There are a number of things that make homeschooling a wonderful choice for so many families. At the top of most parents’ lists are the endless options and resources available to homeschoolers, not to mention the relentless stream of ideas and dreams a homeschooling parent can conjure once they embrace the freedom homeschooling allows.
With so many ideas and options, though, homeschooling can quickly become an overwhelming proposition—leaving parents frozen like a deer in the headlights or cowering like an ostrich in the sand.
Whether you’re embarking on a new homeschooling journey or you’ve been homeschooling for a while, here are a few tips to break through those feelings of overwhelm so you can move forward with focused action.
Define Your Goals
What are you fundamentally aiming to do? Take the time, preferably with a pen and paper in hand, to define long-term, medium-term, and short-term goals for your homeschool. Setting some boundaries around what you’re doing and fine-tuning your focus will go a long way toward reducing anxiety.For each day, define no more than three short-term goals. As a prompt, you might say, “Today, it would be great if we ... ” Further, define three medium-term goals, perhaps for the current season or semester or period before your next break. As a prompt, you might say, “By the end of this semester, it would be great if we ... ” Finally, define your goals for the “school year,” however you define that in your homeschool. What would you like to have accomplished at the end of this year?
Doing this regularly, and considering the extent to which your daily goals support your longer-term goals, will continually refine and improve your focus.
In addition to specific goals like these, you should also define your overall aim, your mission, and your purpose in homeschooling. Why are you doing this? What are you trying to provide for your children and your family? What is your north star?
Cut the Fat
Some common habits can exacerbate a sense of overwhelm significantly. Homeschooling requires focus and attention. By virtue of embarking on the journey of homeschooling, you’re deeming this endeavor a priority.With that, aim to eliminate distractions and less important drains on your time and energy—like screen time, for example. Curb your consumption of news and online content, rein in your tendency to overcommit yourself, and clean up your calendar to ensure that the only appointments you have align with your responsibilities and priorities. Give homeschooling the place it deserves in your life at this time.
Focus on Progress, Not Perfection
You may have a vision of the perfect homeschool day, where you and the children greet the sun on your morning nature walk, head back home for chores and math before breakfast, spend the afternoon engaging in art and science projects, and round out the day with poetry teatime with friends.It’s great to envision beauty and even perfection in your homeschool, but don’t allow that to cripple you or steal your joy in experiencing the reality before you on a day-to-day basis. You’re not going to have a perfect day. You’ll have some great days, tons of good days, and a whole bunch of crummy days, too. Such is life. Focus on progress, both from an overall perspective and in specific areas. You need only aim to be a teensy tiny bit better than the day before to experience a sense of progress and thus great joy and meaning.
Let Go
It can be tempting for some parents to devise a host of elaborate plans, specifying activities for every second of every day, and then feel frustrated when things don’t go according to plan. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by either what you’re defining as noncompliance on the part of your kids or just overall failure because your grand vision isn’t manifesting in real life, let go of the reins a bit.You’re raising human beings, not programming robots. Embrace flexibility, free time, and boredom; be willing to toss the schedule out the window. Allow projects to wrap up when they naturally do. If a Lego city is in development and you’re stressing because you haven’t done math yet today, take a deep breath and consider how much geometry is built into the making of said Lego city—not to mention valuable sibling connection. Let go of a need to control, and see if the sense of overwhelm doesn’t lift just a bit.
Define Nonnegotiables
Your ideal education for your kids is probably rich and robust, with a variety of subject matter. When you strip it down to the bare bones, though, you should be able to identify the most important topics to continue making progress on, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.It can calm a sense of overwhelm to define what the baseline of the education you’re providing for your children is so that when life gets crazy and everyone just needs a slower pace or a lighter week, you can still move forward.
Have Fun
Let me let you in on a little secret: Children are natural learners. Given a loving home, healthy boundaries with screens, and a stocked bookshelf, it’s actually unlikely that children are not learning. So, rather than worry your way through this amazing enterprise you’ve signed up for, have fun! More important than mastering fractions is the connection and adventure you share with your family. Enjoy your kids and this journey while you can.
