. I can't. It's off the table. Reaffirming this knowledge and turning it into a "rule" has helped me deal better with the night time crazies. 2) Do you qualify for respite care from the state? See if you do and use that time for yourself. 3) I have this option but you may not - I don't schedule any dr. appts after noon if I can help it. 4) I put everything in Evernote because it syncs to whatever device I might be holding at any given time. 5) I answer emails at night when I'm not fit for any other work that involves concentration. Sometimes I answer emails in the bathroom. These habits let me carve out a rather stable 15-20hrs per week I could rely on.

If you have flexibility with appointments for your children, can you schedule them all on one day, or, conversely, block out one day at which you absolutely will not schedule appointments? So when they ask about scheduling, you say "I need to do it on Tuesday or Wednesday" and then the rest of the days you have more predictable time. Alternatively, you could say "I can do any day but Monday" and then Monday is the day to get work in. The other thing to do is that even if your kids don't do as well with a nanny or assistant, you can designate a "work day" and on that day, they sort of have to deal so you can do work. This is not ideal but it might be a better balance between your kids' needs and your needs than you currently have. Daycare calls? Nanny goes because it's Tuesday and you're "at work". I hope this is helpful. You have so much on your plate and even trying to carve out time for anything else is ambitious and brave. Kudos.

Thank you to everyone who responded. I've got some good ideas here - especially from those who messaged me - and lots to think about. I think I probably need some business development coaching to help me figure out what I can do with my existing business, because, as much as I would like to, I just can't focus enough to handle switching from client to client anymore. I've already been working in bits and pieces and the shock of switching from child crisis (which can be extreme) to crisis is probably the most challenging piece. I just honestly do not have the mental bandwidth to manage multiple clients anymore and a lot of the business model in my industry - which used to allow me to work on bigger projects - has changed. So I probably need a new game plan, along with many of the suggestions above. Thanks.

I think you need to look at that 10-20 hours a week you spend on appointments and rework that. I'm not saying don't go to appointments, but every week? If there are therapy appointments, can the therapist come to school and do the sessions there (many agencies in my state do that now)? How much of the advocacy is really needed verses something you feel pressured to do? If you are constantly having to run interference with school officials for services or what have you, do they need to be in a different school? Different classroom? Is there someone else in the community that can take on some advocacy programming (not exactly sure what you meant by "advocacy") to free up your time? Can you declare some weeks as "no outside appointments week"? My questions are to give you a different direction to think. Not knowing specific details it's hard for me to get specific. I think a BIG part of the puzzle is rearranging all the stuff you want to do into time chunks. By doing so you aren't asking your brain to change gears/focus every 10 minutes...that's hard on anyone. Think of it like Pomodoros but on a larger scale. Appointments for kids only on Tuesdays or Thursdays, scheduling work on days dad has the kids, etc. if you are feeling this chaotic with the schedule I am sure the kids are too and being a bit more predictable might help them as well (and help nighttime meltdowns). Bless you for taking all of this on! I like your determination...I am not in your situation but always happy to be a sounding board if needed.

What can you outsource if not child care? Outsource that. Be it cleaning while the kids are at school, using virtual assistants or real ones for the basic work related jobs & job tracking leaving you free to do the income producing work. Outsource your memory to a good app or 2 or hell even a filofax or notepad. Outsource your shopping to online & delivery. Would a mothers help be something you could look into instead of a Nanny. Pay some teenager whatever the going rate is to come over in the evenings and not so much watch the kids as help you care for them. Do the running around, load the dishwasher tidy up the bathroom, stuff like that so you are less tired when they are in bed. Heck even just a couple of evenings a week. You don't have to do it all, you do what is most important to you and either outsource or discard the rest. Be kinder to yourself. I get such a sense of anger & loss in your post. You are not going to have the life you dreamed, you are going to have this life. You may need a little professional help coming to terms with that, but there is no reason it won't be as fulfilling and happy as the life you lost. Different is not lesser. Your income is not a reflection on you as a person.

I had to drop my boys off so I want to continue my post. I really feel you. I have reread your post a number of times and here is everything that has worked for me (continued from previous) and even some of the stuff that has not. 6) Can you create a product from your skillset instead of being in a position where you have to manage clients? 7) Can you focus on a niche in your industry where your primary tasks can be done in bits and pieces throughout the week, cumulatively, instead of requiring sustained concentration? If I'm the primary caregiver (meaning, my kids aren't at their dad's or with their sitter) I can eke about 15-40 minutes of work out in a given time period (no more than 15 without interruption tho). So I stack my task priorities with those time constraints in mind. Is income more important to you, or using your education and skills meaningfully? I tried to switch careers after my sons came along so that I could meet certain income requirements, but I discovered pretty quickly that a lot of my identity is wrapped in my work and I had to use the skills and experience I'd fought so hard to acquire, so I stepped back and looked at my industry as a whole and found small ways of working in it in order to meet my income needs, even though I took a paycut and was stuck doing some of the most unfun, tedious parts of the job because I could do it quickly and easily and come back to it after multiple interruptions with little damage. Lastly, do you have a dream project? The one thing that has keep my spark alive in the last few years is that I have a dream project. It won't make me millions of dollars, it won't make me famous, it doesn't do anything except keep me interested in what I do and give me great satisfaction when I get five minutes or an hour to work on it. I got through a lot of nights with my sleepless youngest son without losing my shit by putting a pad of paper and a pen next to me on the couch and scribbling ideas while nursing or rocking him. I have a giant whiteboard ($10 markerboard from Lowe's) in my office where I keep an outline of the dream project goal so that I can see it and get that little boost. When the kids are demanding and I'm having a hard time seeing past the next diaper I zone out a little bit working out technical details in my head. It's become my happy place and it has made it easier for me to transition back into full time employment now that I have a more reasonable childcare solution. It is so easy to write a summary like this and I do hope some of it helps but it glosses over so many agonizing days and nights (not the kids' fault, I was in a bad relationship and the needs of two babies and the physical recovery from back-to-back pregnancies were overwhelming me until I got out of it) and it took so much trial and error to find anything that worked, but you have to take your victories where you can get them. So if the best you can do in a day is ten solid minutes of daydreaming about what your ideal work life looks like in your current situation, then that's a victory.

The thing that keeps jumping out at me from your posts is the word 'hard.' There are many aspects of your situation which ARE hard. But I think (I say this as gently as possible) that you need to clarify for yourself the difference between 'hard' and 'impossible.' It is totally valid to say 'today was a hard day and I can't do any work this evening.' But the consequence of saying that EVERY day is that you will not have the career you say you want. So when you say it is 'hard' to regroup after a difficult evening with the kids acting out, I hear that and I understand that. But I also would like to gently suggest that if you truly do want that career, you have to sometimes go back and do that evening work anyway. Hard is not the same as impossible. When it is impossible, you simply can't. When it is hard, is still is technically do-able, even if that doing takes a supreme act of will.