Yep, been there, and still doing that. Homeschooling with a baby. It’s a skill, and not just in physical showing up, as much as the mental stretch that comes with “growing in patience”.

Homeschooling is almost always met with the desire to control and therefore stay in our lane of comfort; we must understand that homeschooling with a newborn, with babies underfoot, around feeding schedules and nappy changes, is not to hinder us, but is an opportunity to become a master mother teacher.

I have been homeschooling with babies on the side for my entire homeschool life; it's become second nature- not easy, but natural. It’s changed me, grown my patience, my ability to let go of perfection or even good circumstances and instead relax into showing up daily with an expectation of what needs to be done and doing it, no matter the circumstances I am currently living in.

Prep for the newborn season

In the newborn season, homeschooling is hard because if the baby is sleeping, it’s not always the first thing you want to do; for me it’s shower, eat, make my bed or sip my decaf coffee in the sun. Math books? Times tables drilling? flashcards blends? Science read-aloud and narration? They all sound like nails on a chalkboard when I have precious 90 minutes tops before I’m feeding and burping yet again.

This season is hard to keep sustainable. Consistency is required, but you can modify your routine and what you choose to be consistent in doing.

For example, anything that requires a lot of my brain function, I tend to “put off” for the first 8-12 weeks of the postpartum season. I make things easy to access, with as many “thought hurdles” taken care of in the planning of my schooling choices in the lead-up to the baby arriving.

I rely on drilling work previously done in math and writing, simply spending time doubling down on basics.

They are easy to keep up because I can do them any time of day; it’s worksheets, copy work, and memory work. Drilling times tables in song; make time for more music practice, which can be done independently.

I want school to be approachable any time of day, because who knows when I will get to it?

I know I want to show up, but I am fully aware that I will not have the capacity to sit down and help my high schooler master a new maths concept, nor can I guarantee starting a new science lesson.

There are a few steps I take to plan for the newborn season. (I need to add that I have older kids; my three eldest homeschoolers are 10, 13, 14. For these boys, I apply a heavy focus on the extracurricular or anything they need a lot of my input in the months leading up to the birth, then scale back, but for the most part they can do a lot of work on their own and just mark work.)

1. I homeschool through holidays in the school year to make up for my “extended holiday” when the baby comes (we stick to absolute basics for 8-12 weeks, or when I just had only littles to homeschool 8 and under, I just took the newborn season off and relied on audiobooks and some math drills on good days). It may mean homeschooling through summer, or homeschooling through all the other holidays of the year to bank time off.

2. I prepare everything down to the letter and place cues in my diary to keep tabs on things for younger kids, especially reading work and copywork. This is for any subject I feel NEEDS to be done, usually math and reading.

3. I set out new job lists for older children: chores, meals, babysitting. All is listed, and it is either normal daily chores, while some is paid work or earning screen time or treats. A new baby is a hard time for everyone in the home, joyful, sure, but also hard. I like to keep it light-hearted and exciting by including treats in the grocery shop to incentivise the extra work I will need during this time.

4. I make a basket with all the books I want to read to the children in the place where I plan to feed the baby. It’s not overcrowded; only two or three are in there at a time. I try to reduce overwhelm as much as I can, and I find I am less likely to tackle reading if it looks like a lot, but when there is one to three books to slowly read through or to simply pick a page and read to a child near me, it’s easy on the mind.

Habits that form consistency when homeschooling with a baby

You need strong habits to build a consistent homeschool. I have never been one for a schedule, especially when I am coming out of the newborn haze, but I do know the power of habits compounded.

In the newborn season (the first 3 months), my habit is that the first nap of the day for the baby is the homeschool window. Do I always look or feel good? no. Am I eating while listening to bible verses or times tables songs? Probably.

The effort of homeschooling with a baby is mostly in the mental gymnastics of desiring good circumstances to start. We should start now, but the dishes need doing first; we should start now, but it’s so nice outside; we should start now, but the table is messy; we should start now, but I am still in pyjamas.

It is not to say that one must embrace homeschooling in chaos all the time, but there is a season for a good homeschool routine that is built on a well-run home, and there is a season for just showing up. When you master the habit of beginning when you should, not when you want, that habit will build other habits that create more desirable circumstances over time.

This habit of mine, the one where I start my homeschooling when the baby naps, is one that still sees me through today; however, over the months it has morphed from chaotic and uncomfortable circumstances to having children begin when the baby is still up, at around 9 am, breakfast is finished, morning chores complete, and the house tidy. The baby (now almost 11 months old) is crawling, playing on the floor until around 10-11 am, and her first nap. It’s much easier now; she is still a distraction, but with some child training, it hardly ever truly hinders homeschooling.

Compounding habits like starting at the same time, waking at the same time, eating breakfast at the same time, followed by a built-in action sequence for the children of breakfast, beds made, morning chores and then school books on the table, these little habits create a flowing morning that builds in consistency. Over time, you can build back up to these kinds of habits as your newborn begins to sleep better at night and the naps get a little longer in the day.

Growing in ability as baby grows.

You need to upskill.

Child training should be a part of your life; if you want to do this homeschooling thing long term and successfully, then having children who obey your authority is not something “some lucky families have”

Just like setting out to teach math, you can set out to teach a child to obey you.

When the 11-month-old wants to eat a Lego or a flower or a stick, I can train her to listen to my “no” from across the room, not screamed, just a simple. No. And she puts it down.

If you are interested in learning more, I suggest reading these books.

• Shepherding a Child's Heart. Tedd tripp.

• 8 errors parents make and how to avoid them. Michael Brock.

There is little I can share to help you navigate the toddler stages, the awkward time when you need to sit and deliver or watch over lessons, only to have a whirlwind causing chaos around you.

If you want a smooth homeschool with a toddler, it starts and ends with child training.

Encouragement for the homeschooling mother with a newborn.

It is easy to write about homeschooling with a newborn, and easier still to plan for it, especially if you are nesting and feeling that surge of energy just before baby arrives.

It is quite another to do it. To show up after a bad night with almost no sleep. (To be honest, I don’t show up; I have that day off) I have found that keeping a house tidy, or showering daily, has never been my sore spot when it comes to having a new baby; meals are certainly simpler, dishes sit in the sink a little longer, but overall, running a home, at least with my growing-up brood of children to help me, is not my biggest struggle.

It’s the mental load, the desire to sit and do nothing in those brief, sweet periods when that little babe is sleeping, and you can stand straight, stretch arms and set your mind on things like hot coffee or a good meal or even cleaning the living rooms so you can enjoy the evening when hubby gets home.

These things are real; we all face them; we all feel pulled in many directions during this delicate phase.

There have been times when I have done no schooling at all during the newborn season; I have either prepped for it by homeschooling year-round, or I simply haven’t felt the need.

Other times, like with my seventh baby, I knew taking an extended break would not benefit my children, so I sacrificed in other areas so I could homeschool.

If I have another newborn season, who knows what I will do?

Every season of life is different, and reading the needs of our families is just as important as homeschooling, homeschooling through chaos, and making the family suffer through poorly cooked meals, filthy homes and a grumpy mother is not something I want to pass on to my children when they recall the times I had a new baby.

We are creating a legacy of so much more than just education; in fact, the newborn phase is a fantastic season to teach your kids many life skills. When your hands are full and you are less capable of taking on everything on your own. My children have become helpful and responsible when I stay seated and let them figure out how to cook eggs on toast or roll and fry the bread for burritos.

Bringing up younger children to be helpful is done with a joyful attitude toward them making mistakes, and doing this is sometimes done better when you aren’t feeling the push to keep busy and instead can rest in just letting kids step up. You can do so much more to help your children stay joyful and calm during the delicate season of introducing a new life to the family dynamic when they can feel helpful and responsible.

If homeschooling through this season takes all that away, then you could be doing yourself a disservice.

There is much to be learned as a mother when it comes to the skill of joyfully doing what does not naturally bring us joy.

Homeschooling with babies is one of them.

Take each day one at a time, allow freedom in saying, “not today, let’s see what tomorrow brings”, while also learning that perhaps the “right morning” will never come.

What can you do to show up joyfully and meaningfully today?

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I was homeschooled by a very new-born-again Christian mother, young, newly married, who had only conviction and tenacity, and who went on to have 11 more children and homeschool them all.

Some things I am doing differently, not because I don’t think she did a good job but because, as the homeschooled, I have the understandin…

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I wrote a post about my experience “homeschooling boys”, and I thought this one would be a good follow-up, because while I have learned that boys tend to thrive when starting school later in age, as well as doing less than I intended at first, there is something else I have learned over the last 8 years, and that is value.

Or perhaps, not settling for mediocre.

In time, I have begun to call it “excellence”, or to my children, the quote often comes out, “do all things well”.

There is still a lot I have to learn. In another homeschooling article, “When the right homeschool choice feels uncomfortable”, I was putting on paper (on Substack) my internal musings as I “scale back and scale up” my sons’ educations.

The value of high standards

If you don’t understand “high standards” and what they look like, and more importantly what they bring about, then I can only enlighten you to my own little corner of limited knowledge.

In my case, high standards equal not allowing my children to churn out poor work, not merely in their written words on the page, but in the quality of information used.

It is an aim to bring children up and above the norm for things like history and reading, not to say they must all read for hours a day, but rather, what they read is quality; it is going to change thoughts, understanding, and essentially shape a worldview.

Essentially, I believe that high standards bring about a high level of intellect, because intellect is not about being wordy or highly informed; it is about being able to reason and understand. When we provide the ability to complete tasks to a high standard, from basic letter formation to being able to dictate passages from great books, there is a foundation of highly functional thinking that is learned and practised by the student.

Shaping a worldview requires intention.

I see myself not as a manager of work done in books, but as an artist of a worldview. It is something I take joy in doing; it is a mindset of always adapting to the applicable ways of education; it is a lifestyle, in the earnest use of the term, because I think I must explain the use of the word lifestyle.

Homeschooling is not a natural lifestyle; it is a choice to take on something difficult and see it through.

I think that today, the term homeschool lifestyle, when spoken in homeschool circles, denotes “how much education I can avoid giving” and simply relying on lifestyle for the rest.

It is this ideal that shapes the choices of many homeschoolers into mediocre educators.

It is the belief that, essentially, Homeschooling, however it comes, is just fine.

Many see the problems in modern schools, and we tackle them not with a mindset of growth and intention in our homeschooling, but with the leaning into, dare I say, frailty.

This frail mindset, this “do what you can when you can” or “just showing up”, “plans are bad”, “schedules are only for some people”, and “tests mean nothing”.

This is a pendulum swing too far, from one side relying on tests and slots for the masses, to the other removing all desire for rigorous or hard work in a home education.

When I describe shaping a child’s worldview through a lifestyle, it is a lifestyle where I, the mother teacher, am dedicated to the betterment of my own teaching ability. This requires a moulding of one’s life to the necessities of education, from the time at the table to the books one reads.

Don’t forget God in your pursuit of excellent homeschooling.

I rely on God to guide me, in posts I have written in the past, on planning and scheduling, I have learned that there is an element of me showing up for the hard work, but I also try my best to not fall into the trap of the world, which is teaches the ideal that if we do x, y, and z, we will get the results we want, I truly believe that these modes of thinking are not biblical.

God doesn’t give us exact methods, but rather we are told how to treat the gifts and circumstances he gives with contentment and thankfulness.

When we step away from his ways of living, when we become sure of ourselves, it is then that I believe we make the biggest mistakes.

God wants our attention, our hearts, minds and our faithfulness, enough to follow him, even though we may not understand it, or we might just look silly to the world.

We are always working as learners, making mistakes and having to try things that don’t work. My faith in God and his mercy has me always remembering that whatever I may endeavour, I wholeheartedly ask him to fulfil my family's needs by directing me to where I need to be.

Where do you want to put your efforts?

Like in my last two homeschooling posts, I shared that one, less can be more for some students, and two, making the choices that work can be uncomfortable.

Over time with my children, I had to come to the realisation that my effort in the schoolroom wasn’t paying off; I had become a floor manager of mediocrity, rather than treating my homeschooling like a craft, and when I say craft, I am referring to the skill of a glass blower or a Japanese knife maker.

I wanted my effort to reflect not merely “stuff being done” but seeing real lasting results in my children, not just on paper but in character.

How could I form these two things at the same time?

I immedialty thoughts of chores as something else in my life where I teach two skills, cleaning and character; it’s easy to teach a child to clean the bathroom in a half-done sort of way, and then come and clean up after them with those “finishing touches” But my mother has always told me, and I experienced this in my home growing up, that a job could and should be well done by anyone of any age; it does, however, require time and considerable effort from the teacher.

This, of course, does pay off, and in time you have home cleaned by children from four to fourteen and beyond, to a standard that you actually enjoy. It means you have children who are capable of turning out good work, and have the skill and the work ethic to do so regularly.

Add to this a happy countenance (not complaining while working or being asked to work), and you have a peaceful home, where everyone can not only enjoy it, but help bring it about.

Again, this takes effort! As mother, you need to be constantly inspecting work, and pulling a child back to fix poorly done work, you need to keep that standard up, or in time it will slump, but not only does this affect my home today, but I know, from my own expereince growing up with this kind of work ethic, that it affects my children’s abilities as adults, in any work they choose to do.

So, how do I create this kind of work ethic in my children’s education?

I use the same method: set standards high, inspect everything, make children redo work that doesn’t meet the standard set for them.

I lift my children beyond what I think they can do (this is a practice you will get wrong from time to time). I skip the grade 1-5 twaddle readers and read the Bible and Shakespeare. The history of julius ceaser, Alexander the Great, not in childish books, but rather taking small snippets, little verses to recall, from adult reads, to place in the brain through repetition, miming and dictation that places that verse, its meaning, to a place and person in history.

With older children, it is done by removing the time-wasting, skill-less task of filling in blanks in curriculum student guides, instead reciting or dictating in a way that provokes thoughts of great intellect, and builds language of great writers on the page.

My standard is not merely ticking a box of perfection, but rather allowing the pursuit of good work to be grown into character, not only in practice but in reading, the learning of great characters, of great actions, reactions, and ideals, the world over.

Isn’t that what shapes a worldview? What creates change in children, brings them up to aspire to greatness?

It is an art, one I am hoping, in time, when I am teaching grandchildren, I am master not of dictating information, but of capturing interest, and making the education a child should have important to them.

Education is not information, but how information changes you

Many of us get all hung up on education, and rightly so; but we must know what education really is and what is not. Education is rooted in the Latin word educare—meaning "to lead out" or "to draw out" potential.

It is not merely time spent getting stuff done in books.

This is where the unschooling movement is becoming more popular; they can see the disparity between schools today and “education” However, I don’t believe the way is to “undo” school, but to instead lean into intention and value in our education choices.

This is why, as my children get older, I am learning more and more that less is actually more, but you have to be wise about where you put your intentionality.

There is such a thing as not doing enough, or “laziness,” and this is something we have to guard against. Homeschooling is hard; it’s enjoyable, it can be fun, but it’s also tough when you are having babies and living a busy life, it can be easy to invent a mode of thought that faciliates your feelings, and have you walking a path of doing less, not to actually bring about more intentionality but rather allows gaps and a lack of any real path for the child to follow into adulthood, in order to provide “respite” for the homeschool mother.

When the focus is just academics

Let's equip all children (future adults) with the ability to read well, write well, have a decent level of mathematics, and I think knowing their History well is important (but that’s my opinion). It means, however, that just wanting your kids to learn something isn’t enough.

Buying a curriculum because it teaches Latin, or history, or has a great science and faith element isn’t enough.

You need to make it valuable in your home, to your children.

If you want history buffs, you need to be history buffs; if you want artists, you need to be artistic or at least facilitate it; if you want musicians, you need to be facilitating music in the home, a lot.

You probably have one or more of these things important to you, but if we want our children to know these things, we need them to care; if children don’t care, they won’t learn it with the same joy and lifelong branding of that information and its effect on them.

I do not think we can give our children the best of everything, but I believe (for now) that we should tailor an education to the child as they age into high school, based on interests and strengths and if they have an idea of the career they desire.

The education I give my children has become more and more about not the variety but the value to the child; it has meant culling the books they do, just to do, mostly to make me happy that they have covered a topic, aka busywork.

Education is only as valuable as the changes it brings about, from how it shapes a worldview to how it shapes their actions and future decisions/choices.

When you are intentional about this outcome and not merely the outcome of 12 years done, it changes the way you see the books you use, the time you spend at the school table, and the conversations you have.

This is an educational lifestyle in the home, not information, but sharing the value of it.

The physical work of a valuable homeschool

My 6-year-old son can write an entire page of words poorly and with a bad attitude every day. I can make him sit and do it, and would his writing get better? I know from experience with my older boys that no, it won’t.

I can make him write one line, one sentence of Psalm 1, very well, sitting by him and watching every pen stroke, praising the good and gently correcting the bad, and in time, he masters every letter, every formation, spaces, and punctuation.

It is placing a value on every pencil touch to paper, as well as my time with him. This is for every child, and while I do not “sit by” all of my children, I have learned to become rigorous with my red pen.

This method (very much charlottle mason, nothing new here). It takes about the same amount of time; the one yields results I want; the other just takes up time and gives the illusion of results. My aim is not work done, but mastery of every pen stroke, every sentence and every number.

It is memorising poems and bible verses, not just the word but the tones, the inferences, the lilt and fall of the language that can come alive. It is not merely a recital of blunt words given no meaning to children passing time.

In this value system, it is a living out, a passing on, the idea that Books are special; pencils are worth keeping for as long as possible; work well done brings pride; poor work takes more time when I come to correct it.

This is the ethos, the way of life I want to impart to my children, and it comes today, as I am one mother with seven children, doing less curriculum with more intentionality.

Not to say that you must switch to a less-for-better approach, but I am aware of who I teach, and how this life, an educational life, must serve them. I believe that for the moment, a minimalist approach, within an excellent mindset, is where I will achieve the best results.

So, what is an excellent homeschooler?

“A parent who doesn't undermine their children's outcomes through their lifestyle, but intentionally builds a lifestyle that gives their children the best opportunity to thrive.”

But that’s just my opinion? What do you think?

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I write this as someone who jumped on the trend of swapping my iPhone for a Dumbphone almost two years ago, dropping my device like it was seed oils, and picking myself a nice little Nokia that had me carry a purse, pick up my teenage skill of texting on a numbered keypad again, and freak out when I realised I had to read a map.

The first month or two was great, and I was a loud advocate for the dumbphone to friends and family, but something shifted a few months in.

Spoiler alert: around six months later, I was back on my iPhone.

I am going to cut to the chase on this one.

Digital minimalism is not quitting the iPhone, only to take up a laptop.

It is not putting timers on scrolling or texting on awkward keypads.

Digital minimalism, as per the meaning of “minimalism,” is stripping away excess to focus on what brings value, clarity, and purpose to your life.

Don’t be sold the trend- opt for the value.

The trend for dumbphones is being sold to you by clever marketing, and the biggest laugh of it all is the people selling the ideals of ditching your blue light pocket mirrors (if you know, you know), the dangers of too much time online and zoned out to entertainment and sharing the many saving graces of buying that 600-dollar litephone (that’s the price here in Aus). They are all EXTREMELY ONLINE.

All their platforms are monetised: websites, buzzing social media platforms, podcasts, YouTube; all of it is daily updated to feed the addiction of the masses and to sell whatever product or trend of the day to us, who they know needs new content daily; they build the idol they claim to want to tear down, and as far as I know, they have no plans to stop.

It may all be relevant information, sure, I believe it, but like everything in our media-crazed world, it’s fit into a niche, marketed, and sold to help fix a crisis that doesn’t start or end with a gadget, but stems from the last 20 years of brainwashing our value system into stats, eyes and clicks and ends not when we opt out of a smart phone, but when we opt out of their value system.

The argument is that these people need to share so that others online, stuck in a funk of doomscrolling and distraction, can see, learn, try it, save themselves from the frantic pace of media and the pull we live with in our pockets.

These people promote less time, no smartphones, or “balance” while hiring others to do their “dirty work” so they can promote and earn while avoiding blue light.

Are we falling for another lie? Another quick fix? Since swapping devices can be easier than actually having to choose to say NO.

Much like a diet pill from a bikini model or a fancy new anti-wrinkle cream sold by a botoxed 40-year-old, the dumbphone offers all we want from our lives as they should be, all for a price anywhere from 50 to 600 dollars.

We spend money first on that dumbphone and the plans, then on laptops and desktops, and then, if we are committed (or not), we fork out for the most expensive “dumb” phones on the market because a camera and maps are actually really useful!

(I just received an email from Litephone; they have just released a Litephone Flip! for almost $500)

We want the best, but for the least amount of effort. Many of us, myself included, bought the idea that WE would change because our phones did, and I can tell you, from the many praisers of the dumbphone who go oddly silent after a few months, we are all faced with the reality that, in fact, we didn’t change, not at all.

Social media does not require an iPhone.

A dumbphone can cull the noise; it can address the pull, but if you shift your media consumption from one device to another, there is no gain here, only a temperance that will lose its potency over time as the newness, the delight at the different, and to some, the absurd, wears off.

Very soon you are just as distracted on the laptop as you were on the phone, and yes, maybe less so; perhaps you are not scrolling on the toilet as you used to, but have you really gained? Or when you have a free moment, are you still perusing the same slop on social media you did when you carried your iPhone in your pocket?

This is not growth, if that is what you desired from ditching the iPhone, or if you want to go so far as desiring a defiance at being enslaved to the media; its brain-dulling potion of inane made entertaining is not one you wish to swallow.

Mothers, you won’t find a village on social media

It’s most often the reason. I have no friends; social media is how I “feel” connected.

Lie.

You are connected to no one, only a mirror image of who you think you are. That’s what makes social media so enthralling, not because what it offers is real, but because what it offers is what we wish was real.

Real life is messy, inconvenient, and yet, so completely worthwhile. Social media takes the pleasant moments and offers a filter. And, if you do find someone who is sharing the “mess”, they are merely playing into a niche, not to say it isn’t real, but it isn’t what creates connection, we may feel as thought it’s “nice” to see someone struggle, someone say its okay to live just like you do, but thats the mirror, the little ball and chain in the form of acceptance of burden rather than acceptance of growth.

What shapes your values around social media?

I ditched my iPhone, and then took it back six months later. When I did, I knew what I really needed to do, and that was delete my personal social media accounts (just Instagram; I never had anything else)

I deleted all apps that made me use the phone in any way that wasn’t communication, including Facebook Messenger, emails, any media, and any entertainment and search engines, shopping apps, all of it GONE.

In time, as I saw social media for what it truly is, a waste of life. Even things like Pinterest, which is now filled with ads and comparison traps, I just quit and haven't used in years.

I have Facebook, which I use now to stay in touch with my homeschool group and little town life after our move interstate 7 months ago; and that is only used on my desktop and once or twice a week, tops.

If anything, the switch to a dumbphone taught me this: what you USE doesn’t matter; it’s what you want to see, it’s what you value, and if you want social media, you will always have it, and that’s fine, BUT if you want it, you will always be fighting it, because that is how it is designed, whether on the phone or laptop, you will waste some amount of time.

When I deleted my social media, there was no choice, nothing to see on anything. The war was over, and I was free to use my time in any way I liked, and I still had a fantastic camera, reliable map apps, and the ability to use apps like email when in a pinch- simply download and then delete, or get Google back when we are on holiday, for things like finding a cafe or something we need.

These machines we hate have a use when we understand the tool is for solving and not for serving.

Making friends, for real.

It can be hard to make friends in the real world, especially if you are like me, an alien at church, homeschooling groups and just everywhere I go, with my seven children (here in Aus it’s super rare). It can feel easier to just “find them online”, but I have tried that, and it’s not rewarding, because it is never the same as getting one’s hands dirty with a real person, whether they are like you or not.

Many women can feel isolated not because they are, but because they isolate themselves, with the need to be “seen” to be “accepted”; it’s because we have grown into the mirror image, the self-curated feed of reflection, finding those who “get us” online and thinking this must be the only way outside of it.

If we only desire to be surrounded by people like ourselves, there is no room for growth.

I am an introvert; I highly value time in my home, alone, yet this is not healthy, not for my family or me, and I know that there is no excuse, no “there is no one out there” there are, but it will require some discomfort, inconvience and effort, all things online only friendships take away and replaces with shallow disconect with a side of addiciton.

Would I use a dumbphone again?

Probably not.

I do still have my dumbphone for my older boys to use if both of us parents leave the house and they may need it. It will be the phone my children get when they do need a mode of communication before they are 18.

Overall, I would say if you are deadset on trying, then try, but you need to rewire your values, and only then will you see lasting change for the better.

When I first began homeschooling, I figured that if you had a plan, you had it right- the right intentions, at least. I knew that not all plans were equal, but if you cared enough to make a plan, you were surely going to succeed. (I have other posts on ‘God in homeschool plan’ and ‘ditching the effort to find the perfect schedule ‘)

The above thought is not wrong. But we need to know the two reasons why we need “the plan”: first, it is wise to plan where one will dedicate one’s effort and time; this is what you will hear, read, and tell yourself throughout your homeschooling years. It is the buffer, the safe zone; it is why the plans can become so very articulated and detailed among women with high expectations and very little experience.

By no means is this wrong; I plan my days, weeks, and school terms as diligently as I can, but I have experienced times when my plan has held me back, and I have had to pivot uncomfortably or completely ditch and rewrite.

The second reason, and this one, drives much of the plan: the fear that if we do not do what is acceptable or enough, then we are going to produce failure.

It is this driving force that has us spend thousands on curriculum we do not like and time on methods that do not suit us. A curriculum is the providence of the plans, the safeguards we desperately need to feel like educators.

We strive not for the best that we can offer, but for the best there is, the best we know of now, and we hope that this best, purchased, afforded time in our homes, will produce the success we desire.

These curricula often come with ready-made plans that make us feel comfortable. There is nothing wrong with a plan, a dedicated path, but I am learning that simply adhering to the path, or the constructing of a plan, is not enough to deliver a sound education.

So, what do you do when you are faced with children who aren’t thriving on your plan, on the curriculum that was supposed to be your fail-safe? The outcomes aren’t there; you trusted the books, the process, the daily showing up, you have put the time in, and yet, you know, this isn’t working.

We are capable-assessing from the roots up

“We strive not for the best that we can offer, but for the best there is, the best we know of now, and we hope that this best, purchased, afforded time in our homes, will produce the success we desire. “

This is where many homeschoolers get all tangled up. (myself included)

We don’t strive for the best we can offer; we want the best there is.

The best curricula for the budget you have, for the place you live and the time you have; that best looks different for everyone, and comes with varying outcomes.

When we sign up for a best, one outsourced and in demand, it makes us feel like we are moving in the right direction.

This best, this plan, in the shape of books and tests, will give the children the education they deserve, with a mother teacher as an aid, a master of output.

We ditch the input and become slaves to the outcome, the grading of each page, the master of time put into the “plan”. We read from the books we are told to read, we expect the answers the guides give us, and happily grade accordingly.

We are attuned to our curriculum, and perhaps when we do become bored, intrinsically mute to creativity or desire, we decide that the chosen best, “the curriculum,” needs a change-up.

This is the cycle of many homeschoolers, but we need to understand that a curriculum is a method, and not an education.

Read that again.

A curriculum is a method, and not an education.

Many of us choose boxed curricula because they come with a plan and promise.

The plan removes us from risk, and the promise removes us from fear.

We buy into these so willingly, not for outcomes, but for a desire to have the task of educating given to professionals, or at least be a part of a group, the safety of numbers, the faith in reviews and opinions of those in the same boat as yourself.

I must add here that I am not against boxed curriculum; I use curricula of all sorts, I have switched them, I have bought far too many and used too little.

I am not here to alienate or discourage anyone for what they use.

Rather, I am here to share what I have been learning through trial and error.

Simple is not less; it can be an opportunity for more

A boxed curriculum is not the enemy. A boxed curriculum can offer the homeschooling mother everything she needs for excellence.

Structure, planning, answers, book lists, and peace of mind. All Good things in the home of a mother teacher. But these things alone are not a promise of the outcomes we desire for our children.

When done well, these curricula can produce a well-read, articulate, and lifelong learner.

When done poorly, the product is whatever the child happens to process long enough to keep in mind, during the 10-12 years they spent churning through the pages of the curriculum.

One child is set up for life; the other has spent a childhood in books they have little use for in real life, and no desire to continue the process.

The problem is not curriculum; the problem is thinking it will work for you.

Knowing your role as teacher

When we understand that curriculum is a method and not an education, then it becomes very much up to the teacher to apply her wisdom to every child she teaches, to lift them beyond the drudgery of accumulation, and into the heights of learning.

This process of “lifting” is incredibly nuanced. A fine education is not ever the same for any individual; therefore, in that knowledge, we can and should agree that a curriculum can hold us back from making the decisions that could greatly change the outcome of any one child for the better; yet fear of deviating from the “plan” can be so overwhelming that we never want to rely on our own widom, which feels much more risky then sticking to the plan we bought into, not from desire, but from fear.

Letting go of subjects, repeating a math year, simplifying the books we have because we have an instinct, we look at the child, and we think, I think they need this… and yes, we struggle to let go, to take the risk of having an outcome on our shoulders.

It can also be seeing that a child needs more from you; finding the time, the energy, and the resources to deliver. I do believe that more often than not our children need less, but not less variety, but less busywork and more intention.

That is our purpose as mother teachers. We are here not to deliver but to curate, not to manage but to master.

Leaning on our own ability can be uncomfortable

Many of us truly believe that we are unequipped to educate without a helpful guide, a menu, so to speak, of choices, topics and requirements from each.

It is true, many of us aren’t naturally good at seeing the learning opportunity at first; the longer I do this, I realise that I could, in time, ditch altogether the programs I rely on today, as my eye, my instinct, is honed for learning.

Filling my school shelves with books on every topic, country, history, ideologies and more, I am coming away from completing the program, and opening up to reading, narration, copywork and conversation, for my younger and older children.

This comes with fear, not always knowing where a choice will take you but trying it anyway, admitting mistakes and listening to those older and more experienced.

It is the buffer, the safe zone; it is why the plans can become so very articulated and detailed among women with high expectations and very little experience.

I wrote this earlier in the article, and say this as one of them: I was the one who thought that more was better, and More IS better- more rigour, more mastery, more consistency, more of high standards and less of mediocrity.

The vast majority of new homeschool mothers, however, want more variety and struggle to stay consistent, more structure based on a to-do list, and less time on the interests of the young child. More time in textbooks and less time reading for pleasure.

They aren’t interested in mastery; they know not what mastery looks like; they desire boxes to tick, and the more the better. Many of us start here; the longer we teach, the more we leave it behind. If you take the time to listen to older, experienced homeschoolers, they will often say that a simple approach, one given energy and intention, will get results that stand strong, long beyond childhood.

I am here now, living it out. I am seeing results I don’t like in my current routine, and having to pivot, having to trust my own wisdom, accumulated over my few years of homeschooling, and trusting that with intention, and lots of assessing, prayer and determination, I will reach the results I am striving for.

I am doing less, but doing what I teach well.

I am lifting standards to heights I never thought my children could deliver, but they do when there is less of a workload.

I am choosing quality over quantity.

It is not comfortable right now. I feel safe in getting more done; surely the more you do, the fewer gaps, fewer mistakes. (I will detail what I teach in another post)

That is the fear of actually educating; I am a curator, not a manager. I am committed to excellence, not a to-do list. Only by practice, by moving to face results and not ignoring them, will I master my homeschooling experience, and be the better for it.

I am willing to learn, and even willing to make mistakes, because I know that my gut- that instinct I feel tugging when I grade mediocre work, when I listen to reading that is bored, when I watch the child do but not thrive, deliver but not care- that something is wrong, and I need to scale back and get to the roots.

Homeschooling is not about me; it is not about my comfort, my desire to not be afraid, or worse, wrong.

It is about delivering an education, and no one said that would be done without fear, discomfort or a stretching of one's abilities beyond what we thought we could handle.

An education is not bought and sold; it is constantly sought after, with intention, practice and conviction.

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As a mother to seven, I have lost count of the times I have been surprised by an outcome of my parenting. A mix of good and bad, and ultimately these surprises, these illustrations of my own lack of foresight- despite my strain to prevent these little occurrences have taught me one thing.

I am not equipped to plan the outcomes for my children.

You don’t have to listen long or go far to hear many parents my age (early 30s) share the many decisions being made in the home to achieve outcomes they desire for their children as future adults.

There is little wrong with this; I believe this is good parenting to desire an outcome, but I am aware that platforms like Substack, podcasts, YouTube, and blogs make it oh so easy for us to share plans, but not always the outcomes, or perhaps more frightening to parents, is the children’s interpretation of all those childhood ideals we impose upon them.

I say this, not to deter us who do choose to write or speak or film ( I am part of this, though I do aim for transparency as much as is wise) but to remind all of us that some of the loudest voices, the biggest followings, are the most inexperienced. I am sure many a mother can relate to the new mother who declares her baby will be raised, doing or eating or sleeping a certain way not because she truly knows how to enforce these things or why she should, but just because she wants her child to be above a standard she herself has found insufficient. A mother like this is the loudest; she is quick to share her thoughts and find her “tribe”, wanting to unite not in the outcome of her parenting but in the diligent awareness that her choices are better than other parenting she is aware of.

Much like the new mothers, many of us learn that we need to rewrite the narrative we jotted down sometimes in pencil, sometimes in permanent marker; the reality, the day-to-day, the path we thought we would be taking, and replace it with the path actually in front of us.

We have ideals, plans, roads we hope to take, and I think that while all of those things are admirable and necessary to a degree, we have to make them all in pencil, eraser at the ready, and not permanent marker, etched into our ideals like stains in beige carpet.

The problem is not wanting an outcome; the problem is thinking that we control them simply because we say we want to.

It is not that this is new, that parents have only recently begun to make plans or design a life around what they hope to pass on; far from it, but the problem can be or should I say the problem very much is, the fact that we cannot guarantee anything, and that we are making mistakes all the time, and as christians, we need to focus a whole lot less on ourselves, and look to God.

Start with humility, approach with daily vigour

I have learned that when we hold onto control with an iron grip, all we really do is get worked up about the outcomes we want, believing that our way is the only way to reach the desired result. More still, we do not know if the outcome we strive so hard for is the outcome that is actually good for us.

Control is choosing a path toward a certain result, without actually being aware of whether it’s the path that will bring the result we work so hard for.

When I become overwhelmed at the idea that I have to predict futures with my choices, actions and knowledge, I have to remind myself that I am not required to do this alone; in fact, I am told to pray without ceasing and come to God with thankfulness. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

That is where I am most grateful to be a Christian; I choose to serve Christ because I learned somewhere in my twenties that I know basically nothing, and that I am not able to predict what is good for me, let alone bring joy.

Once I admit this, that when we become truly humble before Christ, only then do we realise how much we need him, not just for our salvation through faith alone, but to live out every day as his servants, to bring about not our own desires, but to see his desires lived out in us.

If I can realise this for myself, that my life is not my own, and ultimately I will be more fulfilled this way, then how and why should I try to plan and predict my children’s futures for them?

Instead, I choose to give my days to God, humbly praying my prayer daily that he will guide me. I make plans, I learn, I read and use those things in my life. God is not a God of chaos, and I have wisdom I can learn through his word and prayer.

I am aware that right now, I am making mistakes, but all I can do is give these to God, ask that he show me, and then pray harder to overcome them.

Who do I want to raise?

I used to say that I want to raise “successful adults”, but what is that? If I am to place my children on the world’s pedestal of success, something I have myself chosen to ignore and instead serve Christ- not that you cannot be successful as a servant of Christ, but that serving must come first.

What would make me happiest to see is that all of my children will come to know their own need for Christ, and serve him with their lives, for his gain. Ultimately, I cannot “make” my children serve the lord; I can teach them, pray for them, and show them my own life testimony, but I am not capable of any more than that.

So what am I capable of?

If I am to trust only myself to create children who can serve society, as hard workers, good wives, husbands, honest, reliable, kind and more, can I do all that as well as impart the very important knowledge that all that comes when a heart is fearful of our great God, and chooses service to him?

Where do I stop trusting myself and trust god?

What decision is too small?

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Allowing God to work in parenting

Number one, I must be transformed by the renewing of my mind.

² Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. romans 2:12

Reading my bible daily, memorising God’s word, praying daily, thankfulness, and rejoicing. These are ways we can transform our minds.

This exchange of myself over time, from the flesh to the spirit, is the best I can do for my children.

God is more powerful, more capable of knowing what our children need. Our hard work and conviction to live faithfully to Christ are required, not for parenthood but to show our children what we hope they will emulate as Christians. God knew this was difficult, hence why he imparted his Holy Spirit, his word and his ear.

If our Christian parenting is not paired with praying over our children, nor the humble giving over of self-reliance and instead letting God work in our children and us, then we are serving a master of our own making, one who will let us down and ultimately bring our own lack of knowledge and foresight to the forefront, over and over again.

How becoming a praying mother changed how I parent.

It is a funny thing to realise how little we actually have control of. Most of our control is an illusion. When things go well, we feel in control; when things do not, we feel overwhelmed. There is no control; there are only things happening that we can either surrender to and practice gladness in all circumstances, or we can ride the rocky road of wanting control and feeling in control sometimes, and highly likely we are struggling with anger and anxiety when we feel we have “lost it”

Parenting is no different. First, the children in your care are sinners, and every sinner has his own personality, traits and mind; it is not that we are different that is hard; it is the relating to difference that can be difficult to impart to our children.

Difference is simply how we relate to the world around us; we have our normal and our way of doing things, and yet we still need to function with others who don’t understand our normal or our way of doing things. This is the fine art of living in a fallen world, and still being able to serve the Lord in it.

Being okay with being different needs to meet understanding, compassion and hard work.

Children grow, change, life changes, seasons change. Your capability as a mother changes, and so, how can we rely on our own plans for futures we have no clue will come to pass?

Making plans is fine, but don’t let those plans hold you in a chokehold; learn to be okay with saying. “I don’t know” when someone asks how you will act when your child hits 16, or when the first boyfriend walks through the door.

We can obsess over all the things we are or aren’t doing, which only creates burdens we aren’t meant to carry.

You could honestly say. “I don’t know, but I am praying always, so when it comes, I know I’ll be praying!”

I cannot sit and write this as an expert on how to raise Godly adults, as I am not there yet, but what I can do is encourage you to pray about how you are going to raise your little tribe of sinners, and not become overwhelmed with outcomes, but instead, pray.

Pray for each child. Pray that you will be shown where they need you, pray to be available to them, to be prompted to talk to the teen, or pray for an opportunity to sit and mould clay with the 8-year-old.

Pray when you don’t know how to deal with fighting siblings, pray to find answers, to be lead to them, perhaps a friend, a good book or even the idea will come to you, try this.

Pray for the willingness to teach the littles how to wash dishes, though it’s quicker done by you; pray for wisdom while teaching math, or the reminder to read aloud.

Pray for friends that will be a blessing, for future wives and husbands that are Godly. Pray for the sport you should sign up for, or that you can find a great book list for your 12-year-old.

Nothing is too small to come to God with. When we pray for these little daily decisions, we give all the little burdens that can weigh us down to God. I have seen all these prayers answered, from book lists to tackling a hard math season.

When my eldest was listless and needed a push to manage his time, I prayed; I was tired and had little in the tank. I knew I would work harder if I had to, to help him learn the important skill of self-will in time management, but I prayed, and weeks later he got a job, and how he manages time now!

I am not saying everything is easy; there is much I need to do each day, and many days when I regret wasting time or doing something I shouldn’t have.

This is not a post to rid you of your responsible parenting. If you have a conviction you want to see lived out in your home, then you must stand by it, live by it, and teach it.

There is much we must pass onto our children that can only be successfully done by diligence, self dicipline and constant learning.

But I truly do believe that I can live out my parenting joyfully, not by controlling all circumstances, but by surrendering to them.

Give my circumstances to God, and simply serve with a glad heart.

Not easy, but more fulfilling and I believe more rewarding than striving for control and calling it wisdom or stewardship. I believe diligent stewardship is coming to Christ with your circumstances, asking for wisdom, and applying God’s word to the decisions you have to make.

This is not done with a strenuous control over your reality, but rather a heart that is humble in the knowledge that your best life is lived in the Lord’s timing and direction.

When we pray and wait for an answer, when we begin to see those prayers answered, these begin to take shape in ways we could never have predicted.

If I could share here every prayer that has been answered for me! I would be here all night.

I hope this encourages you if you are feeling overwhelmed and not sure what to do next.

pray.

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One of the biggest misconceptions of most homeschoolers when just starting is that there will be time for all the homeschooling. That once education is on the radar, time and space suddenly open up for all the things we want to achieve.

Perhaps this article is leaning more toward mothers with more than the usual number of children, though I can attest that when I had three children, I thought I had very little time to spare; now that I have seven, I realise I threw away my time when I had three. When you don’t know any different, there is no way to tell yourself what is to come, and get on with all that extra time you have.

As I had more children, I started to homeschool less consistently. The older ones have an established routine, and we show up diligently, but I still struggle with my younger children. It isn’t something I am ok with, far from it, many a night I lie in bed, angry at myself for missing the read-aloud time with the toddler, or not sparing the time to work on math with the 6-year-old.

Then the next day, time takes hold, and it seems to be endlessly sprinting, with me begging for a moment to stop, look, and listen to the children that need me.

But what I know is that there are many successful homeschoolers before me, with more children than I have, and what my problem really is is the distraction. When we speak about distraction, most think of scrolling, but the distraction can be good things.

tidying the laundry, stretching and folding, vacuuming floors. Just the general “getting things done” of a day as a mother at home. But these things should not take precedence over my children and their education.

It is not that these should never take place, but my problem is not being good at ignoring these things that are always waiting for me, and getting on with the things that can’t wait.

I have spoken before on Substack about praying for guidance. My prayer during my 7th pregnancy, when I was so very tired, was “to be given eyes to see what they needed to see, and hands to be where they needed to be” This prayer, has become almost a daily occurance for me, uttered in the mornings, either in the rare quiet time I get before the baby wakes, or while stuffing luandry into machines or elbows deep in dishes.

I NEED God, something that if you admit to a non-Christian or even a Christian who doesn’t agree with the number of children I have, may find feeble, but I only think it is humbling for us, or unthinkable to others, because many of us assume that daily life should be tackled merely by self-discipline and experience.

Experience has taught me, however, that giving God my values and my trust results in realising that if I want to do my best, I need to ask God what that is, and stay humble when he shows me that it’s plain, simple home life, done with my best attitude.

We could never do it without him, and I must admit, I thought for a time that I could, or at least, I thought I could get through the days. I prayed for big goals, for the broader life picture, but for days, for mere snippets of time, I thought I could manage that with some strategies and discipline.

Turns out, my best days are when I give them to God, and serving god requires the skill of ignoring everything else. We cannot serve two masters.

A curated life is not one lived in real time.

I feel I need to very briefly address this, since I fall into this trap now and then. We are surrounded by curation. The artful creations of others, to “inspire” can be just that, wonderfully inspiring, but I truly don’t believe anyone can live with homes, wardrobes and a garden that are constantly looking inspirational.

As mothers, we need to be able to separate the inspiration from the reality of life in the home, children and true service to those things. There is nothing wrong with having cut flowers, doing your hair and dressing for the day, but chasing clean floors, perfect kitchens, and airy, comfortable living rooms is not a service to your family without the child training, the daily construction of meals, the reading, the laundry and even things like exercise, sorting out sibling squabbles, talking with the teens and running errands.

IT is not that you cannot have a clean home and train children, but I can guarantee your home will need to be put firmly in second or third place some days and in seasons of life, many days, the time it requires to steward a family well, I believe is being overlooked, as we allow the children to much control, while we are busy working, or trying to create a “restful” home, whie I children are anything but.

I leave my home every Sunday morning for church, looking like a tornado has swept through. I try to plan, make breakfast ahead, have ironed clothing laid out, shoes and socks ready, and yet somewhere between feeding the baby, my coffee and grabbing the baby bag in those final minutes, the chaos wins. But I clamber into the passenger seat of our van, seven smiling children in the back, and off we go, for the hour drive to church through a winter-misty morning, and I need to remind myself that THIS is it, this is a life, not the home I live with its mess until I get back.

If you want well-behaved, likable, kind, honest and diligent children, they get that from two places.

You're teaching them, and you're living it out in front of them.

The teaching is required, and time teaching little children can be tedious, but we need to remember that Home is the tool used for the growth of the family, for the betterment of those around us.

Home is not an idol to be served for the sake of the home's aesthetics. Now, if you have a clean home, this doesn’t mean it is an idol for you, but it can become one. And this is what stops many of us (myself included) from achieving the outcomes we truly desire in our children.

The hurdle is not the home; it is the way we use the home.

Our homes are to keep us growing, to keep us safe, warm, and able to spend time evolving characters, skills and relationships. Therefore, to choose dishes over the morning read aloud is not a service, but a disservice to the true usefulness of your home; dishes are important, yes, but we need to have a set list of priorities, what must be done versus what can be done.

Put your blinkers on.

I don’t mean indicators, I mean the blinkers put on horses.

Horse blinkers (or blinders) are attachments to a bridle that limit a horse's peripheral and rear vision. They are primarily used in racing and driving to reduce distractions from other horses or the crowd, helping the horse focus entirely on the track ahead.

You homeschooling mamma are a horse, and your homeschool and child training is the track, the crowd, the other horses, the competing sounds and sights need to be removed, so you can focus on that track alone.

Putting on blinders is easier some days, and feels impossible others (does anyone else have a week in the month where crumbs just get to you?). It means ignoring the crumbs on the floor, or the laundry that needs folding, but I must add, “for a time”, I am not advocating for a complete lack of housework, or calling a clean home “not important”.

Not only do the blinders help us ignore the mess so we can focus on what is important at that time, but we need them to continue on the Path God has called us to. Comparison is not only the thief of joy, but the thief of doing what God called YOU to be doing.

BE diligent with your home, allow it to function as a place of learning and rest for the soul.

We can only use a usable space, and if our homes are not usable, and only bring stress, swinging too far in the other direction, and having your family live in dirty rooms, with little beauty, is not the place for ease and rest. Your home is a tool, and we must keep it at an optimum place of living and making.

It is not a matter of never tending to one’s home, but knowing when to tend to the home.

Chasing the living room being clean and orderly before every read aloud is not optimal, too many times you probably won’t sit for the reading, you will lose time to “just this one thing”, or “later after I have done this.”

Instead, we need to learn to place the blinkers on, and practice ignorance of the mess, of the task list, and instead set our sights to achieve the priority of the moment.

Now, there are some things you can do. I practice in my home to help me not live in continual squalor and probably make me tremendously depressed.

Have your children do chores once or twice a day to keep things tidy.

Cull clothing and toys to a manageable level. I have 7 kids, and one small tub of toys.

Get in the kitchen early, start bread, baking or even dinner before the school day starts. During very busy days, set timers for 5-10 minutes in little pockets of the day and clean a space in areas that need it most. Walk away when the timer stops.

Don’t overclutter your home. Be mindful that everything you own must be managed, with time and energy, since life is a time and energy game. I am always cautious of what I bring in, knowing it will either serve me or take from me.

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How am I going to practice ignorance in my home?

My problem is consistency in new habits. Life is always changing, and my days this past six months have been wild, baby number seven has grown me immensely, from the brutal sickness in the first trimester to the fatigue in the last, then a move interstate with a three-month-old, and now finding new routines homeschooling almost 6 children.

1. Time block. I always go back to time blocking. Here is a very brief summary of my time-blocked day. Before 8 am, morning routine, I am to be ready for the day, bed made, coffee had, and the Bible read. after 8 to 12 pm, breakfast, morning chores, school. lunch. Before 1 pm, no screens of any kind. after 1 pm quiet time (exercise, writing, gardening, cooking), 3 pm afternoon house clean/dinner, 6 pm dinner, chores, read aloud, bed routine. 8 pm. free time.

2. Pray. My daily prayer is asking God to help me be where I need to be. Sometimes we can plan the perfect day, thinking we have it covered, if we just get to all of it. Often, though, something creeps up, and we have to be willing to be all in on the unplanned as much as the planned, since I know god can see so very much more than I.

3. I have set times for housecleaning. am and pm. I know these times are coming, and so I am able to ignore the mess until those times. Seriously, my house can look pretty bad by the time school is drawing to a close, and yet I am pretty chill, because I know exactly when it will be clean again.

4. Put creativity first. I have learned that if I don’t do the thing I want to do, like sew, paint, or even write on Substack, whatever it may be, you cannot do these things only when your house is clean, set aside time, and when that time comes, just do it, you will be happier for it.

AS I finish up this post, I have seven children in the kitchen making flatbread with butter and honey for lunch( the little one is in the high chair, munching on a peeled apple). I write this in snatched minutes. I am actually practising my ability to do something and then let go and not let it burden me again until I have made time for it, but there is a mix of doing things when one can, and the doing of things when one must. The morning was spent playing Monopoly with my four eldest, a game that spanned hours over the last evening and this morning.

I have many things to do, many things I want to achieve during the next two weeks of our winter break, but I will give the best hours of my days to children, and practice this with a joyful heart, this is where I need the most practice, and I hope very much that with the Lord’s help, I will be a better mother and teacher in the months and years to come.

My 3 eldest boys don’t particularly enjoy schoolwork. My fourth boy seems to be heading in the same direction as his older brothers and bemoans his lot of math and phonics.

Never have I experienced boys who WANT to sit and do their schoolwork when the sun is shining and motorbikes beckon; there is nothing they want less.

I went through several years of homeschooling boys and felt like we were getting nowhere. They have all taken a very long time to become readers, and once they are reading, they show little interest. They didn’t care in the least as a year would tick by with little progress at ages 5,6,7 and even 8. I was feeling vulnerable. I was sure I wasn’t doing enough, but I could also sense that if I pushed for more, it would be a waste of my time and theirs.

I was stuck. I wanted more, not because they actually needed it, but because I did! I wanted reassurance that I was doing well.

Children only retain what they are actually interested in, and when they were young (9 and under, maybe even up to 11!), they wanted nothing more than Lego, dirt, trees and motorbikes.

We showed up, we did the bare minimum, and over time, it has turned into what I think is a rich education for my high schooler and almost high schooler, both boys are very different, but in their different ways, they are thriving.

They were never interested in read-alouds as young boys, never keen for any project I introduced, but always came to me with ideas they had tried on their own. Chores, cooking, and even looking after younger siblings have always been a part of their lives, and over time, they have become helpful and quick thinkers.

Over the past year, my older children have begun to love my reading aloud to them, and I find that with a big family, the older children lead the younger naturally into new pursuits. We have read The Pilgrim's Progress, Mary Slessor, The Trojan War, books on the gold rush, and more. (I fully credit this to ditching our TV in the living room 6 months ago)

Since then, I have found my boys reading on their own. If I could go back and tell myself not to fret, I just had to wait till they were interested, and the problem was, they were too distracted on screens, even though I thought I was monitoring it, and I hadn’t read interesting books to them!

Respect your future men

Boys of all ages want respect, and mothers, we are usually the primary homeschoolers, and we often reward or try to encourage with love, our language. But boys want to be brave, strong and capable.

I learned that telling a boy he did well is okay, telling him, “ I knew you could do it!” is better. To affirm them into a role, one that they at first play-act, but over time, they lean into, they feel it, and soon, they are proud to try.

As mothers homeschooling boys, we need to remember that they are driven to learn differently than we are, and while we need the same education, the way they learn it can be different.

They can be ready later in age, and I have often found that they need fewer words and more time to mull over a new concept. If you step in and help them too much, they can become lazy. That button, the one of the brave conqueror, is easily pushed to “off” by an overreaching mother.

Step back, and let them try. There have been many times when I have had to be very helpful in math, but never has a concept been mastered by my hovering. I need to be sure they understand, and then let them make the mistakes and find them for themselves.

It’s uncomfortable, and they can react badly. Pride, after all, can be fickle, but we need to teach boys the right kind of pride, the one that is humble in defeat, and able to keep trying until the problem is mastered, and when they do, be sure to tell them, “Of course you did it, I knew you could!”

Boys need prodding, but I have found that incentivising works wonders. Give them something to work towards, something that really drives them. When I was a new mothers, and my boys were young, incentivising was easy as baking cookies and handing them out after a job well done.

When they are older, you need to find and grow interests. You need to introduce new things, let them try hobbies, things they can do in their free time, and then allow them to use schoolwork to earn money or time for it.

Piano lessons to earn a movie on the weekend.

Saving for a new part for an RC car, five dollars for a perfect spelling test or memorising a chapter of the bible.

We use the pencil challenge to keep pencil loss to zero all year round, and we go to lunch and bowling at the end of the year with stubby pencils in pockets.

Boys respond well to feeling responsible, and responsible comes with competent, and competent also builds confidence, confidence builds pride, and there we can teach a Godly pride in our sons, to serve others, to work hard and to never allow pride to stop us from admitting we are wrong or need help.

Boys are our future men, and they need dignity and respect from their mothers. This leads to the best relationships, and while we can always show love, and hugs never go amiss, there is a new language we should learn, not only for our sons but for our husbands.

I share this, knowing I made SO many mistakes, I had to learn true consistency, how to master everything I taught, and I had to go through learning the basics of how to teach.

But that is what being a mother and educator is all about, we learn just as much as they, and as competence comes, so does confidence.

IF you are homeschooling young boys and feel out of your depth or discouraged, then know that you are joining many a mother educator, and that in time, if you keep showing up and keep learning, you will succeed.

shenaede

For many Mothers and fathers, old and new, life is filled with negotiation, threats, bribes and then the subsequent angry outburst when, after a long day or days, the child wins, and the parent is left feeling shameful and lost.

I see this in public and in others’ homes.

Life for the vast majority of parents is long, exhausting, and the payoff is promised in the years ahead, with shrinking breathers of brief connection when all is going as the child pleases. Mothers and fathers are not united, as there is nothing to unite over; rather, there is a competitive tally of who did more and who ignored the longest and got away with it.

The conception of children is an ideal, a nice way to fill a void. Love is all-consuming, and every parent would answer that they dearly love their children, yet as that new baby grows, the joys are few and far between, barely recalled among tantrums, arguments, and constant disrespect.

knowing your role.

Parents have a vital role; Raising strong children, in mind, body and spirit. We are all three; never are we disconnected from one another. This means parents are not caretakers only to feed and clothe, but to lay the foundations of healthy bodies, minds, and spirits.

It requires intention, learning, and time. This is harder than distracting, bribery and enduring the terrible twos, and every age after that, but the payoff is more than one hundred times worth it.

Your country, wherever you may dwell, needs you, parents. Countries are made of families, and good families make good countries.

Every parent who wants their children to live in a free country, with liberties and ability, should know this.

"Democracy is only as good as the education that surrounds it", Socrates

It is your job parent to educate and raise a child who will one day keep a country free, or will they fall victim to the bravado of dictators who rely on the programming of children in state systems.

Now I know the fellas that spoke the above quotes weren’t anyone to mimic, but if you know your history, then you will know that Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and many other dictators of the last 120 years didn’t begin with adults who had already been educated; they knew that to change a nation, they must target children.

Nothing has changed today, it’s one of the major reasons I homeschool my children, but what this really should empower you, parents, is that YOUR role is vital, and when these men (the dictators) began to change nations through children, the roles of parents were taken from them, and given to the state.

Why? Because the parents would never have taught their children the ideals the government needed to make true change, they knew this. This is not at all a new philosophy; this has been a desire for thousands of years, from the Roman Empire to the ancient Greeks. Families were hard to control and weren’t to be trusted when it came to controlling a nation. Plato wrote on this idea in his book “The Republic” almost 400 years before Christ.

This is all to really help you understand that just as your power as a parent has been significantly undermined in the last half century, you can take it back, and when you do, the results are life-changing, for you and your children.

A parent’s role is to prepare children for the world as responsible, honest, kind, hard-working adults, who can converse, think and disagree with others without falling apart.

If you are a Christian parent, then I would add that your most important role is to lead that child to Christ. You cannot make them believe, but you can do all you can in the brief time they are in your home, to teach and watch you live out your days becoming more like Christ.

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Be the boss.

You are THE BOSS!

You follow through.

Number one rule. Read the quote at the top of the article.

YOU FOLLOW THROUGH.

EVERY TIME.

I don’t have time to tell you all the ins and outs, but if I were to share anything that I know will change your parenting for the better, it’s this.

Let me tell you this. You have liberties, being the example is not forcing yourself to live as a child. I see this, and it is comical, the parent thinks that they have to earn the respect of the child by being “Good”.

That is not how you earn a child's respect; it can help, yes, especially when you have teens who notice things that you teach and not live, even more as a Christian parent. The phrase, more is caught than taught, is definitely one I live by. But even then, respect is not earned by the adult. This is not an equal rights campaign run by the children.

What tears down walls and teaches disrespect more than anything is the parent who doesn’t follow through.

You are weak, you are ineffective, you are … unnecessary.

Your role is being abdicated, and the child knows it before you do. The child knows that the first demand for candy at the grocery store won’t be listened to, but the 7th will, you have proved it, time and time again.

don’t want to pick up the toys, just wait it out, mother is sure to get tired of asking soon.

left your bike in the rain again, don’t worry, Dad asks, maybe yells, but nothing really happens.

There is no need to change, to obey.

When we lack follow-through, when we lack the ability to discipline, there is zero incentive to obey.

Parents think they are building a friendship, but the children are creating a dictatorship, one that hurts them. They truly desire boundaries; they need the firm nos, the chore routine, which actually helps them feel needed and responsible.

They need the time away from screens to play and read and be bored, they need the vegetables on their plate, the hand in the car park, and the straps on the car seats.

Yet parents fail to enforce basic concepts of “obey”, instead opting for negotiation, bribery and frustration.

Who is raising your child?

That’s the question.

If not you, then who? because someone is. Is it the school system, social media, movies, or friends?

Do they have your child’s future in mind? Do they want them to experience the joy that this life can be? Are they creating capability or dependency?

Can your child depend on you to raise them as they need to be, or will they be moulded by the state and algorithms?

Parents need to unite.

Parents are lost, with no role, no idea what to unite over as mother and father, no idea how to enforce it, feeling scared if they try, shameful if it goes wrong and spiralling into the crutch of state systems to find momentary relief from the daily grind of uncontrollable children who then go on to cripple the system.

Do you think that was an accident?

More and more, the state is encroaching on families, and that means that parents are being forced to step back and let the state step in, and history has taught us that this is a lethal trajectory for the society that adopts this model.

Parents need to stop accumulating points on the scoreboard of suffering, and unite over the role of protector and provider of good habits, life skills and morals for the child.

A child is not a child but a person, and no person is just born just as they are at 25; it is an accumulation of daily dedication of them that raised that child into an adult.

Take back your parenting and change the world.

Books to read.

8 errors parents make and how to avoid them. Michael Brock.

Shepherding a child’s heart. Tedd Tripp.

The replublic. Plato.

Trying to have a conversation with the vast majority of mothers of children under the age of five these days is tedious. Scattered conversation is held among constant interruptions and a total lack of response to commands from mother to child, all morning long.

Overall, there is a lack of ability. On the mother’s end, there is not the abilty to control her child, no knowledge of how to begin and end a situation where she and her child/children clash, and of course, the clash is what she needs from them, versus what they want to give.

The child has zero understanding of authority, refuses to listen or carry out basic requests, and ultimately creates chaos and unrest not just for the child's parent but for all those surrounding the situation.

These mothers complain of no village, where is the help? Where is the advice? They ask, bewildered, but they don’t admit they only want to take. They want to be surrounded by bemoaning mothers just like them, unable to control children who rule the roost with “big emotions” and only leave chaos and fatigue in their wake and call it “parenting together”

It isn’t parenting, it’s passing time.

This may sting if you are reading this, mother, but the elusive “village” can do very little for parents who cannot, and who/or believe that controlling children so that they are helpful, kind and courteous is “wrong” (I don’t believe the “village” existed. I do beleive parents did more together out of need, and that was aided by the each parents abilty to control thier own children)

These very same mothers show up to homeschool group, talk (constantly interrupted) all morning long about curricula, new ideas seen on the internet and fun ideas for outings, all the while their children run, naughty, whinging and whining and completely unable to notice how they disrupt everything around them.

If you can’t control your child, your homeschooling will not succeed.

It is a lack of accountability.

The mother wants the world to accept her; she wants the “village,” but she is incapable of raising in her home children who bring any benefit to others, even themselves.

These women cry out for community, for helpers, and yet many (not all) are unwilling to help themselves.

If you do share how your well-behaved children are made (no, it’s not a lucky dip), they are unwilling to do the work and instead rely on labels that leave them out of the equation.

Little Johnny just has “big emotions”, " ADHD,” or they’re on the “spectrum”.

These labels are thrown about with enthusiasm; no one seems to care how this label will affect the child for life. It is a way out, an excuse.

I don’t believe even half the children labelled with these excuses have any real condition; it is a collapse of parenting, and the only one who really pays the price is the child.

Your role as a parent includes training children

Homeschoolers today are falling into the pit of acceptance.

acceptance of all the wrong things. They accept the “big emotions” aka tantrums, they accept the petty demands of little tyrants who want this plate and not that plate, who won’t leave the house without water bottles and snacks, who don’t want to do anything they don’t want to at any given time.

They rely on bribery, or long explanations of “why”, as though the child needs to “vote” that the reason is important enough for them to obey or not.

Mothers and fathers are at children’s mercy. And they expect to homeschool this way successfully.

It’s crazy.

Children like to do schoolwork when it is new and exciting. Give it a few weeks, and the repetition that is required to learn well will get boring.

Then what?

Do you switch it up constantly? make it fun? Hope your child will want to show up today? That is a recipe for poor outcomes.

Child-led learning, the new catch-all term in homeschooling for “we do what the child wants or it won’t get done”, child-led learning never used to be like it is today. Child-led learning was inspiring curiosity; It was the practice of using a child's natural inquisitive nature to teach concepts of all kinds. It was a dedication from the mother teacher to know her child and use her child’s strengths in order to give them a great education.

Now it is another brand of unschooling; the labels are changing because homeschool parents are losing control.

The number one problem in the mainstream school system today is the teachers’ complete inability to control students.

Why? Because children today have zero respect for authority. Homeschooling itself won’t change that.

Successful homeschooling does not begin when books are placed in front of the child.

It begins with obeying commands at the age of two.

Can you go to the park, grab a coffee and chat with a friend while children play kindly and contentedly?

Are your children helpful?

Can they work in the home without grumbling?

Are they polite?

Can you trust them to listen to you if you have your hands full and need to cross a street? a car park? Are they responsible?

This is the kind of intention a mother needs to have when at home with her children because these areas of obeying, helping and responsibility turn into homeschooling a child who has a respect for authority.

Will the child get complete school work daily, to a high standard, without bribery?

Can you get them to do math even when they are 13 and hate it?

These are all valid scenarios, ones that become very common in a home where the children have no respect for their parents’ authority.

Many homeschoolers out there can homeschool “okay” when their children are young, only to have them flunk out of high school because they lost the ability to control the young teen. It is a complete failure on the parents, and it is a scenario I think we will see a lot more of in the future.

There are upcoming articles on child training if you are curious as to how I have my children obey, listen, help, work and respect, and do all of it with a glad heart.

I have been sick the past two days, the kind of sick where I am in bed and the baby is brought to me for feeding.

The first day was a workday for my husband, and he was unable to take it off. When the children woke and realised that I was not up soaking the sun with my coffee on the porch, they found me in bed and immediately sprang into action.

The 12-year-old changed the baby who was already up and at ‘em on the bed beside me after her dawn time feeding, and fed her her usual breakfast of scrambled eggs. The fourteen-year-old made breakfast after finishing his 6:30 am shift at the dairy farm next door.

Dishes were done, beds made, and then they all went outside. I was dozing to the sounds of children bouncing on the trampoline and a pressure washer going, since it was a Friday and on Fridays we choose a deep clean job.

Lunch was leftovers, the baby was napping beside me in the bed, and the two littles were playing with blocks just outside my door. Again, dishes were done and then quiet time.

I was able to stay in bed for most of the day, the baby lay beside me while she slept or played (she’s almost 8 months old) with her older brothers in her usual spot in the lounge room.

By the time my husband came home, the 3 pm clean was finished, meaning every room in the house was spotless.

Day two was very much the same. Hubby was home, but he had to butcher a deer he shot the week previous, and that takes quite a bit of time. The children stepped in, while the littles played around with footballs and hoses outside, the older ones helped with the baby, made breakfast, and did the usual chores.

The only thing that got missed was the laundry. I was able to wander out and start a few loads while hubby cooked an excellent dinner of crumbed venison and mashed potatoes. (of which I could sadly eat none)

Train up a child in the way he should go

A very important trait in the “way he should go” is responsibility. It is the cornerstone, I believe, of most everything. Without personal responsibility, many a thing goes amiss; it is the kinship of self, action and reaction that inspires growth, that awakens us to our sin nature and our need for a personal saviour.

Responsibility is not (often) found in books or play; it is made in the offering of oneself to others, to a duty or to a belief. Sometimes it is the good of the individual, but more often it is for the good of those we surround ourselves with.

As Christians, we are called to serve God, to pick up our cross daily, to deny self, and place the Lord as lord (lord with a lower case meaning ruler) in our daily lives. To teach this in the daily rhythms of life is to train children to serve, to serve themselves well, to serve others, and to do so without grumbling.

God doesn’t want us to serve with a sour heart; in fact, we are told many times in the bible that God wants us to serve him gladly.

“Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.” Psalm 100:2

"With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:" Ephesians 6:7

Serving self is for the good of our God-given minds, hearts and bodies. Teaching children to make good food choices is a simple way to teach respect for themselves, hygiene, and time management so that they can enjoy their free time. Grooming before leaving the home, caring for their possessions, some children will do some of these things more naturally than others.

Serving others in the home simply means serving the home. Dishes, cleaning a space in the home, making beds every morning, learning to cook, and even caring for each other.

Serving others outside the home as well, from odd jobs, a child might score for cash, to simply helping load the firewood with dad, to helping out a friend or someone in need you might meet. (not something we have done yet, to be honest but I hope we can soon)

There is a line when it comes to kids and household tasks. I don’t like to “dump” my home on my children. The baby feeding, I think of as my job; the dishes are always on rotation, with me doing it most often. Saturdays, I love to clean my home, giving the kids a day off, unless we are hosting, then we will be a team as usual.

I do not train my kids to clean and serve to “do less”, and I think any mother who teaches her children the same as I do will tell you that it is a lot of work to train children to work effectively.

Often, there is an assumption that children just can’t “clean very well”, that a 10-year-old girl couldn’t possibly clean a bathroom for guests without her mother having “brushed up” on the job. I can definitely speak, though, for the ease that it is to simply do the “brushing up” over work done only half as well; this is not due to the child’s “inability” but to the mother’s lack of desire to train her children to do a job well done, every time.

But to give our children this skill is only helping them; many a home today is lacking a trained homemaker, and the state of the home deeply reflects it. For boys, too, there is no need to allow them to be slovenly. A boy will be a man, either working for another or for himself; a job well done is a trained eye; very rarely is it “gifted” in a person.

To sum up, I am very proud, glad and filled with a sweet sense of contentment that my children can “run the family home” for a brief period. It is a reminder that they are becoming the adults I hope will be living for the Lord, and part of that is that the physical work we are given is conducted with gladness and excellence.

If you are a mother with young children, I hope I have encouraged you not to underestimate the work of a mother. No one sees it, it is “Pinterest worthy”, but it is a gift to teach children to serve, to work well, and it is your job to always be there, with encouragement and also with a firm hand on the wheel of excellence.

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Homeschool schedule. Google it, and you will be inundated with videos and blog posts. The titles hit big, with Promises, breakthroughs, and the perfect formula.

I have been doing this for seven years now, and I have never found a schedule that lasts. I was raised homeschooling, and I never remember having the same schedule that was the pillar of my learning.

At first, I was frustrated. Where was this elusive schedule? Was it me? Was I lacking discipline?

Over the last two years, I feel I have learned a lot about homeschooling. My eldest has entered high school, and I am educating 5 children with a toddler and a baby. My days are packed to the brim.

I have had to learn that just showing up is not enough, that just making sure books get opened on time isn’t what will get you a great education.

No, you need to show up with a real desire to pursue excellence.

An excellent homeschool and the schedule

I was sure that to pursue excellence in my homeschooling, I would need a schedule that “did the thinking for me”, one that was set in stone, that set the tone, that made it easier to “show up” consistently.

I forgot I was the teacher; I was not merely here for the ride; I wasn’t here to deliver a book for 15 to 60 minutes, tick the box and move on.

I wanted to ride the schedule as a way to de-stress my homeschool.

I wanted to rest in the knowledge that my time was paying off. Because two years ago, I had the terrible realisation that my kids were behind. (another article for another day)

I had to work hard, and so did they. I had to learn that the frustration I felt at not having a schedule was completely baseless, and that “scheduling” didn’t earn me any results.

This is not to say that a “schedule is bad”, this is to share what I learned, and what I see a lot on the online homeschooling niche, is the selling of a schedule, the planners, even the curriculum, all of which is not at all what will give your children a rich education.

A schedule should always serve you

A schedule is there to serve.

A schedule is there so that you can plan, which is important for any teacher, at home or in school.

Schedules don’t hurt you; they don’t cause frustration when not done perfectly or when they outright fall apart, IF your mindset in your role as homeschool teacher is right.

It is easy to step back from the schedule when you, as the teacher, are fully aware that adherence to the schedule will not earn your children a “better” education.

No, a Good, rich education only comes from the constant dedication to each child in your home, something that you will fail at time and time again, but with each fail comes learning, comes patience, understanding, and through living it, you actually gain confidence.

I like to think that the schedule is there as a mindful whisper; some days it whispers into calm waters, and it serves a purpose for both the teacher and the students. Other days, the schedule is barely heard, and you may feel like you are clinging to a life raft, but still you do not despair, because the schedule will be there, to whisper again the very next day.

Your job as a teacher is to listen to your children, to assess, correct, encourage, instruct, and to keep standards high.

There is nothing wrong with having a schedule, but if that schedule makes you feel overwhelmed, the day is never “going right” because you can’t keep up. This is where I found myself, and I realised I was confusing my role, I was not a station master making sure every train leaves ontime, I was the engineer, I am the only one in the room who can say, we need to pause, we need to try this agin, we need to stop here, we need to push through or we need to spend more time on this, or that.

I am the only one who is dedicated to the outcomes. The day can either be run by a schedule that doesn’t know things are falling off the train, or I can do my job, and my job is to care for the journey, and run it as best as possible for the outcome, not for the schedule.

There are seasons when you may do this from a chair while nursing, or while holding a baby on the hip, while peering over the shoulder of a newly writing first grader. You may be waking at 5 am for early morning runs, or barely dragging yourself out of bed by 7 am with morning sickness.

School may start later because A baby is up and needs breakfast, the sourdough needs attending, and the chickens are hiding eggs all over the garden.

An excellent life is not pursued only inside a schedule; an excellent life is lived in the dedication of doing “all things well”

From the conversation with a daughter while brushing hair, to listening to a student read and correcting speech while preparing the midday meal.

The more I practice “excellence”, the less I need the schedule.

I am not stuck on the ridiculous idea that a schedule means education.

How do I structure my homeschool day?

I am big on having anchors in my day. Could you call this a schedule? Loosely, sure, does it change season to season? Absolutely.

8 am every morning, breakfast is on the table.

The goal is that school starts by 9-9:30

12 pm is lunch.

3 pm is the family chore time.

6 pm dinner.

These are basic. They require no thought, and they rarely change.

These anchors mean everyone is out of bed at the same time each day.

We know that school takes around 4 hours, so we start at around 9. This gives us enough time to eat and get morning chores done.

Some mornings, though, we start at ten. If the day is sunny and the chores are done, the younger boys play outside, which I find is better for school anyway, and in this current season, I deal with the baby and get her down for her nap so I can school hands-free, but we all know we will finish later in the day, but we also all now that the 3 pm clean is looming so there is that to get boys to try and be less distracted.

I start the school day with the reading hour. In this hour is nothing but reading. the bible and bible memory, spelling words, tests, and language lessons.

The second hour is the math hour.

The third hour for my two eldest is sciences or history. (Note: my high schooler has his own workspace and his own schedule)

In this third hour, I sit with science and or geography in read-alouds for my younger children.

During this time, there are toddlers, babies, there are cups of tea while I read, perhaps a cake, or bread and butter. The morning is chaotic, I don’t always like it, it’s hard, but it’s my job, and with seven children, in one small home, all who have different needs, I have to embrace the season, show up with diligence and know that in the future, as I have more older students, it will get less “chaotic”

recall the job of “mother teacher”

My job is not to provide a set time; it is to make sure that every subject we do serves a purpose, that it is done to the best of everyone's ability, and that it is done consistently.

That is not something you will always be able to do comfortably inside a schedule.

It doesn’t mean there should always be complete chaos, or no plan; these things don’t help a mother teacher.

But you have to face that as a homeschooler, you are at home, and if you have younger children, babies, or both, you will come across chaos. You need to be able to rise above it and still deliver a great education.

You will need to try different things that may only serve for a season; there is constant change, but don’t be discouraged. Your aim is not sameness; it is consistency in the pursuit of doing all things well.

As I write this it is a sunday night, it is way too late, I will be regretting this is in the morning, but I can finally sit on a sunday and not dread the week ahead, I am okay with just taking it as it comes, I know that my days won’t all be in my control, that my time is not only made worth while only when “all things are going well”

So much of the frustration we feel is our desire for control, which in itself is only an illusion of success. If we begin measuring our success by our ability to control, then we quickly burn out.

True success is found in the daily showing up despite the circumstances. As mothers, we need to work on that, and in our lives today, where optimisation and control are the new measures of worth, we are falling prey to leaving the true joy of doing something with all our presence and ability behind and replacing it with “done on time”

I fell victim to that way of thinking long enough to damage my homeschooling. I am glad I saw it when I did.

From the daily schedule to the schedule of the ages and grades meant to “mark” our children in the system of mass learning. None of it warrants success. I am still learning how to deliver a rich education, but I am certain that a great education is not found in a schedule.

Several years ago, I stopped making videos on my YouTube channel; in fact, I deleted all my online content, a successful homeschool blog.

I felt overwhelmed and was struggling to find a balance between productivity and rest.

I was desperately seeking peace, the feeling of being content with a day lived well.

I did the things we all do when we want to acquire knowledge, a method, a mindset. I went online, I read productivity books, listened to podcasts, looked into hormones, stress and gut microbiome.

I culled, organised, and tried to set up systems for everything that I needed to get done in a day.

And it took me three years to realise that I was being sold into a mindset that promised the outcomes I wanted but didn’t align with the values I truly wanted to see in my home.

I had to learn the hard way that the world’s ways just aren’t fruitful to a homeschooling Christian mother of seven who is striving to create a faith-centred and peaceful home, amongst the busyness and chaos of the outside world.

searching for joy and peace

So, a few years ago, I went out looking for peace. I was stressed, anxious, angry and struggling with finding balance.

I just knew that I wanted more joy in my days, I knew that the way I was behaving was not what I wanted for my family, nor was it what God wanted from me, and yet I just couldn’t break the cycle.

I tried systems, I culled, I stopped all of my online activity, I ditched social media, and my smartphone.

But no matter what I tried, I just never felt happy with how my days felt.

I thought that if I renovated my life enough, peace would surely come. It had to, I figured if I could control the laundry, if I had systems for everything, if I went to bed on time, woke early, exercised regularly, sat down to homeschool with perfect consistency, if I was doing all these GOOD things, that surely peace would follow.

I figured if motivation can follow action, surely peace would follow, if I was doing the best I could each day.

What I didn’t realise was that I was basing what I should be doing every day on outcomes rather than values.

I had unwittingly taken on these outcomes, on a strength I didn’t possess, doing my best to predict a future I desired, with only my own wisdom and ability, that mindset became what drained me, and made me constantly run in a state of burnout.

Because we aren’t given dominion over futures.

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letting go of planning the future

We are given enough strength to live each day to the best of our ability.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Matthew 6:31

When we are in a season of strain, of change, then our abilities change.

When we are in a season of ease, our abilities can increase.

As a mother to seven children of various ages, my life is in a constant state of change.

For years, I thought that this was something I had to fight.

Fight through the fatigue; if you want to reach those goals you set when you were not pregnant or postpartum.

I didn’t want to accept that my choice to have more than the usual number of children would affect daily life negatively if I were capable of less.

And I hung onto this, because I believed that my long to-do list, my list of behaviours that I had picked up from my time seeking answers online and in self-help, would surely be the difference in my children’s future.

I was constantly frustrated at myself for not achieving the best version of a day consistency, I was concerned not with the day itself, but with the future it promised.

I was stressed and anxious with how much I didn’t do, as well as how many times I lost my temper while trying to get it done.

I was committed to having a large family, trusting God with the number of children I have, but I didn’t realise I was taking that faith and placing the outcome of those gifted children into my own hands, which is not what was intended by God.

In Jeremiah 33:3, it says. “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.”

I had faith in God for something as great as adding a life to our family, but I didn’t think that something as simple as a day was something I could simply give to God. For some reason, I had put that burden on myself because it was small; it should have been perfectly manageable.

As mankind continues to learn and develop, our obsession has been less with survival in the Western world; we no longer look outward to others, but my generation is obsessed with looking inward.

We base our lives on becoming more, becoming better, we want to live longer and healthier, we want fewer years lost to aging and more time in youth and comfort, we socialise less and less, we are dependent on states rather than people, and we live with wealth that exceeds the wildest expectations of generations past.

As we have more time to perfect ourselves due to modern conveniences, we are more prone to forget the simple joys of just showing up and enjoying what is set right before us.

Are we striving for the wrong growth?

So we arrive at a place of wanting the best for our futures. not in real legacy or memory but in the perfect trajectory of improvement.

Improvement is valuable, but as Christian’s, true improvement is not a physical list of behaviours on paper, but a seeking to live in the spirit, which cannot be done in our own strength and wisdom but needs Strength from God himself.

The fruits of the spirit we should be tending like a precious garden are what bring true value and growth to us and future generations.

²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

²³ Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

Galations 5:22-23

As a Christian mother, I lost sight of the basic value of enjoying the life I have been given and simply allowing God to shape me in these spiritual fruits.

For me, what was missing was all of the fruits, but I felt the joy, peace and longsuffering. (patience)

Now this doesn’t mean that working toward a future and joy don’t mingle. But that we aren’t equipped to choose perfect futures, that isn’t our role.

I woke up to my misplaced energy of predicting futures for my children. When I was pregnant with my 7th baby, I was extremely sick for the first four months and then very tired for the last 5 months with low iron levels that left me feeling exhausted pretty much permanently.

I couldn’t exercise, wake early or even stay awake for an entire day, even with 10 hours of sleep at night.

As is often the way, God had had something to teach me when I was struggling. It was then that I really learned that I could give my days to God, I learned it because I had to, out of desperation.

I always find it interesting when I look back to all the times I have learned my most fruitful life lessons, they come in times of weakness, struggle and having to face my own lack of ability.

Every morning, I prayed, asking God for eyes to see what I needed to see, hands to be placed where they were needed, and ears to hear what I needed.

I was raising 6 children, all with different needs, from homeschooling to discipline, random conversations, questions and training.

Those days showed me that when I am less capable, I can rely on God’s capability, which is the absolute best I could ask for.

What I didn’t know was that finally, after years of searching, through doing this, I would find that peace and joy in my days.

I didn’t care for futures with strength I didn’t possess. I only asked for wisdom and strength for that day.

I still had important values to live out, but I wasn’t concerned with my own capabilities to make each day perfect to achieve that perfect future trajectory for my children.

I gave the future to god. I simply showed up with gladness and did what I knew was good.

This isn’t about flying, by the seat of your pants through chaos and hoping for the best.

But I stopped planning futures I couldn’t actually bring to fruition, not just for the fact that what I truly wanted to pass on were values, a heart devotion to faith lived out, not a set of standards to be kept based on man’s wisdom.

I started working on being present, in every moment, in replacing my heart through daily devotion not to habits, methods or routines, but choosing joy, patience, gladness, peace, contentment, and self-control.

Proverbs 16:3. Commit thy works unto the Lord and thy thoughts shall be established.

I am more productive and more joyful when I do what I am called to do in only a day.

When we know that we are only stewards, not controllers of our time, it also brings peace about doing what is needed each day, about starting the day with knowing it holds its own potential.

Controlling versus stewardship

Controlling focuses on dictating outcomes, managing every detail, and holding onto power out of fear.

Stewardship is characterised by caring for resources, nurturing growth, and managing responsibilities with an open hand, trusting God and accepting that one cannot control the outcome, but instead letting God have the future, and simply showing up to nurture those fruits of the spirit that truly make the difference to our children and families.

Potential isn’t found only in the compounding of perfect days lived out, controlling the routines and methods, but also in the day itself. Give God your day, and who knows what it will bring, what will be asked, talked about?

Matthew 21:22 says, and all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

I believe that most of a mother’s distress comes not from her life with children, but in desiring a life other than with the children she has now.

When we place ourselves beyond this time, beyond this minute we are in, when we are concerned with the next phase, the next stage, the next problem and the next solution we are never anywhere.

We are simply hovering, attempting to control what we were only meant to steward.

We have a choice to make each day, many times a day.

Not, how can I control this?

But how will I react to this?

The world sells works. God gives grace

Years ago, I went looking for peace, and I was sold productivity.

I bought the lie that my doing, my achieving, my constant worry over doing enough, would somehow change futures and bring me peace.

That made me realise I was never commanded to concern myself with futures, but rather I was commanded to live with a joyful countenance, I was told to trust, to pray and to rely on God.

I believe we are commanded to do this because we should know that God is great, he is almighty, and he loves us. Therefore, what reason do we have not to be content with the life we are given, the life He saw fit for us?

Philippians 4:4 (”Rejoice in the Lord always”) and Psalm 100:2 (”Serve the Lord with gladness”).

Proverbs 15:15. All the days of the afflicted are evil: but he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.

These verses made me recall the many times I had read about Paul, who wrote while he was in prison.

In Philippians 4:11. Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.

I had read this so many times, I had quoted it so many times. But I hadn’t regarded it as teaching me to clean the spilled milk, sweep the same floors and wash the same dishes, with a heart content to be doing just those things.

When I began to frame it as being content for exactly what was set before me, the verse made me realise how thoroughly we can learn to be content.

So I began to pray, I asked for a renewed mind and heart.

In Romans 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

I took this, I prayed and read God's word daily, with a true desire to find constant opportunities to be content.

There was so much for me to see once I was seeing my life not as something to be fixed or controlled, but as a tool to learn contentment.

I learned that it was my place as a mother and wife not to create joy through controlling everything and everyone around me, but to provide joy from within. I was the joy; I wasn’t in charge of making joy. I had to see it in the places God set before me.

I could serve God and my family joyfully when I accepted that everything I have is from God.

I make breakfast like I have hundreds of times. I clean up spilled milk, I brush the same heads of hair, the same teeth, I start the same loads of laundry, everything that I had seen as something to be managed into systems so I could live more without them, I instead just took it as part of the gift of that day, I was a steward of the day given, not a controller of things I wish I didn’t have to do.

I ditched the systems that would gain me the most time to do the most things, so I could achieve the most I could in order to give my kids the best outcomes.

I started doing exactly what needed to be done. My hands were content with knowing the messy kitchen, the crumby floors and the wet bathroom awaited me while I read aloud.

I wasn’t frustrated with my lot, but became simply accepting and then glad to be able to serve this way.

I wasn’t angry at the home that needed more control, so I could live a better life. I just started living the life I was chasing, and never found the energy to enjoy.

I was not dedicated to being the engineer of joy through applying the perfect set of systems; I was simply stewarding a gift God gave.

How wonderful it is to have a home.

to have clothes to choose from.

to have a little girl’s hair to brush, a baby to wake and hold all day and night.

I stopped trying to live for the morrow and placed my energy in this very moment.

Some moments are sweet, some are hard, some make you want to yell, be angry or bitter. Those feelings don’t go away.

Contentment is not a freedom from all bad feelings or bad days.

Contentment is knowing that we are able to choose how we see those moments.

I have a choice to be either angry at spilled milk, a wet bed or muddy boots on carpet floors, or I can choose to accept that this is it. This is my moment to be content. I will live it, and I will live it well.

It isn’t overwhelming, like trying to control a home is.

You are the joy. You are the peace, the day is just a day. God willing, another will follow.

Contentment will make you see that everything you have already is worth being your best for.

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Systems work with stewardship, not replacing it

Is there anything wrong with a system or a schedule? Of course not, but if you are looking for joy, for the feeling of having lived a day and truly feel good about it, not what you accomplished, though that comes too, but how you reacted with your children, how you spoke, how you taught.

Systems won’t provide this. peace and joy are not a reflection of one’s surroundings; they well up within and overflow, so that joy is not the accumulation of habits done well, but reactions chosen well.

If any of my family were to watch this, they would tell you I am not perfect at this.

But we were never called to perfection. I do, however, ask God as often as I remember, to show me where I can put my energy, my time.

When days are seen this way, there is no day you can’t give to God, and ask him to show you where you are needed and where you need help, even if it just to know where to put your efforts.

Who needs you today?

The greatest oppurtintuy that comes from having as many children as I have, is how much more I need God with every new addition, and this isn’t something to be ashamed of, this doesn’t mean I am weak or lazy, it means I know that I am human, but I have a great God and that nothing truly great can be achieved without him, and this inlcludes my children’s futures.

All those outcomes I was working toward, they aren’t mine, they are his, it is to his glory, not my own, and therefore, asking him, leaning on him every day that I have those children with me, is just common sense.

Just took me a while to learn that.

When I realised that I wasn’t in charge of my future, that I didn’t have to predict it with the perfect set of behaviours lived out every day.

That I was commanded to show up with a glad heart.

The more I share here, I hope that will be reflected in how I share this message of no longer predicting futures.

It is not that I do nothing to win my children to a future of God-centred faith and life, but I do not think that my ability is what drives the walk, rather I give my ability and let God make it of it what he knows my children need.

When fatigue or discouragement hits, the “joy of the Lord” serves as a source of strength, transforming, as noted in Nehemiah 8:10, mundane tasks into meaningful worship.

Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

But when we give away our own desires, and simply fill each day with what the lord Gives, which when you ask this of him, he will do.

You may wake at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and there is still a healthy home routine, and kids thrive in this. I am not saying throw away anything that governs you; it is not a joy to live in constant chaos.

But when a day is a day, just a day that you choose to live out to the best of your ability, with a glad heart, each day holds its own potential.

The question

There was a question I heard asked on a podcast, and I realised that I too could not answer it in a way I was expecting, and this question helped me to trust that I really have so little control over outcomes.

The question was,

When you look back at your life, have you ever successfully predicted exactly how something would go?

I realised I had never done so, and the fact that I am where I am today proves this.

So, I will leave that question with you.

And if your answer is the same as mine.

who will trust with your future, you or God?

Until next time,

shenaede

Mother teacher.

I like this term.

Mother.. care, nurture, tenderness, training, playing, time.

Teacher.. conversation, reading, instruction, training, delight.

They intersect, they are one, and they are separate, not in role but in application.

The way we apply ourselves to each role is crucial.

As mothers, we grow more patient, understanding, and less demanding, less time-constrained and less self-serving as we age into the role of mother.

As teachers, we become more attuned to careful application to tasks, aware of interests and reasoning and less constrained to lessons and more toward opportunities as we gain experience as teachers.

That is where most of the learning, for the home educator, is done.

not in learning new methods of teaching, which happens, but less than we think it will in the beginning.

No, it is applying the role of teacher to our days that begins to expand and grow as we learn to recognise where we can truly bring the mother teacher to life with careful intention and creation of interests in our children.

The mother teacher is an ever-morphing mix of the two, a creature of habit yet of constant change. A mother teacher can mix red marking pen with feather strokes of water colour at the same table; she is a whirlwind of great language and respite from dull facts and figures, not by wishing them away but by bringing them to life.

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We are the gatekeepers of thought in our home. We can cultivate it with an attitude that wells from the mother teacher; if we are ever learning, then that alone is a great leap in the learning life of our children.

Many mother teachers obsess over the curriculum that will be BEST

There is no best, there is only good. Best is up to you.

how you apply it, how you create standards around its completion and how to use it to bring life to the learning it presents.

All curricula come from Books, and if you can read to your children, reading great books alone is enough. Now, if you are turning your nose up at this notion, then you are not thinking through the above.

Anyone can read a book only to forget it.

So too can a child fulfil a curriculum quota and gain very little.

It is the application of the information that is the difference.

This is your job as a mother and teacher.

You can borrow a book from the library on Africa and create great tales and images for your child, representing the facts as lively as they would be on safari.

You can buy the best curriculum and do the same.

The choice is not in either better or worse, but in the effort you place.

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Helping you choose your curriculum

To the new homeschooler who doesn’t quite understand the above.

I understand you.

You want to lean into a curriculum while you learn the ropes.

Curriculum is good, I use all sorts.

Memoria Press, Apologia, Math U see, Mcguffies, Reading pathways, masterbooks.

You will find all of these in my schoolroom.

But are there any truly better than others?

The answer is yes, but seriously, it is marginal at best. The difference is only how we like to USE them.

So yes, this is the point of a curriculum. To pass information in a style…

It’s how we like to use books that determines if it works or not.

Find one that suits you.

Yes.

But do you know what you want?

So, to take the pressure off, here is this.

Using any curriculum

Use any curriculum just like you want to.

I bought a science booklet not too long ago for my younger kids. When I looked at how they wanted me to use it, my first thoughts were.

Ick.

No, thank you.

Is my 7-year-old going to really need to do a crossword? will that help him retain anything?

hmm no.

But can I read the books, borrow more, on the topics my kids really go for and have them draw, paint, or act out what we learn?

I sure can.

without having to buy another curriculum.

Because the information was there, it was just not how I would like to deliver it.

So I am free to ditch the parts I think won’t really work for my young kids.

But they will learn, I do sneaky little oral tests here and there, and we talk about the new book over dinner.

We read, read more and all the while I am using the curriculum as an anchor.

It isn’t wasted, it isn’t wrong.

I do the same for all sorts, adding more when I think it may need more, taking away when I think it is unnecessary.

I am a mother teacher.

I am learning, growing, just like my kids are.

One day, I could maybe pass on the best curricula.

For now, you have to be willing to make the best.

Don’t think it’s hard.

Google Books lists, for every grade, every topic.

There are study guides for most from somewhere else.

base all you find on how much time, and how it will fit into your values.

Be free from constraint to a book

The hardest part is knowing and trusting that you are free to do so.

That you are capable of doing it well, that will come in time, for now, just know that your role as Mother teacher is coming into fruit, and that with time, you will be rich with a wealth of experience, isn’t that what life is all about?

So, new homeschooler, don’t spend hours and hours combing the internet for the “best for you” curriculum.

Make the best of whatever you have already or whatever you end up with.

Time to learn, consistency of showing up, and a good attitude get you further than finding “perfect.”

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I have 7 children, my oldest is 14, so I am by no means experienced in the grand scheme of things.

But I have had my fair share of comments from strangers, some who are truly being negative, or others who mean well enough.

Mostly, I hear them say, “Enjoy it now, it gets worse later, and you will wish you were here again.”

When you only have littles, it’s hard to refute this comment, even if it is just in our own heads, because we haven’t lived it yet, our children have yet to grow up.

So while we are pretty sure they are wrong, there is a little doubt.

I got that comment the other day, in line at the checkout, my new baby was crying, but I wasn’t stressed in the least. (Having 7 will do that to you) Others around me began to comment, “It’s hard, but not as hard as it is later!”

At the time, I only had my littles with me, and so they don’t know that I am entering the season of “later”, and yes, I don’t have 18 year old yet, but I remember not so long ago, being scared of my kids becoming teens at all.

I am sure it will have it’s times of hard, it times of not knowing, of worry, but I have a great God, and the more I parent and the more I realise just how truly wretched I am, I come more and more to him, and leads me more and more to his word, and that leads me more and more to joy.

But I know that the world sees me as a little (a lot) weird. I am probably toxic to Gen Z.

Apparently, teens and tweens were all very traumatic for parents everywhere, and they often feel the need to tell me so.

But I smiled when I got that comment, I don’t feel the need to “Correct strangers”, but in my head I had an answer, one that made me calm, sure and happy.

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Work, intention and prayer

Now, can I stand here and say that the comments we get are just a lie, a dreadful trick people like to play on you?

No, I see my fair share of brats out there, let’s be honest.

But I am a Christian, a true gift of grace and peace for my place in the life to come, and with that gift comes God’s word, a great gift for peace in this life.

When we adhere to God’s word in all areas, 2 Corinthians 5:7: “For we walk by faith, not by sight”. There is a payback, not in the prosperity preaching sort of way, but in peace, that in daily walking with God, I, a sinner, can do as he asks, imperfectly but in time, learning, growing and reaping.

It is with a humble heart I come to God in prayer, to give me strength, diligence and ability, to train up my children in the way they should go.

Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

It is with this intention, and with great attention to all in my home, that the great benefits of trusting to live my faith not by sight reveals itself.

I just played chess with my three eldest boys, 14, 12 and 9.

They made me laugh, challenged me in every game, and were splendid company for the entire evening.

10 years ago, I didn’t know how this stage of my life would look.

But I love it.

It’s hard, sure, but it was hard when they were young, hard to train, to discipline, to encourage and to stay in line with god’s word even though the world thinks it’s trauma.

But a quote always comes to mind, and it has nothing to do with child raising, but here it is.

You either get busy living, or get busy dying. (Shawshank Redemption)

I turn it on its head.

Get busy living for self now, which reaps very little benefit later.

or get busy dying to self, picking up that cross daily, and in time, reaping the rewards of applying God’s word in your life.

Choose your Hard

The world lacks wisdom. The world fumbles for a foothold, struggling to find the wisdom God offers us in His Word.

They loop back and forth, from toughness to trauma, one generation to the next.

seeking endless happiness, which is only selfishness covered in glitter.

They want the benefits of children without the hard work of raising them.

They fall in love with the idea of love, but don’t truly know what it is to love.

The world’s love is only self-indulgence; it’s love that doesn’t want to work but wants to validate, at the expense of everyone around them.

divorce.

alcohol.

anti-depressants.

drugs.

All very common among parents today, all escaping the hard they create from avoiding the hard that will actually provide peace, joy and true love.

That is what you are hearing.

the true meaning of those comments.

Validation of suffering.

They didn’t enjoy the teen years, the terrible twos, the tantrums, the timeouts. Whatever it may be.

So they want you to be the same. even your fellow Christians who have designed a self-serving God who looks very much like the world, only to be shocked and grieved when they end up with the same outcome as the world offers.

Their comments are not a warning to you, mother; it’s a prophecy they want fulfilled.

It’s a shame, it really is, that so many don’t know the Lord and his GOOD ways.

They don’t know that life is hard because of the fall of man.

But God still provides peace, in work and in walking by faith.

Both for this life and the next.

Read his word, heed it, live it.

have ears to hear, and eyes to see.

This, I hope, is encouragement from one mother in the thick of raising children: stick with it, look odd, follow the Lord’s wisdom and meet me here, enjoying every minute of it.

If you were to comment as you passed another mother very much like you, what would you say?

shenaede.

A new year, and in our house, that means a new pencil!

One solitary pencil, per child, per year.

It’s as simple as that.

I bought seven pencils, one for each of the five kids, one for myself for when I help with math work, and one spare.

I write a name or leave a mark on each pencil to differentiate.

NOONE wants the spare.

If you need the spare pencil, you have just lost the privilege of a lunch outing, followed by bowling

(they choose at the end of the year), plus 20 dollars.

In 2023, I did this for the first time, and it was almost offhanded. I said that if they could keep the same pencil all year, I would take them out for lunch and an activity.

This then turned into pencil measuring to see whose was getting smaller quicker, and all year long, no one lost their pencil.

I was amazed at the end of the year that there I was, eating pizza with three children who had the same pencil tucked away, much shorter than when they started a year previous!

In three years, I have bought one pencil each and no more; the dreaded spare is still about in my teaching trolley.

When it comes to erasers, I have a large pack of the ones that go onto the end of the pencil, and give out new ones when they wear through.

This year, I am embarking on year four of the pencil challenge, and it’s one of the most anticapted moment of our homeschool, the first in getting your Fresh pencil, and then in turning it in, much smaller and well-worn.

But as I think many homeschool mum’s our there would agree, the best part is for me.

No more asking “Where is your pencil?” and the regular trips to get a fresh box, only to have them strewn about the place when vacuuming.

They drop them less because they know that when you drop them, the lead can break, and that doesn’t bode well for pencil longevity!

There is less mess, less expense and less headache.

Now, if you have read this far, then I am sure you are wondering, “What if the pencil becomes too short?”

If that happens, which it does to my older students who write more than the younger ones, then once it becomes a hazard to good handwriting, it can be replaced, but it’s only 2 pencils a year instead of 1 so far.

I have trained the littlest at my school table to keep a button in his pencil case during thier pre k year, warming up for the pencil challenge in his first formal year this year.

The hardest part is following through.

So far, I haven’t had to, but I do know that one day a kid will lose the pencil, and it has to be met with them being unable to come to our pencil lunch date. My heart will break for them, but there is no use in the challenge if this rule is not kept.

It’s one of those things in our home, we stumbled upon it, but here it is, four years later, and it’s saved me frustration, provided fun and made every day using their pencil and seeing it get a little smaller filled with laughter, challenge and reward.

To the pencil challenge in 2026!

shenaede

These days, high cortisol is why we are struggling to sleep, lose weight, be happy, feel fulfilled and who knows what else. It really depends on how many health and wellness YouTube/podcasts you listen to.

The air we breathe is killing us.

LED lighting shortens life spans.

A green potato is toxic.

Gym leggings cause cancer.

Walking barefoot in a public park is a health hazard.

Now, I don’t discredit what they say; I am not trained in any health science whatsoever.

However, I have been on social media enough to know that these “issues” that are spoken of by experts, scaring us with shorter lives, larger waistlines and less sleep, move from one topic to the next with lightning speed.

We are left with half-baked views on everything from what is on our plates to the air we breathe, the material we wear, and shoes or no shoes? less vs more sleep, all the while being sold 100-dollar prebiotics and red light therapy every 15 minutes.

Many of us don’t feel in control of what we eat, drink, breathe or wear; we are forced to compromise on everything and hope for the best.

Our lives have become a game of Minesweeper; we timidly approach a new square, hoping that our calculations and past failures will keep us from being hurt — or worse, eating seed oils.

Stress, as we aim more and more to avoid it, has become a badge of honour.

If you aren’t stressed about something “aware”, then what are you even doing?

Now, I am an avid seed oil avoider, I keep my sugar down, and I am aware of GMOs and mould on coffee beans.

I used to let the knowledge I was constantly adding to, through weekly podcasts from multiple health “sources,” dictate what clothes I bought, what I ate, how I worked out, to the sheets I slept on.

The stress I felt when I couldn’t push our one-income family to afford organic linens and 10-dollar-a-punnet raspberries enough to feed 6 children was frustrating.

My humble life, filled with blessings galore, was being snuffed out by the inability to keep my children and myself “well”.

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Leaving stress behind

Then, a little over a year ago, I switched to a dumbphone, which meant that my easily accessible podcasts were limited, and I found myself, once they were harder to listen to on the go, simply falling behind.

And strangely, my stress level, that dreaded high cortisol, seemed to decrease by half.

I stepped away from all social media; I replaced it simply with reading books and living my own life, in my home, serving my family.

The strange thing is, I actually struggled to let go of my stress over health, because I felt that if I let go, fell off the wagon, so to speak, of being “healthy”, I was letting myself in for a world of pain, I mean, my 30s is my blueprint for menopause!

Now, I don’t think you need to switch to a dumbphone to do this; in fact, I no longer use my dumbphone but have an iPhone.

However, those months I had free of constant information, each one often saying the opposite to each other, everyone an expert, all dogmatic in their beliefs, and convincingly put across by skilled podcasters.

Leaving that was freeing.

I slowly began enjoying every meal, and since I had ditched social media, my outlook on my own body image began to shift away from controlling every bite and every movement to be the “best version of me”, and I simply just ate good food and moved.

I bought non-organic berries and my favourite coffee beans again (I still don’t know if they test for mould)

I bake every week because I love it, with actual sugar.

I sleep as long as I need to, and don’t stress about waking at 4 am only to dread parenting seven children by 11 am and wondering why I just couldn’t do it.

Simply put, I realised that the ideals of health in our modern social media-soaked world were what was keeping me stressed about health. Ideals that change every week, merely for a view, a click and a sponsorship.

As a family, we enjoy everything in moderation. Every plate has veggies, and we eat fresh meat daily. We also enjoy chocolate chip cookies and apple pies.

Do I think it would be fine if we ate constant sugar, soft drinks, and fast food?

No, we would all feel horrible, and that would benefit no one. I am still a cook-from-scratch gal, like I said, this isn’t a ditch of health, it’s a ditch of the obsession with health.

YouTube, algorithms, your ears and eyeballs

The problem with health now is that it isn’t about keeping us healthy; it’s about getting seen.

Every day, more and more podcasts and YouTube channels are started, with the aim of “informing”

inform us of what?

It’s mostly opinions.

You can make anything sound like a serious issue, with clickbait titles, a well-styled podcast studio and a little bit of fear.

many of us, who wouldn’t take health advice from people we know, but are willing to listen to a topic for 40-60 minutes and make changes, or at least worry if we aren’t.

Many of us don’t fact-check, and most of all, we don’t ask.

Is this worth my time and effort to take on?

Or is this another podcaster, making his weekly video, aiming for so many thousands of views so he can pay his bills?

They carefully curate the right title to draw you in, they ask questions that cause fear and always just before and after an advertisement for the sponsored product of the week to keep you watching.

They are careful to construct a hook in the first three seconds that makes you afraid NOT to watch/listen to the topic.

Getting views, keeping retention, and making you think you NEED to stay and watch is a science, one that uses human behaviour to manipulate what we THINK we NEED.

The swing of the pendulum is always too far the other way

As we mistrust big pharma more and more, and we want to take our health into our own hands, we need to acknowledge that fear is a driver toward destruction.

We need to be aware that while we live in a toxic world, there are simple choices we can make to be better, such as cooking from scratch, avoiding packaged foods, and limiting fast food.

Then others require more money than we have, more time than we can spare and more stress simply by trying to keep up with it all.

As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes ‘Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry’

Sometimes I think we forget what blessed times we live in.

We have access to almost every food, all the time.

We can create wonderful times with our families, eating hot dogs, barefoot in a park at sunset on a summer’s evening, wearing ‘toxic’ spray for the mosquitoes.

Life is short.

WE are blessed to work with our hands, create to serve others, spend time with others, and be a blessing to others.

Those things are all made hard, and for some even impossible, when we swing too far the other direction.

I am all for ditching big pharma, but I think there is another hill to die on, the “wellness’ hill, made up of avoidance, suspicion and even the judging of others who don’t care about the same things we do.

Trusting God with our health

Don’t make health your idol; food is there to serve us, both with energy and connection. We should be healthy enough to serve others and serve God.

We should be able to rise early, work hard and rest well.

That means there are certain choices that need to be made in order to do that well.

Ultimately, I believe that is far are our obsession with health and wellness should go.

Can you serve others and God in this body God gave you?

If you're doing this in order to live longer, is that in our control?

ultimately, God designed us to serve him. In that calling, there is much to do; make it your duty to be able to do those things, but even then, our health is up to Him.

It’s a humbling truth, many of us addicted to control don’t want to hear.

But when I finally let go of wellness and just focused on being a humble servant, the stress melted away, those crusty cortisol levels seemed to lower, and I found joy in the basic life of the “uninformed” I thought were sure to be killing me.

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Baby number 7 made her arrival a week and 3 days later than her due date, and did so with an easy birth at home.

As is the normal form for my babies, she was born at a little over 4 kilograms (just shy of 9 pounds) and spent the first 24 hours feeding, very close to nonstop.

She is two weeks old now, and still, while I strive for a 3-hour routine, it’s a slow and sometimes frustrating slog.

I can only tell myself that I have been here before, and it seems that having a fat baby at birth means a very hungry baby for the first 6 weeks or so, then things seem to settle down.

The real problem is not the newborn; no, she is a blessing. The problem is me, and my struggle to just be.

In the week and a half I had of rest before hubby went back to work, I rested dutifully, since I know what happens if you assume you are ready to get back into the swing of things before you should (I hosted Christmas with a three-week-old with baby number five)

But my mind was swirling with new ideas, things to get done and observing my home and the people in it more than ever and keeping a mental list of all the things that need tackling when I am back to marching order.

When it comes to homeschooling, the hard part for me is not the physical act of sitting down to homeschool, no, it’s the mental.

Tired me is less patient, and fatigue makes cowards of us all.

I know that I just don’t have the mental stamina to homeschool with the same vigorous intent that I did before.

So, I downscale.

Pick one or two things to focus on

I need to note that this is for my older children (9 to 14 )who can almost school themselves, when it comes to littler children, I rely almost solely on read-alouds as our schooling. The 7-year-old does math drills and reading lessons when I can manage, around 3 times a week.

As it is the end of the school year for us (8 weeks ish to go) we are focusing on getting our maths finished. Maths is the one subject that I like to get the book finished each year, as it is the subject I really measure school years by.

This year, I found holes in my boys’ math comprehension, and so we had to supplement and work hard to fill those gaps. Now it feels easier since all the hard work means we can pick up where we left off, and each day they churn out around an hour of math.

If we were still working on gaps in math, and it took a lot of my mental energy and time to sit with my two eldest individually, then I would pause; I simply don’t have the energy, and we would focus on something else.

The nice thing, though, about having a baby is that you usually know roughly when they will come, so I had that deadline and mind and pushed to have those days behind us.

reading.

For me, if you cover math and reading, your school is doing just fine.

Yes, I love to have extracurricular studies, but if you are reading a wide range of books, as individuals and as a family, read aloud, the world is open to you.

We are reading through the Mystery of History, Greek myths, the bible and the great battles for boys - The Vietnam War.

We like to cycle through all these books (except the bible) since my boys (my oldest three) have never liked reading or read-alouds (as an avid reader, this pains me). I push hard for reading to be central as a family.

Reading aloud to your children is the easiest thing you can do during this time, and you will have lots of time for it if you're breastfeeding as often as I am.

Every day my three oldest boys do all their reading activities.

• Spelling from the McGuffey’s eclectic speller.

• reading lessons in the McGuffey series.

• additional reading material.

• bible reading.

Focus on what’s important during the newborn season.

As a mum now to a "large family”, I can attest to the fact that kids don’t care if you can’t do it all.

The house is more untidy than usual, the day starts later, and dinner isn’t on the table at the same time every day.

No, what is important is the way I make the home feel during this time of change.

This is the hardest aspect in my opinion.

When I am tired, like anyone, I am snappy, less inclined to have kids around me, and I am feeling pretty touched out.

But it’s why I think it is important to take a break from homeschooling, at least full on.

When I had only littles, I would take off at least two months.

If you can get a few loads of washing done, bake cookies or leave the house to go to the park and shops, then that is a productive day.

If you can do it happily and without becoming overwhelmed at everything you're not doing, your whole outlook on this season changes.

As I have more children, the more precious these weeks become. Soon, the little newborn is gone, and life, with all its stresses, to-do lists and routines, will be back, and you will wonder where the time went.

Your home will be clean again, you will be well rested, and the children will resume normal schooling before you know it.

Like all women today, I have been exposed to a hefty dose of feminism all of my life, and while I was brought up in a very anti feminist home, the world still seeped in, through media, friends, and later in life, a twisted theology in the church.

I have heard many, if not all, of my Christian, female friends and acquaintances proclaim they aren’t feminist, they declare boldly that they wish for more masculinity in the home, in the church and in our society.

Yet, they joke about being the neck of their Husbands (my big fat Greek wedding), able to learn his ways, how he ticks, and then gently and lovingly “steer” him in a way that is not at all manipulative, especially since they learn so much at bible study and they are the “help meet”.

I, too, not so long ago, thought this ideal, being the oh so clever neck, able to steer the head whichever way I want, is merely teamwork.

After all, I have a brain, I am spiritual, I read my bible, why shouldn’t I use my knowledge, my ability to steer my family in a way I think it should go?

However, when we view our husbands this way, when we think that we are equal, not in value but in role, we inevitably usurp the God given right of men to be the leader of their homes. We become very much like coaches, seeing to it that they stay on the straight and narrow, to be rewarded with our good graces.

Teamwork. Right?

I had let go of fixing a ‘problem’

“Help meet” is A term that has become blurry.

Help meet is thrown around as a catch-all for any role we choose to play, since the way we see it, our help is what is needed, and we will ‘help’ our husbands in any area, if they ask for it or not.

Is this really what the phrase means?

Or is it that the husband has clear intentions for where he wants our help and attention?

The next question is, would we be happy to know what those things are, versus what we think they should be?

Another question we need to ask ourselves is, since a husband’s role is described in the bible, who are we hurting more when we usurp it? our husbands, or ourselves? Since we answer to God as a creature of his making.

We often assign ourselves to be the helpmeet of something great, spiritual growth, physical achievements, job promotions, work ethic or instilling family values through enforcing behaviour and rewarding with a genial countenance in the home, when these actions are followed through.

All women can smile through these kinds of undertakings, seeing the fruit in their man, and more importantly, feeling like a true “helpmeet”

It’s not hard to see what is truly taking place.

A woman marries a man.

Lives with him for a while.

Spots his weaknesses.

desires to fix them.

Sets about doing so, as the loyal help meet.

He either changes to meet her criteria of “worthy” for fear of her displeasure.

Or fails to live up to her standards, and bitterness grows.

What is a “helpmeet”?

We are not to keep our man accountable, not to us, or to God.

God takes care of that for us, in his divine structure.

We are accountable to the man we are married to ( We stand before God in our own right, and this makes it even more important that we honour our husbands), and he(husband) to God.

No one handed us a tick-the-box list and said, “Make sure he gets at least half of these before his time comes.”

If we aren’t to “fix our man”, then what are we to do?

Pray without agenda

I learned, at the very least, that when it came to praying for my marriage, I often added a list of things I needed/wanted for my husband that seemed very important.

I realised that if I was going to drop the box ticking, it had to be done first and foremost in my prayers.

I simply prayed for my husband.

Not to be a better Leader, or better with the kids, or spend less time doing something I didn’t like.

I prayed for him, asking God to bless him, to keep him safe and to show me where my husband wanted me to be for him daily.

I asked god to show me what my husband wanted from ME.

I did not change overnight; there was no magic moment where all the lights turned on and I was suddenly a contented wife, adoring all her husband’s qualities.

No, much time was spent in quiet, frustrated moments, praying.

And slowly, but surely, something happened.

I changed.

I let go of my own ideals

Much like redefining “help meet”, I had let go of “My life” and replaced it with “our life”

It wasn’t something I realised I had been doing.

Physically, it was very much “our life” as I am a stay-at-home mother, relying on his paycheck, which seemed to make our life pretty aligned.

I really can’t do much without him.

No, what I had to let go of, though, was my own goals, my own idea of what a successful life looked like.

I am a wordy person; I like to talk through my ideas, write them, muse on them. I find it very motivating to try and “discipline” my way into what I want with behaviours, habits and routines.

My husband is not at all like this, and I saw it as holding “us” back. I would talk endlessly of what we should be working for, how we should get it and what it would take.

I have learned that, yes, if he wants to use the traits I have to help him, he has to only ask, but if he doesn’t ask, if he doesn’t want to approach life like I do, I shouldn’t try to change him.

I am me, I like me, I like what I do, I love to run my home, and challenge myself.

I am also married to a Man who is not like me. And when I married him, I was declaring my submission to him.

Funny enough, his happy-go-lucky way of seeing the world was one of the things I liked about him when we met. He took my seriousness and made it light; he was a break from my constant self-criticism and high standards.

Of course, once married for a year or two, I grew to think he was merely lazy, not “applying himself”

I took on my ideals for both of us, and wondered why he wasn’t responding like I wanted.

I had to relearn who I married. I had to remember who he was before I came along.

I chose him, I married him.

I have said so many times, “You can’t change a man”

Much like I would struggle if he tried to change me, my very brain, and how it is wired to work (which he never has, which makes this all the more a facepalm moment for me). How incredibly cruel of me to try to change him.

Submit to who you married, not who you wish you married

No, peace for me in my marriage came when I submitted to the “kind of man” I was married to.

I would never find peace if I submitted to the man I wanted to mould him into (another version of me?). Submission would never come; I would be holding that list, ticking off boxes, probably only to rub out those hard-earned ticks after some time, since my husband would forever struggle to maintain the Ideals/standards I had for him.

I do not think that my abilities in marriage are, therefore, equal to nothing, since I am not a man.

However, I have learned that my abilities do not equal “us”; it is our combined abilities that make us one and even more than that, is submitting to my husband to use my abilities as HE sees fit.

In this day and age, where feminism is a roaring lion, it is the fashionable thing to ignore a man's qualities and set about finding his weaknesses and then moan about a lack of masculinity.

We want better men, but not the ones we have; we want praiseworthy egos, bigger opinions and more action.

As long as those things align with our desires, instincts and agenda.

Embracing my role.

Going back to the helpmeet.

I believe it is not about setting out to fix a man, but rather to support him.

Many women would nod and agree right here.

But then, if you truly clarify what support they intend to give, it is really “fixing” their man.

But, if we drop the clipboard, what is left?

What do men actually need from us?

In the bible, we are called as married women with children, to guide the house. The Proverbs 31 woman, who is cited as a great wife for a great man, is a woman who looks to her household.

Is our role, the one that is truly fulfilling to us and to our husbands as helpmeets, this instruction?

Raising children in the lord, educating them, running a clean home, being hospitable, when all these things are sought after by the woman and done well, these things are quite more than enough to fill her time.

The result of this undertaking should be well-behaved children, a Godly family culture under her creation, a clean and peaceful home, healthy food daily, and becoming a family pillar for the Christian community.

This means your husband can truly enjoy the fruits of his labour when you set about to make the most of what he gives you.

Our Gift is turning his paycheck, his work, into children he can spend time with and teach, a home that is peaceful and wonderful to be in, food he enjoys and makes him healthy and the knowledge that your hand is always working to bless his efforts.

When we shirk this role, or even if we try to add much to it, thinking the role is small and insignificant, therefore affecting our ability to do it well, we not only lose peace ourselves, but our husbands lose it as well.

Seeking things to praise in your husband

Praise for me is strange and very unfamiliar territory. In the home I grew up in, praise was extremely rare to give or receive.

But for many women, praise is more natural, but not in a marriage.

In a marriage, praise is earned and given according to careful criteria of when it is safe to utter words of gratitude.

It is this way because when we praise with the clipboard in hand, we must always be careful to praise, but still recall what needs work.

Funily enough, we all want praise from our man, and he is more easily and willingly inclined to give it, since men rarely carry a clipboard of boxes to tick for their wives.

We want him to notice/compliment the meal we prepared all afternoon, the dress we are wearing, or how well we are doing in one area or another.

If he doesn’t praise us, we see it as being “taken for granted”

Yet again, men rarely complain about not getting praise, yet, when they do receive it, for most men, it is the absolute highlight of their day/week/month.

I once read on Reddit about a man who once received praise for something he had done by a strange woman on a train, and he said it was so rare for him to receive praise that he still thinks of that compliment years later.

Men in today's anti-masculine society are starving for praise, starving to be needed, in a world where men are merely a side hustle adventure for strong women.

This made me pause.

Was my husband receiving praise from me?

The answer was no.

And to be honest, it wasn’t that I was “holding back” all the time (there were times, though, I must admit, when I did bite my tongue because I was angry at something else he had done)

I had to learn how to give praise sincerely.

I hate flattery, and I never would set out to flatter my husband into “submission” This is just manipulation, and is not at all what I mean when I am talking about praise.

I began by asking to be shown by God all the things my husband needs/wants praise for.

It is still a work in progress, but in all, there is a freedom when you drop the clipboard and just see good things.

It’s like finding the positives in any other area of life.

Look for the positives, and that is what you will see.

Men crave praise, not in a petty sort of way, either, but they do want to be noticed, just like us, not for how they look, (though it doesn’t hurt to compliment.) Men want praise for their abilities, service and achievements.

When we are always searching for something to praise, we will find it, and when we find it, we can see more and more, and soon, the man we married is the man we wanted, the man we chose, not because he changed, but because we changed what we focused on.

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Submission is not silence

This is a place in marriage and submission where I am still learning a lot.

But, with my journey to learning what true submission is, there have been some changes in our lives, big ones, ones that have taken a lot of conversation, prayer and thought.

I am so glad to God though for these life changes coming at a time when I am surrendering my wants and serving my husband.

If I were not where I am, then these decisions would look very different, and the peace I have in my marriage today would not exist.

I have realised that the most gratifying thing to experience in married life (for me so far) is not to be right, but to be at peace.

If I am looking to be “right” to have my say in all things, then quickly the peace is gone, I am left navigating the outcomes of my “meddling” and hoping I was right, all the while telling him I am.

This is probably down to my personality; not all women would relate exactly to what I describe.

I am naturally dominant, and I have no problem speaking my mind.

I have had to learn that when I live this way in my marriage, it has a separation effect on myself and my husband.

I had to take it in stages.

I had to first understand Helpmeet.

Let go of the agenda.

Pray to see the positives.

Now I was ready to balance, to be able to speak my opinion without seeking the outcome I wanted.

I am merely a voice for him, if he wants to hear it, instead of striving to hear myself through him.

As my life gets more and more chaotic, with more children and homeschooling , I crave peace more and more.

Peace is such a wonderful place to mother from.

To have peace in my marriage is a true gift, and it has become the rest in my busy life.

To seek peace, I have learned to:

1. Pray when I doubt my husband (it’s not always easy to submit, but I trust My God), rather than bring it up.

2. Pray for my marriage every day.

3. Just listen to him without giving advice.

4. Praise him daily.

I have learned that peace comes from not taking/seeking control.

And the truth is, once I got used to just letting go, I actually really like it, which for me, is a BIG thing. ( I like control)

Turns out, I am a better mother, homeschooler, and wife when I am not shouldering the load of leadership through the guise of “helpmeet”.

It’s almost as if God never intended me to take on that role, and he gave me a man to do it for me.

It’s always a work in progress

I still have to let go of my agenda, but like I said above, I let go of that clipboard, I stopped seeking my own desires and saying it was right for “us”, and let go.

It was a process.

But that driving force was peace; once I got a taste of it, I wanted more.

I have learned that I can speak my mind; I am not an empty vessel in this marriage, but I can do so with a totally different desire for the outcomes.

I speak when asked, and when my husband actually wants my opinion, the value of it is far greater.

I am not pushing; it is actually teamwork, and when my husband realises that he can trust me, talk things out and pray with me, all without me pushing him to my outcomes, he does so more and more.

I will never be perfect; there will be times of frustration, anger, and sadness.

I am married to a sinner after all.

But I do believe that in time, it will get easier, I will learn more and be able to navigate these roads with ease in 20 years.

I assumed that if he wouldn’t, I should

The common thought among married Christian women is that leadership is old school; teammates are in, if he won’t, I will.

The other side of this is that most men are happy to opt out of leadership, since the calling to leadership is one of self-discipline and discipleship, roles that haven’t been taught to boys in the last few generations.

My husband wasn’t raised a Christian; he is learning and navigating a whole new family culture as we raise our 7 children.

His leadership doesn’t always look like how I think it should.

But that is irrelevant to whether I submit or not.

I want to note that submission can look exactly how it sounds at times.

Submission. Being told what to do, and doing it.

It is hard to do, and you have to trust God through the process, because we are married to a sinner, he will make mistakes, and there are times we may not agree with what is being asked. (not sin, I won’t commit what I know is sin, even for my husband)

I too am a sinner, and time and again I slip into old habits. But I am growing more attuned to them, and repent and pray quickly when I do.

I have learned that again, peace, between me and God, and between me and my husband comes when I trust God, and in that, I also trust “who” God gave me.

It doesn’t mean perfection.

It means a life lived in messy sin, two sinners side by side, but I can choose to trust a great God and the man he gave me, and let the rest go.

What I have gained

In summary, my gains on this journey, which is still very much underway, have been eye-opening.

I am still married to the same man, but it was I who had to do the changing.

In that change, more marital harmony, peace and joy.

My husband seems more willing to spend time with me as a result, and I am in no way going without on any physical or emotional level because of my submission.

When I set out to serve him, in my imperfection, he responds to serve me, in his imperfection.

I say imperfection because I don’t get it right all the time, and neither does he. I know that amongst the busy days of large family life, it’s hardest now to prioritise marriage, but we try.

However, as the wife, I am praying for him, seeking to praise him, listening to him, and serving him in the role I was given by God, the old critical eyes are gone, the clipboard dropped, and instead I have chosen to trust God with my submission, and let my husband walk his own walk with God wihtout my fear or worry at “how he’s doing”

It’s not a one-and-done ideal; I will be working on this for as long as I am married.

I do hope, however, that with time I will become more sure-footed

In my role as A godly wife.

Contextual information up first.

I currently homeschool five kids, from kindergarten to year 7.

I’ll be honest, I have learned way more than seven things in my seven years of homeschooling.

But if I were to list all of them, this would be awfully long.

So, instead, I will write as though penning notes to a younger me. To tell myself all the things I wish I had known back then that have impacted me today.

1. Perfecting less is better than attempting more.

To a frazzled 24-year-old mum of 4, in 2018. (aka me)

You’ve got it together, don’t you? New laser printer so you can print off entire ebooks, worksheets, and to-do lists.

You want to take on the world and make a difference for your kids. Giving them the very best education you can achieve in your own limited capacity, yet you are willing to grow and stretch yourself.

Determined even.

And that obviously means broadening their horizons, adding more choice, more fun, just more.

But, before you march on, ask yourself this.

What have you mastered when you have taken on too much?

from baking to gardening to learning a language or playing an instrument.

What do we master when we try to learn 7 new things at once?

Apply the concept of mastery.

Consistency in one or two things benefits the child, giving them routine, competence, and most of all confidence as they master basic skills of reading and manipulating numbers. These are the basic launch pads for learning and critical thinking.

It benefits you as you learn to teach the basics well, watching, learning and reacting to little changes, bumps in the road, as different children learn in different ways under your instruction.

When mastery in reading and maths is achieved, when they can leap from solid ground with unwavering confidence, the world opens up in so many ways that don’t take from you but only increase your capacity for joy in learning.

mastery over box ticking.

The world will open soon enough.

Focus on less; it takes less time, which is better for the child.

You don’t need to make it fun all the time; the child can learn that application to learning is a skill in itself that is lifelong.

Child-led learning has its place; there are always questions you can answer, but there is a very important place for consistency and repetition that is boring and character-building.

It took me a long time to learn this. I still stumble as it can be oh so very tedious after 7 years, but it is my mistakes I talk from, and I am determined to be better in this.

Sincerely, your older, slightly wiser self.

2. Education is not more important than God. (not in my home anyway)

Dear, too-busy younger me.

Reading the bible to your children is more important than penmanship.

Now, I can say, yes. learning to write is important, and it isn’t that one must take from another.

Ultimately, on a busy day, or when the postpartum hormones are raging or the morning sickness is making everything seem 100 times harder, it is better to take time from mere “getting it done” to read God’s word.

As you prioritise this in your life, your children will learn to appreciate the time spent with you daily. When the bible is placed down closed on your lap, the reading over, the questions begin.

This is the time when true life-changing learning, for both yourself and your children, begins.

You will learn to trust god with your homeschooling.

putting him first is a discipline, one that to the world seems foolish. But it is here, in the sometimes chaotic, tired, frustrated and boring bible reading, that it turns into the habit, the consistency you need to homeschool in general. It is learned by practising this God given role, for the Christian mother on every kind of day.

If you are struggling to find time, pray, and embrace working harder to fit it into your family rhythm, it may just mean getting over the idea that math is more important.

No one promised easy, but God does promise blessings from following his commands.

PS. Our current family bible routine is memory verses in the morning, and bible reading after the dinner cleanup. This works in memory work, penmanship, as we write the verse daily, and eliminates the after-dinner TV as we drink tea and read every night.

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3. Lifestyle can matter more (as much) than the curriculum you choose

Dear younger self.

Teach more, do less.

The best curriculum money can buy won’t serve a child who doesn’t (won’t) work with their hands.

Too much (any?) screen time makes learning difficult to stick long-term, when little brains are literally shrinking.

Running, climbing, chores, and imaginative play are crucial.

Master these, and learning comes easier.

We all know that basic play, especially outside or with toys like blocks and Lego, is a great way to encourage critical thinking in a fun way.

But work on your lifestyle, leave the home, teach them manners, how to look someone in the eye they don’t know well and speak, even when they are “shy”.

Make them do things they don’t want to, clean up after themselves, make beds to a standard that is a little difficult, and make them practice their instrument even when they lose interest.

Encourage your children to spend time outside their comfort zone, and don’t allow them to complain.

This shapes your homeschooling. As they get older, you will need to encourage them to take on some of the responsibility for managing their own schoolwork. This takes a child who is willing to set themselves a standard, stick to it, and be honest about doing so.

If you have a great curriculum, especially as your children get older, and you begin to broaden the range of topics, if your children shy away from a stretching workload, or don’t stick to a standard, or are lazy whenever you aren’t looking, then it limits you.

You need to be with them, at all times, while they work, to be looking over the shoulders of 12-13-year-olds, when you are also teaching multiple primary students, feeling overwhelmed and a little silly for not thinking of this four years prior.

The curriculum may be great, but if the student needs to be held by the hand throughout every step, then it loses its educational expandability, as your capacity is limited with a broad range of younger students who still need the daily drilling.

4. A good memory is a gift. Cultivate it.

You simply don’t know this yet, but you should.

Take the time to read either bible verses, poetry or just a good phrase, daily.

repeat it, sing it, clap to a tune.

Make it a daily habit to include daily memory recitation.

When you create this in your home, so many things can be memorised.

Again, this is a discipline thing, hard when you're swimming in three under three, but worth it, probably more than penmanship.

It stretches the brain, makes children and you work hard, but in time, it becomes more and more natural.

It will also make you attuned to the negative impacts of screens in the home, how much time is too much, and how much it affects what you're doing in an educational day.

A few minutes of forced writing doesn’t always show the deterioration in a child's brain, but when they simply can’t remember six words in a row for days on end, you start to question.

This is what will shape your lifestyle and your outcomes. Fine-tune your daily rhythm to feed this memory habit, and you will find yourself culling what you wanted to cull for so long with a driving purpose.

5. Reading good books is enough in the hard seasons.

Dear me, showing up for a new math concept after four hours’ sleep with a four-week-old.

Please don’t.

At least not in the way you're doing.

Choose a good book, make yourself a coffee, open up a pack of biscuits, and read.

Read, while you're breastfeeding, stop, ask questions.

Kids can draw at your feet, draw what they hear you talk about, or sit quietly and listen.

Do the same with the bible.

Add to that some memory work.

sing the times tables until everyone is ready to burst.

All of this is worthwhile and doable during those hard weeks.

Now I have older children who can work independently for the most part (maths is not fun at the moment), but I still have the younger ones, who need routine and diligence on my part, but in a gentler way.

Here are some books you can read that are interesting and educational.

the mystery of history by Susan Wise bauer

Human Anatomy Textbook (not dry but great for all ages) Brooke Ryan M.D.; Jeannie Fulbright

Read on topics like The Australian gold rush, great explorers or My Story series.

Great Battles for Boys. This covers all the wars and great battles that primary-aged children love.

books from “The Who Were They” series.

6. Have a “why” for everything you do.

To the motivated me on YouTube, January 5th.

Always ask. Why?

Why would I do this?

What will it achieve?

Do I need to do this now?

Do I need to teach Latin?

Will my children lose out this year if I don’t bring a focus to great artists?

Does participating in that sport add to our family or take away?

When you are highly motivated and looking for something to mimic, when you are at a loose end and think that filling time is the best thing you can do, take the time to think of why this new thing, this new lesson, workload and outcome needs to be in your life.

It may mean that in some seasons you do add a new thing, something you are a little unsure about, but take the time and be prepared to either love it, or recognise that it doesn’t work for you, or maybe just not right now.

When you make it a priority to fill your days with learning, good books, good music and life skills. Remember, your children are lifelong learners, not just here in the home.

Set them up with tastes, and do your best to keep consistency in the foundation, and add more to the taste buds as they get older, but not all learning starts and stops with you.

Create a learner, not just the learning, especially if it is merely overwhelming, robbing you of joy; this kills learning, so keep a balance, and measure joy over the to-do list.

7. You won’t always feel like what you are doing is worth it.

To thoughtful me, imagining quaint morning basket sessions and five merry children around the table.

These mornings do happen, but they are intermixed with chaotic hours spent figuring out why that sum keeps up the wrong answer, reading lessons to the four-year-old, and someone cut the cover of your notebook by accident.

Sitting down for hours daily on the same maths problems is downright soul-destroying.

Watching a blank face stare back at you makes you want to scream.

The constant drilling of sound flashcards, the dropped pencil 30 times a morning.

It can make you question why you're here.

Where is that joyful homeschool morning?

Why isn’t YouTube filled with mornings like these?

Here is the grind, it is there, in every homeschool home, and you need to face it with patience and gratitude.

You get to do this, your child won’t fall behind in class, won’t repeat years or have to sit in the back.

You can do your best for them on this hard day, and in time, it will pay off.

This is homeschooling, this is why you chose it, remember?

You want what you believe is best for your children.

This is it, the nitty-gritty, the times when you really wonder if anything you do gets through to them.

I can promise, it does, you will break through the hard times, and each time you do, it equips you for the next one.

When you reach a rocky subject, focus on it, cut back the excess work, and pray about teaching it.

It may take a few hours, days, or even weeks.

But you're here, it’s your job, you can either embrace it joyfully or negatively.

So, 24-year-old me, I hope these little pointers helped, that brought into focus what your role is now, setting up for the older me, who inevitably dealt with and is still dealing with your mistakes.

But, hey, that’s homeschooling, we learn, we gather, we grow.

I wonder what I will read one day from 38-year-old me?

Sincerely, 31-year-old me.

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