There is a need to maintain a balance in all aspects of your life when you are a homeschooling parent. Having the homeschool material organized and ready to use each day, making sure that your homeschool students do their required quota of studies to cover the academic syllabus, ensuring that the meals you dole out from the kitchen are healthy, keeping the kitchen groceries up to date and handling the laundry.
Be on your toes from dawn to dusk, and then repeat the next day. There is just no time to get everything done in a single day, every single day. Some parents get carried away in becoming perfect and tend to lose sight of what is truly important. What is important is the fact that you are a family that is learning together. As such, it is not the responsibility of a single person to ensure that everything is perfect all of the time.
The word you need to make a part of everyone’s vocabulary is “Team Work”. It is not just the homeschooling parent who is responsible for every aspect of the family’s life. It is a team effort. The children need to pitch in almost as much as the parent if it is going to be a success story. Does that mean that you start handing out chores to babies? In a nutshell – yes. There is always a task that a young child can help with.
Now you may argue that teaching them the errands or taking your toddler’s help makes the task take twice as long. You can finish is much faster if you do it on your own. This is a very short term view. For the child you teach how to make a bed properly today will be able to handle the task entirely on his own within a couple of months. Not only will this be relieving you of supervisory duty, it will also give you spare time to manage other chores that you can not delegate to your children.
Now make sure that your team handles the responsibility of family living along with you. Just don’t expect everything to be perfect all of the time.
