Empowering Moms: Building Confidence in Homeschooling

7 years ago, I was a mess at this time. My husband and I were deciding if we should pull our 2 youngest children from public school and homeschool them. At the time, our son was in 4th grade and our daughter was in 1st grade. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but my husband was not ready and now he was, and I felt the immense pressure that this would fall on me since I’m the one that was home (I ran a small in-home childcare at the time).

I researched homeschooling until I was blue in the face and then some! I was SO petrified of messing something up with the process that I thought if I just researched enough that wouldn’t happen. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever researched homeschooling, but you could be online for years and still not get all the information! It’s a lot! There are so many ways you can homeschool. But I researched it for 2 months solid any chance I got, and I made myself physically sick from worry. Because guess what? Consuming a mass amount of information does not keep you from worrying that you will mess something up, it only makes you worry more.

I think something that also contributed to my worry was the fear of what people would say. I laid awake at night going over conversations that could possibly happen when people would ask what school they went to. I was consumed with people judging our choice to homeschool. And then I became fearful that they would think I looked down on their decision to have their kids in public school. I was a complete mess in my mind.

One day I decided to just stop researching and give it a try. The saying “If God brings you to it he’ll bring you through it” had guided me through my husband's open-heart surgery a few years earlier and I believed it would help me in this situation. Once I decided to make the decision to go all in and do it, I had such a sense of peace wash over me. I knew God was letting me know it was all going to be alright.

Now, I won’t say that all that worry just left me and the first year was magical. I struggled a lot to have confidence in my ability to homeschool well and I was still so consumed with failing my children somehow. We followed what was written down for us to do every day to a T, not skipping anything because I thought it was wrong to (it’s not 😉). I also didn’t let them have any sick days for fear that I would get “in trouble” (by whom I didn’t even know). We had to have 175 days of learning on the books and that is what we did. And as much as that first year was amazing having my kids with me all day and us learning how to do this together, it was stressful for all of us too, but only because I allowed it to be. I was way too rigid and needed to loosen up a bit. The next year was much better. I started trusting myself and my kids that we could make this work for us, and we did. 

And I’m proud to say that I just recently graduated my son from homeschooling (he homeschooled a total of 7 years.) An accomplishment that I will forever treasure. My plan was never to homeschool through the high school years but that’s where God had me, so I dug in, and we figured it out.

If I could give the momma that is just starting out some advice, it would be this…. trust yourself. You know your babies better than anyone. You will know how to best help them learn if you lean into that intuition that God graciously gave you. 

Have fun with them.

Learning is so much more than a workbook. Don’t discredit life skills and the talks you get into in between lessons.

You don’t have to be perfect or do everything perfectly either. You will stumble and you will figure it out.

The day may blow up in your face and you must abandon the schoolwork, that’s okay. Learning how to deal with problems or reset a day is a huge asset for your child.

There are no wrong ways, just many different ways to homeschool. Find the way that works for YOU and YOUR family. 

Have grace for yourself and your children in this process. As long as you love them and you’re showing it and they can feel it, you’re not going to mess anything up 🙂