The Noble Career of Home and Family Manager workShop

Our culture and those who call themselves homemakers, stay-at-home moms, and homeschool moms often don’t see the value in homemaking and rarely see it as a career, let alone a noble one. In fact, homemakers are more likely to have negative thoughts and feel their best life is working outside the home. Ironically, they also say the best place for a child is home with a parent. There are many statistics to show that there is value in mothers being at home to care for their families on a full-time basis for our society, the family, and mom too, so how do we help women see the value in what they do as homemakers? Easy. We need to help them change their perspective by showing them that homemaking can be a career worthy of honor and praise. Ok, not so easy, but we need to try anyway. 

A career is simply a course of action, a long term endeavor, a permanent calling, a pursuit of consecutive progressive achievements. It involves training and planning. It could be done for high pay, low pay, or no pay. It could be done in public or in private. This is a very broad definition that certainly would include the kinds of tasks a homemaker does. Would we not say that a maid or janitor had a career? What about a chef or a nanny? Teachers and managers have careers, right? So why don’t we see homemaking as a career? Why is it a last resort or a luxury? The answer to that is it doesn’t earn money. Our society is destructively attached to the notion that success equals money, and those who don’t earn money aren’t successful. Furthermore, we live in a society where two incomes are necessary to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. 

It’s also seen as a lower form of work, not on par with pastors, professors, or doctors because it doesn’t require an advanced degree or earn a high salary. But degrees and salary aren’t in the definition of a higher calling. Noble means to have or show qualities of high moral character, such as courage, generosity, or honor.  These are all qualities I have witnessed in homemakers. 

Consider the Proverbs 31 woman, a vision of a noble wife. It isn’t her specific duties that make her noble.  What makes her noble is her fear of the Lord and the evidence in her life that she is in alignment with God. Your work then becomes noble because of the way you perform it. 

Although it isn’t the tasks that make a wife noble, her duties do define her career. She does have consecutive progressive achievements. Her duties sound very much like what we do as homemakers.

She is simply known as a wife. Interestingly, the word wife today just means you are married, but there are many facets of her role as a wife beyond just being married. She clearly runs her household like a business. In today’s world, business owners aren’t called wives, homemakers, homeschool moms, etc. They have titles like owner and operator, president, chief executive officer, director, and manager. I’m not saying that we should be in alignment with the world, but there is power in words. 

With that in mind, let’s try this mission on for size: 

My career, profession, and permanent calling is to raise my children and support my husband. I pursue it as a knight in full career, with courage, generosity, and honor. 

If you accept this noble mission, you are no longer a homemaker or a homeschool mom. You are a home and family manager. 

What’s Included In the Workshop

In the workshop Noble Career of Home and Family Manager, I help you pursue your calling by using the tools of business. 

• We create a purpose, vision, mission, and values statement to help build your endeavor.
• We practice with the Eisenhower Matrix, which will help you determine how to deal with tasks that come your way. 
• A growth mindset is essential to grow a career, so you will learn how to be open and seek new opportunities. 
• The SWOT analysis is a powerful tool that businesses use to create an advantage by identifying and evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 
• You will write a resume to collect your accomplishments on one page to help show you how far you have come in your career, but also to present to those who might wish to partner with you.  
• You will practice being interviewed and interviewing because businesses seek partnerships and employees. 
• Finally, we discuss prioritizing margin and setting limits to protect and rejuvenate your mind, body, and spirit so that you love, not hate your career.