Stop Overworking and Start Enjoying Your Homeschool

Pam Barnhill [00:00:01]:
Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again? Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids? Welcome to Homeschool Better Together, a podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family. I’m Pam Barnhill, and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and into the wonder. Let’s do this. Our topic today is wearing yourself out as a homeschooling mom. I mean, not really. That’s not really what our topic is, but that’s what the result is. And I think I want to focus on that for a little bit. Let’s stop wearing ourselves out as a homeschooling mom.

Pam Barnhill [00:00:47]:
In fact, if you are the person who is working the hardest in your homeschool, there is something wrong with this picture. Mom should never be the one who is working hardest in the homeschool. And I feel quite strongly about this one. So let’s think back to a number of years ago. Oh goodness. About 12 years ago now. And here I was with these little bitty kids in my homeschool and I was so wanting to do everything right as a homeschooling mom. I’m sure that so many of you can relate just like, oh my goodness.

Pam Barnhill [00:01:29]:
I’ve got to get this right. And I can remember now this was not necessarily me. And you have to remember too. I was a, I was a teacher. I was a high school teacher. I was a middle school teacher for a number of years. And I was never the kind of kid that got burned out on school. I was the kid who like really liked school, kind of crazy, but you know, the structure and the rules and the workbooks and like it set up a place where I could excel and I really, really enjoyed the school environment.

Pam Barnhill [00:01:58]:
But I also knew that there were a lot of other kids who weren’t that way. And when I got into teaching, I really realized that there were a lot of kids who did not really like the school environment a whole lot, and they just didn’t enjoy learning. They were very much just there kind of checking off the boxes and just trying to get to the end so that they could start life. And that just made me so, so sad. So I didn’t want my kids to end up that way. I wanted my kids to love learning. I wanted my kids to really love school and enjoy what we were doing. And so when they were little, what I would do is I would try to make everything fun.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:40]:
I would 100% get on Pinterest for hours. Pinterest was new back then. I can remember, you know, Pinterest became a thing when my oldest was like 3 or 4 years old. And so when I was beginning homeschooling, this was a totally new thing. I would get on Pinterest for hours and hours, and I would look up all of these different activities. They might be math activities, or they might be, you know, history activities or science activities. And I would print everything out and I would cut things, and I would laminate them, and I would make all of these really fun activities. And I wasn’t going to teach things the normal way or the old fashioned way.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:17]:
I wasn’t going to pull out the workbooks and just do the workbooks. I was going to make every lesson fun because my kid was absolutely going to love learning. They were not going to hate learning. Yeah. It took me about 2 years to realize my kids were human. They were going to be grumpy no matter what. Like, you know, they’re, they’re grumpy every day. There are some days that they’re like quite delightful to be around the boys.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:48]:
And I had a fabulous writing lesson today. We had fun with it. You know, we were working on sentences and and writing different kinds of sentences, and we just really had a good time with it. So nobody was particularly grumpy today. But there are a lot of days where kids just are grumpy. They don’t wanna do the work. They don’t care that it’s a fun activity. If they don’t like doing it, they really don’t care how much time you’ve put into it.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:14]:
They don’t care about all the hard work that you’ve done. And boy, let me tell you that there was resentment building up inside of me that I was doing all of this work. I was going out of my way to find these really, really fun activities. I was just making it so awesome, I thought, and we’ll get to that in a minute. And they had no appreciation for that, darn it. They just had horrible little attitudes and didn’t care at all, and they they didn’t see all the work I was putting in. Oh my goodness. Was I becoming such a martyr? So I was working really hard.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:53]:
I was the hardest working person in my homeschool, and I was such a martyr for what I was doing. And I still wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish, which was kids not hating what we were doing because if they just really didn’t care, they really didn’t care about all the, the fun little math games and all of that stuff. They just wanted to be done with school so they could go play and do their own stuff. So, yeah, that was kind of the situation we were in and it was not fabulous. I did not feel good. They did not feel good. And that was about the time where I decided, you know what? I’m going to stop focusing on making every stinking activity fun. Like if we’re gonna learn addition, we can just learn addition.

Pam Barnhill [00:05:37]:
If we’re gonna learn to read, we can just learn to read. I don’t have to tie myself in knots and bend over backwards, making all of these activities, like, super fun in order for us to enjoy homeschooling, to enjoy spending time together, for them to love learning and all that kind of stuff. And one of the first things I came to realize was that my kids have their own unique talents and gifts and desires and things that they enjoy and don’t enjoy, and none of my kids were like me. None of my kids were the perfect little straight a student. Not saying that I’m perfect y’all. But, you know, just that little the the kind of student that every teacher loves, my teachers will tell you that they loved me as a student. Some of them, still alive. Elementary school teachers, they will still tell you that they loved having Pam in their class because I was a great little student.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:32]:
None of my kids were people pleasers in that way. And That’s what I was. It wasn’t like, you know, that was just some fabulously brilliant person. I was just a little people pleaser and I liked being there and I liked doing school and my kids did not have that same experience for whatever reason. Now, would they had been if they had gone to school and had spent time with somebody other than mom? Quite possibly. But, you know, that’s just not what their MO was. You know, that’s, that’s just not how they worked. So that was the first thing I had to come to realize was that they didn’t care anything about playing the game of school.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:06]:
They didn’t care anything about school. They’d never been to school. They didn’t really have a big frame of reference for what school was. Yes. We were learning, but they didn’t care anything about doing the little workbooks and stuff like that. And that’s not to say that other homeschooling kids aren’t like that or can’t be like that because I know plenty that are. You know, whether they had been to school at one time or some of them just never went to school. I think it’s just a personality type.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:30]:
You know? And let me tell you, it’s not a more moral personality type than any other personality type. And I had to come to that realization that my children were not broken. They were not wrong. They did not need to be fixed because they did not like doing all the school y things. Yeah. That was a hard lesson for me to learn. And I still kind of go back and forth with this sometimes. It’s like, oh, wow.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:59]:
They have their own interests. They have their own passions. And this is one place where I I really feel like being influenced by some unschoolers and I’d never been unschooler y’all. I just like, I can’t handle the lack of structure. I think it’s actually a lot of hard work to be a really good unschooler because you have to be so in tune with your kids and really paying attention to them. And I feel like it’s more of an extrovert thing. I mean, y’all can correct me, you know, if I’m wrong. It just exhausted me.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:27]:
Just the idea of doing that and doing it really, really well. And so, you know, I did latch on to some of their ideas though, and this idea that my kids have their own That my kids have their own value outside of things that maybe I grew up thinking was valuable. You know, I grew up thinking, oh, being a good student and getting all A’s and doing all the things that you’re asked to do in school and liking school y things was valuable and moral. And you know what? It’s not, it’s not any more valuable or moral than other kinds of interests. Now, does it help you do well in school? 100% it does, but it doesn’t make you better than anybody else. So, yeah, so this was the big realization that I came to. Like my kids didn’t like schooly things. I was the one working the hardest in our homeschool and I was completely wearing myself out.

Pam Barnhill [00:09:25]:
They had no appreciation for that. And I was trying too hard to make everything fun and I just really needed to stop resenting my kids. And so that was when I would say Olivia was probably about 1st grade that I, you know, thought we need to do something different. There needs to be something different going on. I need to change my paradigm at how I look at education and homeschooling and learning and things like that. And kind of number 1, meet my kids where they are and see their gifts and what they do well. And then number 2, stop working so darn hard because it’s not working. What you’re doing is just you’re just wearing yourself out.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:10]:
So what did I do? Well, I’d stopped trying to think of everything as fun. I stopped trying to make everything fun. I came to a few different realizations. The first realization that I came to is there were some things that we would do in our homeschool. It was probably just better to sit there and do them. Like, covering over with a fresh coat of paint or something was not going to make it any more palatable to my children. Right. Covering it in sugar.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:38]:
All of that stuff was probably not going to make them any happier to consume it. We might as well just do it. It might be a little bit difficult. We could do it for a few minutes a day. And just by keeping it kind of straightforward, few minutes a day, consistent Lee working on those skills, man, is consistency such a huge thing, like doing it a little bit every day over and over, and they just know it’s coming and they get in their little brains. You know what? We’re doing math today. We’re doing phonics today. We’re doing spelling today.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:12]:
We’re only gonna do it for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes. You know, when they’re really little, they do it for 10 minutes and then we stretch it out as they get older. We’re only gonna do it for a few minutes. We’re gonna give it our best work, and then we’re gonna be done with it and we can put it aside. It was the same. I mean, I know some of you might not believe me, but it was absolutely the same to do it that way. They had the same amount of. Animosity towards these subjects and the same amount of happiness towards these subjects.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:44]:
When I started doing short little, no frills lessons as they did when I was standing on my head and tap dancing and singing and cutting and laminating things and making these fun lessons. It was all the same to them. They did not care one way or the other, really. It didn’t make them any happier or any sadder, and I was working a lot less by just opening the book and saying, okay, we’re gonna do our few minutes of reading. Let’s do it. So that was kind of the first thing. Now I also did start getting kind of a better attitude about school in general. And that better attitude really, really helped with my relationship with my kids.

Pam Barnhill [00:12:26]:
And I think this was because I wasn’t feeling quite so resentful for them all the time that I was the one over here doing all this work, making all of these fun things that they just didn’t wanna do. And so my attitude towards them changed. And so we just kind of got along better because I was happier to sit there with them because I wasn’t resenting them anymore for everything that I was doing. And so that really helped. And then also really leaning in and starting to look at what is your interest. What are the things that you enjoy doing? What are the things that you like? When you tell me that you don’t like something, let me listen to you. Now, you know, I don’t like math. There’s not a whole lot you can do with that.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:05]:
You still have to learn how to do math. Right? But if somebody was saying, I don’t like this particular handwriting book, or I wish I could do something different for spelling, then I started listening to those things and saying, okay. How can we do things that you like a little more than things that I like? And so I dropped a few things that they were just not enamored with and substituted some things that they enjoyed a lot more. One of those things was extra math. So I can remember my kids being little and everybody’s like, oh, you need to practice these math facts, and extra math was a big thing in those days. I don’t know if it still is. I don’t have anybody working on math facts anymore. And it was this kind of online game that you would play answering math questions.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:52]:
I thought it was great. My kids hated it. Just absolutely hated it. So I just found another program to substitute. That was all that I had to do. We ended up using the math you see. They have a free little math game. It’s it’s a no frills game on their website where the kids would go in and answer math questions.

Pam Barnhill [00:14:13]:
And they just liked it so much better than extra math because they felt like there was a lot less pressure to it. It still did the job, which was drilling them and helping them memorize their math facts. It’s still 100% did the job that it needed to do. They just like that particular platform better than the other one. And so it was such an easy substitute to make. So looking for the different things that my kids, you know, how can I just listen to what they’re saying and see what their personalities are like and make these things better and different? The next thing we did is we implemented morning time. And I will tell you morning time was a game changer for our homeschool because, first of all, morning time was something that I could love, and it was something that they could love. I could put little things in there that they absolutely found fun and fascinating, different stories and books that we read.

Pam Barnhill [00:15:06]:
They could always be doing something with their hands. We did Mad Libs in morning time. That was something they absolutely loved. We’d pull out the Play Doh and the watercolors and the rainbow loom and the Perler beads and all the things. And I would just read to them for the longest time. And it was perfect and it worked and it was for the most part of very joyful time of day. There were problems. I’m just gonna tell you.

Pam Barnhill [00:15:33]:
Some days, like, attitudes would be bad or people would be getting sick or people would be fighting with each other. Those days happen. But over the course of a long time, most days were really good days, and we got so much accomplished in morning time because my kids were close in age together. We did science in morning time, and we did history in morning time, and we did memory work in morning time. And later we did grammar in morning time, and we did Latin in morning time and poetry. All the while, they were sitting there doing the things that they wanted to do with their hands while I was reading to them, or they were answering questions or things like that. And so it really, I think, was a lifesaver for our homeschool. I also started implementing little bits of play into our day.

Pam Barnhill [00:16:21]:
I had one kid, never wanted to do the word questions at the end of his math page. For whatever reason, he just did not like those word questions. The little problems that looked like math problems, those were fine. He wasn’t even reading at the time and he just didn’t want to do the word problems. And so what I started to do was substitute the word pug or the names of our dogs into the word problems. And so instead of Charlie’s mom made freshly baked cookies, it would be Charlie’s mom made freshly baked pugs, which might not be appealing to us as parents, but was really appealing to a 67 year old boy. Right? And so we did this for years, even after he could read the problems for himself at the end of his math lesson every day, he would bring me his book and I would change all of the problems and read them out loud, and he didn’t need it anymore. It was just a touch point in our day, and it gave me a chance to flip the page back and, you know, spot check his other math problems and make sure that he had gotten the other ones right.

Pam Barnhill [00:17:29]:
And it just gave us a a place to connect every single day. And that relationship was so, so important and it brought us so much joy through the years. And it wasn’t until he moved on to work with the math tutor once he got to decimals and fractions that we stopped. But we did it all the way up through the long division book, and it was just such a a wonderful part of our day and something that I certainly will never, never forget doing with that particular child. And so that is such a fond memory for our homeschool. So just adding those little bits of play, that was something else that I did as well. And it’s different. You know? Adding little moments of play, adding little moments of joy, those little relationship touch points, really thinking about what my children’s likes and dislikes are and what their personalities are, and stopping doing all of the work and letting them doing some of the work, keeping lessons short and to the point, implementing a morning time.

Pam Barnhill [00:18:30]:
Those are the things that stopped me from being overwhelmed in my homeschool. Those were the things that made homeschool delightful. Those were the things that kept me from getting burned out through all the homeschool years. And right now, we’re continuing to do those things. My boys and I are doing fallacies in morning time. We’re also studying economics in morning time. These are subjects that I don’t know an awful lot about. And so I’m learning right along with them.

Pam Barnhill [00:19:01]:
We’re reading a book that I’ve never read before. So I’m really enjoying that. We’re sitting and doing writing together as a family and I’m putting sentences on the whiteboard and I always do sentences that have to do with like different video games that they like. And they laughed at me today. They’re like, mom, you research Fortnite. And Fortnite’s not necessarily a video game that they like it. It was kind of an inside joke that, you know, it used to be popular. They used to like it when they were little, but it’s not quite a thing anymore.

Pam Barnhill [00:19:33]:
And so I’ve been, like, bringing Fortnite sentences to the table for us to work on in writing. And they’re like, mom, you researched all of this. And I’m like, no, I didn’t research it. I had chat GPT do it for me. But that’s easy. Right? That’s totally easy. And they’re cracking jokes and laughing and we’re having fun and just enjoying ourselves together as a family, as we’re doing writing, which is something that neither one of them particularly care a whole lot about. They wouldn’t tell you it’s their favorite subject by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a great touch point for our relationship.

Pam Barnhill [00:20:12]:
So stop working so hard. Stop working so hard. Stop causing yourself all this overwhelm, and step back and think about how can we make homeschooling just a little more joyful. If you would like to connect with an online homeschool community, or if you would like to bounce ideas off of other people about how to make your homeschool more joyful, we’ll leave a link to that for you in the show notes. That’s our show for today. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review so you never miss out on the wonder of homeschooling better together. To stay connected and learn even more about the homeschooling better together resources and to join our free community, visit hsbtpodcast.com. Until next week, keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.