Homeschooling Blues

I am so thankful that I get to homeschool our kids, but I’ll tell you something, it is NOT for the faint-hearted! About this time of year, I think many moms are in the throughs of homeschool burnout or at least tetering on the edge. Are you familiar with these symptoms? Feeling irritable, thinking your kids are behind and will never catch up, feeling fatigued, hopeless and YES even having visions of waving to your children as they ride the bus to school!

As a veteran of homeschooling (we are in our 18th year), believe me when I say that none of us are impervious to these feelings ANY time of the year. The thing that holds me back from following through with my visions of sending our children off to school is that the reality of handing my kids to someone else for the better part of every day, scares the doo-doo out of me! So, yes, fear…fear is my motivation to keep schooling. REALLY?? I am thinking we can do a tiny bit better than that? So maybe we should ask ourselves why we chose to homeschool in the first place?  For our family, it was about wanting the influence in our children’s lives to be full of the values that we stand firm on. Not just any list of values, but ones based on God’s Word. We wanted to prepare them for REAL life by living REAL life with them. Real life is full of solving problems, resolving conflicts, working hard, serving others, growing in our Christian walk. So WHY WHY WHY is it so difficult for we, as moms, to put down the books when circumstances call for attention to character? Not math or language (unless bad language is happening…then there’s that) or science or history. What if we have all lost our heart somewhere along the way? And I don’t mean just us moms. I mean our kids too. Have we lost our smiles, our humor, our motivation…in essence, our guts to keep doing this crazy thing called homeschooling? So here you go: I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO PUT DOWN THE BOOKS AND DO SOMETHING FUN OR JUST “BE” WITH YOUR KIDS. The best gift we can give our kids is to keep learning fun (or at least not a complete drag), so they grow into life-long learners. More than that, we show our kids what is really important in life…loving God, loving each other and living life to the fullest. With no regrets.

#homeschooling #oldermom