Homeschooling — Task or Relationship?

When you make the choice to homeschool, life can become overwhelming rather quickly, especially if you enjoy being organized.

On top of being the Domestic Engineer in the house, now you are the Educator-in-Residence, and the demands on your time have possibly more than doubled. What to do?

Some of us who are task oriented—the ones who live by their schedules and to-do lists (and their contentment comes from how much they get done)—will tend to ramp up the output requirements, plowing through curriculum for the sake of getting it done because, after all, we bought it so we should use it, right? 

And then some of us who are relationship oriented will veer off topic if a child asks a question, and we can end up looking at so many different websites or books that it is hard to remember where we started and what the goal was in the first place—but we had fun together, didn’t we?

You can probably see issues with both sides of this coin. All of us, even the ones who struggle with organization, will have to get a grip on our days in some fashion, in order to survive. And all of us, even the ones who thrive on organization, will have to realize we can't do it all and some things will have to slide. And guess what? That is okay!

 “What things should I let go?” some of you may ask. That depends on you and your family.

Maybe you won’t wash the sheets on all the beds every week like you normally do; or maybe you eat breakfast for dinner some days; or maybe (gasp!) you buy your bread instead of making it. Whatever it is, choose something that doesn’t have eternal consequences (like leaving dirty dishes in the sink overnight) and let it slide (so you can read to your kids before bedtime).

The biggest caution I would give is in an area where I struggle—treating your children’s education as another thing to accomplish during the day. This is where those who are task oriented can get bogged down and feel like they are failing their kids, simply because they didn’t finish what was on that day’s lesson plans.

You are not failing your kids! Your are not messing them up! Those are big fat lies from the enemy!

Your kids love you and they want your time and your focused attention. If you are in a rut and you feel like school is a hamster wheel—which is tempting when testing is around the corner—then shake up the routine.

Spend the day reading lots of books to your kids. Do some fun games that teach skills but don’t feel like learning. Make some crafts! If you hate messes, there are many paper crafts that you can do that don’t involve paints or glue. Put on a puppet show so they can act out something they’ve learned recently.

The best way to lean more heavily on the relationship scale is to slow down and spend time with your kids, on their level. Truly enjoy the time we have with them, before they are grown and gone. Thank God for their smiles, their messes, their fits. God has anointed us to help them to see His perspective, and in order to do that, we need to see it first.