We need to plan care for mama as much as we plan for our kids’ education: we need to find quiet, build boundaries, and learn to handle overwhelm.
So how do you take care of mama so she can take care of her kids?
You went into this homeschool thing because you love these little voices. So how to build boundaries in your homeschool days?
You love hearing…
- their made-up stories,
- their nighttime dream recounting,
- their Lego plans, their Barbie tales,
- their frustrations with friends,
- and their plans for the future.
You want to hear their voices.
But sometimes you need a little quiet too.
All day, every day you get to hear the sing songy voices, chirpy voices, sweet voices, whining voices, barking voices, and grunting voices of your children: depends on the age, stage and mood. But there’s always voices.
Teresa Wiedrick, author of Homeschool Mama Self-Care: Nurturing the Nurturer
Require boundaries.
We love these voices, but we need separateness too. Either we need to take activities off the list, set boundaries so others can learn our needs, or we have to sell a kid. Three options.
One of those options is illegal. The other two: doable! If only we have perspective and a plan.
One of the biggest hurdles to our peace of mind is learning how to exist together. (A common reason parents share why they wouldn’t want to homeschool). Every parent needs to learn how to exist with their kids. Not every parent is present for their child’s twenty-four-hour day.
We need to learn to exist with these different-than-us kids, these sometimes frontal-lobe-challenged kids, these always-needing-something kids.
How to find quiet, build boundaries and handle overwhelm:
Time alone.
Frankly, whether you see it or not, you need time alone. If you’re in your first six months of homeschooling, you may not identify that, yet. Just like the wedding honeymoon, there’s a homeschool honeymoon.
For some, it is much longer than six months; for some, it’s much shorter.
Whatever the amount of time it takes, we come to understand that homeschooling isn’t a family utopia, and it is most definitely challenging to find alone time.
Alone time, scheduled, in a different location than the kiddos, not just a different room. No child in sightline or yelling range. Quiet facilitates perspective.
Separateness facilitates the desire to be together again.
If you want to facilitate your own creativity while you’re alone, you might use this resource:
- food for creative thought: how I incorporate writing into daily life
- finding a writing voice
- After I am Not a Homeschool Mom: If you Hear a Voice Within…
- for those that write, or wanna write: 8 things I tell myself every day
You need your own thing.
Whatever it is, it needs to be an all about you thing.
Whether it’s a knitting club, a cycling group, a home-based business, a reading checklist, or a full-fledged career, you have to remember to do you. In my first two homeschool years, I sat in Starbucks with a latte and a journal and I wrote. That writing practice has built and built until I was a writer.
The home designing, homestead building, bed n breakfast organizing elements of my life squeezed in there eventually too.
If you’re not energized, you’re surviving, and definitely not thriving.
Value quiet.
In my observation, the longer a family homeschools, the quieter the children become.
I don’t believe this is just because those children are maturing, but rather that parents need separate thinking space and awareness that quietness only happens when you build boundaries toward it. We need our own mental space as we commune in our families. This is challenging, no matter how hard we try to enact boundaries on noise. It’s a slow process that enables our kids to focus on their work and their play.
They learn to be attentive to friends and non-parental leaders. And they learn to be more empathetic because they listen better.
Daily separateness practice.
Head into your room with a cup of morning coffee and read an inspiring word or two.
Early on, when they’re little, they won’t believe that a closed-door means you’re unavailable.
So when they peek their little noses into the doorway, you can ask in your most surprised tone, “Is the house on fire?”
Apparently, the house isn’t on fire and they back out of the doorway. If you’re routinely addressing their needs and listening to their little voices, then practice sitting in your house clothes for just a little while longer.
(It’s not just the homeschooled kiddos that have a hard time getting out of pajamas. Homeschooled mamas have five sets too.)
Recognize overwhelm.
Learn to recognize overwhelm in yourself.
- Sit with your feelings more.
- Observe your interior.
- Recognize what the feelings are under the iceberg of frustrated or angry feelings.
Accept your feelings despite their uncomfortableness. Honour those feelings. Attend to them like young children.
Recognize that your feelings pass like a weather system.
And recognize the underlying needs of those feelings.
With kindness and continual efforts, we learn what we need. Some days those lessons need to be learned and relearned.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Enmeshment.
Recognize that our children’s struggles are not ours.
We were meant to participate in helping to unravel struggles they may have. We are here to offer tools and be a listening ear. But those struggles aren’t ours.
Though they are our children, they are not us.
Learn more about How to Handle Homeschool Overwhelm.
Or learn more about Practical (& useful) steps to dealing with boundaries in your homeschool
Take care of yourself, practice finding quiet, build boundaries so you can handle overwhelm.
Teresa Wiedrick
Grappling with Overwhelm Journaling Workbook
Journal questions & workbook that aid in your self-exploration to help address your needs, gain satisfying relationships and shift your homeschool perspective.
This can be a self-coaching workbook can be a self-coaching tool to help you discover the barriers getting in the way of your satisfying homeschool life, create a plan to address your relationships, needs & homeschools, and thereby, shift your homeschool experience.
Find more homeschool encouragement here:
- How to Deal with Those (Failure) Days in 5 Easy Steps
- How to Live the Homeschool Balanced Life
- How to Develop Boundaries in your Homeschool Life
- Journaling for the Homeschool Mom to Overcome Overwhelm
- Tell me more about the homeschool mama retreat.
- I’m a new homeschooler, are you able to walk alongside me and mentor me?
Great read!!
Thanks. There’s a book I’ve been writing on homeschool mama self-care…soon out.