What Can Moms Learn From Homeschooling?

If you’re reading this during the Covid-19 shutdown, you’re in week 4. How are you managing? Has it been terrible, great, or somewhere in between? Your children have had a learning curve with virtual learning – new schedules, habits, routines, a new discipline structure. But how about you? What can moms learn from homeschooling? More than you might have thought.

The first thing I learned when I began homeschooling was that I was right – I wasn’t a patient person.

I used to think, “Well, that’s just who I am. Everybody needs to accept it. I can’t help the way I was born.” Then we took the children out of school and here I was homeschooling four children 4^th grade and under and two toddlers.

I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was impatient, quick to raise my voice and react with frustration. We had normal children – well behaved, but not perfect. And in the quiet moments of the day, I knew that the things I reacted poorly to were typical kid things that I really didn’t have a right to react to with impatience. (If you haven’t checked out my complete guide to “Homeschooling Without Losing Your Mind”, you can check it out here.)

I quickly learned that either I was going to have to change, or everyone else in my little world needed to change.

Patience was just the beginning of the virtues I realized I needed to work on. Orderliness, generosity in spirit, perseverance, and humility are others that through the 14 years of homeschooling I realized were virtues I really needed to develop better. Homeschooling brings us face to face with our faults and weaknesses. We can fight it, or we can take the opportunity to become a better person.

God takes us where we need to go.

God has a funny way of bringing us into a circumstance where we realize that we are not prepared, nor feel up to the task just so we learn we cannot always depend on ourselves, but rather must depend on God. Unfortunately, until we need God, we often neglect God. I needed God because I didn’t have the natural virtues necessary to be calm, cool, and collected while homeschooling/caring for 6 and keeping a home. (Did I mention that my grandmother moved in with us our first year of homeschooling! Talk about trying to drink water from a fire hydrant!)

But I have to say that I am a much happier person who is more patient, orderly, and generous with my time than I was 25 years ago – and I know it is because I learned to ask God for help rather than try to do it on my own.

I am capable of handling more than I ever dreamed I could handle.

Juggling lesson plans, schedules, and taking care of a home is quite the challenge.

But we never really know how far we can go until we push ourselves. Truth be told, I don’t think my generation did a very good job of nurturing resilience in children. Those children are now moms, and many believe they are incompetent or unable to take care of their home and their children. They’re easily overwhelmed and live with constant anxiety.

Self-confidence has as its main life-source small successes that lead to positive self-esteem. If we take one day at a time and find a small success in juggling and managing homeschool/home life, we’ll take the first few steps of many in developing self-confidence.

And if we eliminate all the real useless stressors – activities and places to be, texts to answer, Netflix binges and YOUTUBE videos to watch – we will find that we can take care of our children and our family with success.

I found what was important rather than let the urgent control me.

Between the balance in the checking account, the dings from a text, or the million and one places the kids need to be, we live in the urgent. Yet, the urgent isn’t usually the most important part of our life. Homeschooling taught me that being present with my children more than the 40-minute average for most families was what was important.

Teaching my children life skills through morning/afternoon chores, assigned meal prep days and helping them get along with each other were the important, yet not urgent tasks of the day.

Giving them the opportunity to play (read: get along) with their siblings was more important than urgent. And as our children have all grown to adults, my prayer is that they rely on those strong bonds they had as children to keep them close even as they all go their separate ways as adults.

For all you moms who also work outside the home, family time can be a struggle. I hope that this mandatory slow down has helped you see what activities can be eliminated for more family time together and how everyone can continue to work together to share the responsibilities of creating a happy, stress-free family life.

Children are more capable than our expectations.

When you’re homeschooling, you quickly realize you can’t do it all. I had the older children help the younger ones when necessary. Sometimes one person was responsible for making lunch, other times they each made their own lunch. (When my son was a Senior in high school, he went on a retreat where kids were expressing how grateful they were to their parents. There was a kid who thanked his mom for making his lunch all these years. Joseph was shocked to find out that he was probably one of the few kids who made his own lunch since he was 6!)

Our children did their own laundry from about the age of 10, and we rotated the household chores each week. Everybody chipped in to keep our home clean and tidy.

I learned to enjoy my children.

For someone whose mom complained I was such a slob growing up, I CRAVE order. I have to be careful that my need for order doesn’t outweigh my kindness for people. When the children were in school, they would get up in the morning to a mom who was telling them to hurry up, we couldn’t be late, everything needed to be cleaned up before they left…etc… It created a lot of stress on everyone.

But when I began homeschooling, I realized that life wasn’t going to look or be perfect. My schedule and my need for order was just in my head. While it was important to keep the general bones of a schedule, I had to let it go now and then for the sake of everyone’s sanity and we were all going to be ok!

And once I stopped the constant drill of telling the kids what to do and when to do it, I could bond with them rather than just manage them. I wasn’t a terrible mother, but I had to learn to let go and enjoy life and my children.

There’s power and joy in creativity.

There are some people who ooze creativity. I’m not one of them. I don’t naturally think of something creative to do. But with homeschooling, I watched the children flourish in exploring their creativity. They were fearless in trying new things because they had the time – violin, cello, piano, saxophone, sculpting, creative writing, drawing, and play acting. It was marvelous to watch! And it unlocked my creative side. I began experimenting with pattern designs in sewing which led to an amazing online business. I was encouraged to find that people loved my garment designs! I wouldn’t have dared thought that if I didn’t gain confidence in watching my own children push the limits of their creative abilities.

Try new creative outlets. Learn to sew, knit, crochet, write a story, make jewelry – anything, really, just notice how doing something creative sparks joy in you.