This past year I have worked as a private caregiver for a couple of different families.
Just be aware that if you report the income as a household employee, those who paid you will have a good chance of being audited if they did not withhold taxes from your pay and send those withholding's to the IRS on at least a quarterly basis. Weather they get audited or not, depends on how much they paid you for the entire tax year. Your "employer" may have been required to pay from their own money a "match" on some of the taxes they are required to have withheld. So if any of your customer's fall into this and get audited, they could be required to pay their share as well as some fairly hefty penalties.
Whereas if you report the income as self-employment income, then it is "you" that will pay the self-employment tax of 15.3% (in addition to your regular tax) to the IRS. Then nothing gets questioned and nobody has high audit risk.
In some cases, if your customers had done things right from the start, they most likely would not have had to pay their share of the tax on your pay, in the same amount other W-2 employer's do.
