Trying to balance your needs and the needs of your children is an age-old problem for most parents; it only gets complicated when you add homeschooling to the mix. Is there a way to balance it all?
So first, balance. What is balance?
A lot of times we tend to think balance is 50/50. We do this for a certain amount of time. We should balance it with something else. You’ve read this long, you should go outside and play this long, you might say. That’s not exactly the nature of balance.
Balance is the right amount of the right thing. So, soup, you don’t want it to be 50% salt, but some salt or flavor in the soup really helps dramatically rather than if you have unsalted V-8 Juice or something like that.
So, it’s the right amount. So, the right amount of attention to homeschool, the right amount of attention to parenting, the right amount of attention to marriage, that would be the nature of the game.
The challenge here, I think, is that when we come around to parenting and homeschooling, we tend to think 50/50. So, dads should be 50% involved. Moms should be 50% involved or something like that.
It’s never going to work that way. Somebody is going to be better at certain things than the other. Somebody is going to be available for more of the full-time context.
It’s not uncommon for the dads to work and the moms to have that great gift of nurture. So, I would say that’s probably very traditional in homeschools, but not unique.
In our context, I did a lot with homeschool but my husband certainly did that greater portion, especially in the early years because I was home with Charlie and focused on growing the kids; which was OUR game plan.
So, how about you and your marriage and your homeschool and your parenting? I’d argue it needs to work as follows. Work on the marriage. You do that largely by what you model and focus upon.
Is marriage the priority? How do you show that to the kids? Do you two ever go out without the kids or spend any time alone without the kids? Is it a family room and a family bed and a family everything? If you do that, you’re making no distinction to marriage. And in my experience, you’re not modeling to the kids to go out and to be independent, to find themselves a spouse, to build their family. That’s really what you want to do.
Of course, I realize you might be a single parent homeschooling but doesn’t the principle hold? If your ex is in the kid’s lives, then the better that relationship, the better for the kids. Aim for peace and cooperation always, even if you can’t have it.
So, what I would challenge you to understand is that whatever you need to do, you began by making the marriage the priority. And then inside of that, you’re like-minded about how you approach parenting, what are you modeling to the kids, what are your standards of what you’re trying to do. And then, inside of that, the homeschool game can begin to make sense.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
