Ojai-Based Magazine Aids Working Parents

Any number of business journals offer strategies for entrepreneurs planning to start home-based ventures.

But few business publications offer suggestions to parents on how to combat sibling rivalry. Few offer advice for setting behavioral limits with children. And few offer back-to-school shopping tips.

All those subjects are covered in the current edition of the Working Parent, an offshoot of Ojai-based Business Digest. The bimonthly publication leans heavily toward family life but touches on business issues as well.

“There are very few families that don’t have both parents working,” said Susan Vinson, publisher of the two magazines. “I think that’s a problem for the children and it puts the parents in a bind too, to try to do justice to both their careers and the family.”

The new 20- to 24-page publication has a circulation of 20,000. It is distributed predominantly at family-oriented retail shops and community venues in western Ventura County and parts of Santa Barbara County

Business Digest, also with a circulation of 20,000, began publishing in 1989. Vinson said changes that have occurred in the working world since she introduced the magazine inspired her to create the Working Parent.

“People aren’t in cushy jobs anymore, in situations where they are going to be there until retirement,” she said. “They are having to [be] entrepreneurs. Companies are down-scaling, and a lot of people are going out and either taking extra jobs to supplement their income or starting their own business from home. There are more challenges for parents than there were eight years ago.”

Vinson knows those challenges firsthand, having raised two sons, one disabled.

“It took some [educational] courses to help me manage--my responsibilities as a business owner crunched against my son’s disability, and his needs were really trying,” said Vinson, whose children are now adults. “I realized if I was in this predicament, other parents must be in that position too.”