Some homeschool days begin with prayer, Scripture and a peaceful sense that God has called you to this work. Other days begin with a toddler yelling because you dared to help another child for seven consecutive minutes. Both kinds of days are covered by grace.
I have been involved in homeschooling for more than 30 years—first as a homeschooled child and now as a mother homeschooling my own three children.
I have seen the benefits of homeschooling so clearly that I have never seriously wanted to quit.
But I have certainly looked at mothers whose children attend school and thought, Imagine having six uninterrupted hours every weekday.
What would I do with that time?
Work peacefully?
Clean the house?
Finish an entire cup of tea while it was still hot?
Perhaps I would simply sit in a silent room and stare at the wall for a while.
Homeschooling is a tremendous privilege, but it also means that your children are with you for nearly every lesson, meal, question, disagreement, missing pencil, and urgent announcement about a strangely shaped leaf.
When she has not received enough attention, she lets me know.
She does not quietly submit a written complaint and wait three to five business days for a response.
She becomes stroppy immediately.
One of the most helpful things I have learned is to stop and give her ten minutes of completely focused attention.
I also try to include her in ordinary jobs such as folding washing, wiping surfaces or carrying things from one room to another.
It often works wonderfully—but it requires me to notice what she needs before the household situation develops into a small-scale emergency.
And, frankly, I am always tired.
I joke that I will rest in heaven, although I occasionally wonder whether I could arrange a brief trial period before then.
I also work from home and run a business, so my days involve switching repeatedly between teaching, parenting, housework, filming, writing and answering messages.
Some days I feel less like an organized homeschool mother and more like an underqualified air-traffic controller attempting to land seven planes at once.
Then there are the harder emotional moments.
My son Luke has dyslexia and dysgraphia, and when reading or writing feels painfully difficult for him, he can become upset.
Watching your child struggle with something that appears easy for other children can make you feel sad, helpless and overwhelmed too.
Learning more about dyslexia and dysgraphia has helped me enormously.
Books such as The Gift of Dyslexia and The Parent’s Quick-Start Guide to Dysgraphia have given me practical ideas, but they have also reminded me that difficulty does not mean failure.
My son is not behind God’s plan for him.
He is not a disappointing version of somebody else’s child.
And I do not need to panic simply because his path looks different.
Chronic pain can make everything feel heavier as well.
Pilates has helped me enormously, but there are still days when pain drains the energy I hoped to give to homeschooling, work, and family life.
On those days, I have to remember that God does not measure my faithfulness by how many worksheets I completed while hurting.
Sometimes the greatest pressure does not come from our children, our curriculum, or our circumstances.
It comes from the expectations we quietly place on ourselves.
Our family does so much that I genuinely do not believe my children are in danger of “falling behind.”
Yet I can still create an ambitious picture of what the day should look like and then feel disappointed when reality fails to cooperate.
The strange thing is that I can look at everything we accomplished and still focus on the one thing we did not finish.
That is not wisdom.
That is perfectionism wearing a sensible homeschool cardigan.
So this article is for the mother who wants to quit, the mother who feels she is failing, the exhausted mother, and the mother quietly comparing herself with families who appear to have cleaner kitchens and children who complete Latin before breakfast.
It is also for me.
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want to do my course on how to homeschool, click here.
We need practical ideas, but we need more than productivity tricks.
We need Scripture, prayer and the steady reminder that the Lord is gracious.
We need to remember that our children are not educational projects, our homes are not classrooms requiring constant inspection and our worth is not determined by whether today’s plan survived contact with the toddler.
God has not called us to homeschool perfectly.
He has called us to walk faithfully, love our children, seek wisdom, repent when necessary and receive fresh grace for the work directly in front of us.
And sometimes that work is teaching a child to read.
Sometimes it is changing the schedule.
Sometimes it is putting the books away and comforting an overwhelmed child.
And sometimes it is giving the toddler ten minutes of attention before she dismantles the house in protest.
