Homeschool Help Podcast for Your (Real) Homeschool Mom Life

If you need help, homeschool mom, Season #5 of the Homeschool Mama Self-Care Podcast, is dedicated to you.

This introductory episode explores how authorial influencers can help us show up authentically, confidently, and purposefully.

The homeschool help podcast for the homeschool mom is for moms who want to address the most important thing: themselves. Encouraging you to nurture the nurture, you.

Because who you are, how you frame your life, understand your purpose, and how you address your challenges, deeply influence your homeschool kids.

So Season #5 of the Homeschool Mama Self-Care Podcast will help you learn more about yourself!




In this episode, I introduce Season #5 of this homeschool help podcast for the homeschool mama.

As we anticipate the 2023 new year, we can reenvision our lives so we can align our intentions towards a more purposeful life AND even allow our griefs and losses to integrate to become more than we ever imagined we could be.


“The question is not how to survive, but how to thrive, with passion, compassion, humour and style.”

Maya Angelou

I can’t script the reality of your life, and the challenges you might face in your home or the world in 2023, but if I could, I wouldn’t give you challenges.

Oh, I know, we learn from challenges, we are strengthened through challenges, and we are equipped to help others when we have our challenges.

But I’d still delete them from your life.

Since I can’t do that, I’ll help you create strategies instead.

You can access your 5 strategies to revise your vision when you join the 5-Day Homeschool Mama Vision Challenge.

The five strategies…

  1. Do you Know Your Why?
  2. Have you Found Your Vision?
  3. Do you Know Yourself?
  4. Can you Build on the Charms?
  5. And are you willing to Accept the Challenges?


This is what you’ll hear on Season #5 of the Homeschool Mama Self-Care Podcast to help you authentically, confidently, and purposefully live your homeschool life……

  1. How Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart Influence my Homeschool
  2. How Kristen Neff Informs My Homeschool with Self-Compassion
  3. How Elizabeth Gilbert informs our Homeschool Mom Life Teaching me about my own creativity
  4. My book: Homeschool Mama Self-Care: Nurturing the Nurturer (my book of encouragement)
  5. How Rachel Gathercole Informs my Homeschool (teaching me about socialization)
  6. 7 Freedom-Loving Ways John Taylor Gatto Informs your Homeschool
  7. How Marie Forleo Informs my Homeschool (so I know I can do anything)
  8. How Gordon Neufeld Informs my Homeschool (& reminds me that the most important thing is my relationship with my child)
  9. How Nonviolent Communication Informs my Homeschool (teaching me how to communicate: to listen and be heard)
  10. How Gretchen Rubin Informs My Homeschool (how to be happier at home)
  11. How Internal Family Systems can Influence our Homeschools (how my relationship with me matters more than any other relationship)
  12. Amber O’Neil Johnston’s Book, A Place to Belong (so we can build authentic community & connection)
  13. How to Show Up for You (& your Kids) as you are a Working Homeschool Mom with Charlotte Jones
  14. 13 Things Mentally Strong Don’t Do: Amy Morin influences my homeschool
  15. A 2023 High School Graduate’s Thoughts on her Homeschool Life
  16. 7 Ways to Live your Best Life: Self-Care for Homeschool Moms

Read my Love Letter to you, Homeschool Mama!

Leave a comment below and let me know how I can serve you this year.

If you’re looking for a self-coaching tool to address your big emotions, click here.

When you’re looking for a community of authentic women who want to work towards clarifying their homeschool challenges to enjoy their homeschools more, click here.


Love Letter to the Homeschool Mama: a Self-Compassion Strategy for the Homeschool Mama

Self-Compassion for the Homeschool Mama…to instill strategies that help you nurture the nurturer, be kind with your big emotions & your kids’ big emotions…

Is this you?
  • You don’t know how to deal with your big emotions when your kiddo is having their big emotions (& you know you’re making it worse in how you react…this was definitely me).
  • You can’t point a finger on it, but there are too many things going on & everything feels “too much. (This is the experience of overwhelm, too many feels.)
  • You want to show up as your best self, rather than with your tried & true (but not useful) patterns. (And you’ve truly tried all the things, but nothing feels like it’s getting to the heart of this.)
  • You understand that more is caught than taught in how you engage your kids, and that concerns you.
  • You don’t feel supported to do this process with anyone else.
Imagine if…
  • You were practiced in the “pause” before you reacted to your child.
  • You knew for sure you were honouring your child as a separate person?
  • You had a plan to address your big emotions & knew how to be proactive and responsive, not reactive.
  • You felt like you were enough and could do this homeschool thing confidently.
  • You felt supported. 
  • You were clear about when to include self-compassion strategies and how they’d benefit you.
  • You knew you were teaching your child self-compassion strategies, emotional regulation & healthy communication too.
Straight up, if someone had talked to me about self-compassion strategies, I would have thought, nope, too weird.
But then I spent years struggling to deal with my big emotions, I spent years not feeling good enough, and I was finally open to listening to something that might work.

On one particular homeschool day, I was especially frustrated.

What could have been frustrating me?

  • A child was being unkind, again.
  • Kids were fighting, again.
  • Nobody wanted to do the thing I had so lovingly planned for them.
  • The house was a mess.
  • I was feeling unsupported and disconnected from others.
Oh, ya know, a couple things might have been going on.

And I really wanted to text my husband.

But since he wasn’t responding to his texts (he happens to work in emerg, so what he was doing was likely more emergent than his wife losing her stuff at home), I had to figure out what else to do!

Call my friend, I thought. Turns out, she was too busy to respond too.

Well, what is a homeschooled mama to do?

Head over to my bathroom mirror and talk to myself.

Weird, but effective.

I just needed someone to witness my frustration and sadness.

To look into my eyes and say, “Hey, you’re having a moment, sometimes homeschooling is hard, but you’ve got this.”

So that is what I did.

For me.

And to my utter surprise, it was therapeutic, it worked!

“With self-compassion, we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.”
Kirstin Neff

A Homeschool Help Podcast discussing Self-Compassion to address Homeschool Mama's Big Emotions

I often share with homeschool mamas that if they’re particularly heated with their kids, they should head to the bathroom mirror.

Stand in front of the mirror.

See that sad, exasperated, angry face?

What would you say that sad, exasperated, angry face if it were your friend?
You might say:
  • I’m sorry you’re frustrated.
  • I care about you.
  • I’ve been there, done that. (Even maybe this morning).
  • You’re a good mom; I see how you engage most of the time and you care about your kiddo.
What you wouldn’t say is this:
  • You’re a horrible mother.
  • You should never have had a child.
  • You’re such a screw-up.
  • You will never learn how to parent with kindness/gentleness/self-control/you-fill-in-the-blank.

Nope, words you’d never utter to a friend.

So why are you doing that to yourself? (FYI we all speak more harshly to ourselves than we do to others.)
  • How do you want to speak to your friends?
  • Look back to your face in the mirror: speak to that “friend” in the mirror.

I came by this strategy on a day when I couldn’t access my husband by text. And not my good friend either.

So, who else was I going to talk with? Myself. In the mirror.

And I have since discovered that is a useful, though odd, approach to calming myself down.

And when I’m calm? I can decide how to intentionally respond to my anger/anxiety/sadness/other intense emotion AND head back to my homeschooled kiddos and engage intentionally.

Self-compassion begins with treating ourselves like our own best friend.


In this Intensive, you’ll learn more than a few self-compassion techniques.



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Teresa Wiedrick

I help homeschool mamas shed what’s not working in their homeschool & life, so they can show up authentically, purposefully, and confidently in their homeschool & life.

Call to Adventure by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3470-call-to-adventure
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/