Finding Your Way Home: How To Become A Successful Stay-At-Home Parent [Paperback]

Lucynda Koesters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2005

Find Your Way Home! What is keeping YOU from coming home to your family? Are you a working parent looking for a way to leave the paid workforce to become a stay-at-home parent? Or, are you a stay-at-home parent looking for a way to successfully maintain your home-based lifestyle? Whether you are currently at home, or in the process of looking for a way to come home, this is the book for you. Finding Your Way Home offers comprehensive step-by-step strategies to help you plan and implement an exit from the workforce, and create a sustainable life at home with your family. In this book, you will: Learn why a stay-at-home parent is so beneficial to children of all ages. Discover how having a parent at home can improve your health, marriage, family life, and yes, even your budget! Analyze your options for working: full-time, part-time, home-based business, free-lance, or stay-at-home parenting full-time. Learn how to cut household expenses. Create a new one-income household budget. Conquer fear and turn in your resignation! Maintain your self-esteem and overcome resistance once at home. Create new home-based routines and become a successful household manager. Create a safe haven: a relaxed, secure, and sustainable home-based lifestyle for the whole family! Based on the author's extensive research, interviews with dozens of parents and her highly personal account of her own struggle to find her way home, this book offers everything a parent needs to come home successfully. Finding Your Way Home will be referred to again and again as you transition to the calmer, less hurried, and family-focused lifestyle of your dreams.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lucynda Koesters worked as a marketing specialist for The Courier-Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky for eight years before finding her way home to her family. She is now self-employed as a free-lance writer, concentrating on families, children and one-income living. She is available to speak on the subject of finding your way home, and also for private consultations. She lives in a log home in the rolling hills of southern Indiana with her husband, three children, and a toy rat terrier. She would love to hear from readers. Contact her via email at: [e-mail].

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: AuthorHouse (January 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1418489646
• ISBN-13: 978-1418489649
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,271,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite book on this subject, November 19, 2007

By 

First Lady (LB, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finding Your Way Home: How To Become A Successful Stay-At-Home Parent (Paperback)

This is the most complete book I own on figuring out how you can stay home with your child, and I bought every book I could find on the subject on Amazon. I recommend this one first and then "There's No Place Like Home" by Larmoyeux & Pope.

Since I made so much more than my new spouse, I didn't know how I was ever going to stay home on his income alone. But I had done my homework, and this book lays it out the best.

The book has 3 parts. Part I includes 10 compelling reasons, in full chapter detail, on why someone would want to stay home. She discusses the needs of infants, toddlers, gradeschoolers & teens. She discusses mental health, yours & your family's, physcial health, your marriage, family life, avoiding affluenza and having no regrets.

Part II discusses your options, your finances (which is excellent), contingency plans, your new life, the Porch Swing Test, and even creating an action plan (very useful).

Part III discusses how to be successful at home. Daily schedules, managing your children and your house, staying motivated, creating a safe haven, weekly routines, being at home.

There is also an addendum for single parents and how they can come home too!

I just loved this book. It continues to be encouraging. I've been home for 2.5 years now & just re-read it. It is excellent. I hope all moms will read it!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Read For Those Interested in Being At Home Instead, October 28, 2008

By 

E. Riley-Newell "E. Newell" (OHIO, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Finding Your Way Home: How To Become A Successful Stay-At-Home Parent (Paperback)

Having been a stay at home mom, I am very impressed with Lucynda Koesters book! For those of you at work now and contemplating leaving to be at home with your kids for the first time OR for those of us who have already been home and returned due to societal pressures and/or personal ambitions to do more once the children are of preschool age but question whether the choice was right, this is for you!! Even if you are still home and are currently considering going back to work.. STOP, read this FIRST. This book is by far the best book I have read that supports the importance of remaining home with your kids even through high school! She also does a great job at getting into the mind of the mothers who decide to stay at home and immediately begin searching the want ads for fear that they have made the wrong decsion! Not many SAHM books out there address this extremely common mental struggle for today's moms. She has great financial advice, day-to-day advice, and even learning to responsibly live in the moment advice so as to not let your children's fleeting childhood years pass you by. I wish I had read this book prior to returning to work! I decided to and now know it wasn't the best choice. If anything, it may have at least gotten me to stop and look at why I felt like I needed to go back to work. I am now again on the plannig path to returning home once again. I also love the title... "Finding Your Way Home." It truly is a process that we have to grow through to find happiness and satisfaction in being the core of the family through staying at home. This book beautifully focuses on the "big picture" of being a mom! I highly recommend "Finding Your Way Home"!!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helped me immensely!, July 6, 2010

By 

APL (New York) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Finding Your Way Home: How To Become A Successful Stay-At-Home Parent (Paperback)

The idea of becoming a stay at home mom sort of started to creep in on me. I have a great job, have been successful and have juggled parenthood and work for five years. But once the idea took root it stuck. I wanted to freeing myself from the constant feeling of losing control of everything. And the realization of my children growing up so fast...and the recognition that at work, I was on a self-imposed Mommy track that was ultimately making work less than satisfying. This book helped me articulate all I was feeling. Helped me really think out what it would mean, what it would take, and how I would accomplish doing it. I've gone back to it many times to gain more strength for my convictions. Its truly a practical guide to getting yourself through the very real highs and lows and challenges of leaving the work world behind. My last day is next week.

My only issue for this and a lot of these books is that they preach the incredible value of staying home with your kids, but didn't help me deal with the feelings i still have some times of what I'm taking away from my kids by not modelling a working woman any more. I do value that they recognize I have my own world as do they. I'm still waiting to feel how I replace that.

But if you are thinking about making this big intimidating leap, I recommend this book highly.