[Podcast #359] The Rights of a Homeschooling Mom

Brave Writer Podcast

What rights do we forget we have when homeschooling becomes an all-consuming family project?

Staying home to educate our kids can be meaningful, joyful work, but it is still work. We deserve a voice in family finances, time to maintain employable skills, space for lesson preparation, personal interests, exercise, rest, and a say in the educational decisions we spend our days carrying out.

We also get to change our minds. Homeschooling does not require signing away the rest of our adulthood.

On the Brave Writer podcast today, we’re talking about:

  • financial agency,
  • shared household labor,
  • professional development,
  • supportive partnerships,
  • and why caring for our own future belongs inside the homeschool plan too.

Tune in, then ask yourself: what would change if you treated homeschooling like the real career it is?

Show Notes

When we decide to homeschool, it’s easy for the needs of the homeschool to expand until they fill every available corner.

There is always another book to read, a curriculum to research, a child to help, a meal to make, a basket of laundry to fold, or a problem to solve. Because all of these things happen at home, they can blur together until we stop distinguishing between parenting, teaching, household labor, and our own needs as adults.

That is why we think homeschooling mothers need to remember something simple: we have rights too.

We have the right to understand and participate fully in our family finances. Staying home with children does not make family income somebody else’s money. Homeschooling is unpaid labor, but it is still labor. It provides an education that families would otherwise obtain somewhere else, while the work done at home also helps make paid employment possible for the other adult.

We also have the right to protect our future employability.

That may mean maintaining a professional license, taking a continuing education course, keeping up with technology, freelancing a few hours a week, or simply continuing to develop skills that could someday become paid work. We cannot predict job loss, disability, divorce, or death. Preparing ourselves to meet an uncertain future is not a lack of faith in our families. It is part of being an adult.

Homeschooling itself deserves professional preparation too.

So much parental anxiety comes from trying to teach material we have barely had time to understand ourselves. We spend weeks comparing math programs and then try to read the instructions for the winner while a restless child waits beside us.

Give yourself time to prepare.

Read the teacher notes. Go sit at a coffee shop. Reserve a library room. Hire a babysitter when you can. Put on a show for the kids and spend an hour figuring out how the curriculum actually works.

That time counts as homeschooling.

And then there is the time that has nothing to do with homeschooling at all.

  • Exercise
  • Music lessons
  • Novels
  • Art museums
  • Writing
  • Gardening
  • Gaming
  • Long walks
  • Quiet afternoons

Those things are not rewards we earn after every worksheet is checked and every sock is folded. They belong to our adulthood.

Our children get one childhood, and we get one adulthood. We do not have to put every curiosity of our own into storage until our youngest graduates.

In fact, our children benefit from seeing us learn. They get to watch an adult struggle with a cello, draw badly before drawing better, read simply because a subject is fascinating, or make something for no reason other than delight.

And perhaps the most important right is this: we are allowed to change our minds.

Choosing homeschooling does not obligate us to do it forever. If the experience stops allowing us to be the parent we want to be, we can reconsider. School is not a failure. Returning to homeschooling later is not an inconsistency.

We want an education that helps our children flourish. The adult guiding that education deserves a life that can flourish too.

Resources

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Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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