Home schooling and Working Mom

Since March 2020 we have not only been expected to deal with a global pandemic, but we have also as parents, been expected to do something that would seem impossible. Overnight we have become housebound out of routine, working from home or furloughed. As well as full time parents and teachers. Isolating ourselves, keeping our families safe and trying to adjust every aspect of our lives to just mange all that is expected of us.

Many of my friends are feeling extremely overwhelmed with the fact that they are having to home school their children, where they have no experience in this field and have felt that they were drowning in endless zoom meetings, google classroom and emails.

Having some sense of structure in your life right now is what is going to help, here are some tips and ideas on how to help in the stressful situation right now.

Create a Daily Schedule

When your child is in school, the one thing that they can count on is routine, they get set lessons, breaks, lunch and they know when they're going home. It proven time and time again that routine and structure create a more secure and safe environment for children to feel nurtured and content. For your home schooling to work you need to be consistent.

Keeping in mind that you need to fit in your own work schedule too, giving that you can multitask, or set aside a deadline for when your own work needs to be submitted along with the children school work.

Assign your Work Environment

Setting your work area aside from the rest of the house is going to help your children, setting the scene for a "schooling" area is going to allow the children to separate themselves from their relaxing or play areas. Complete the area with your own stationary set up, crayons, pencils, paints, paper create that classroom area.

It can be as little as removing technology, apart form what is needed to complete the work, assuring there are as little distractions as possible in the room so that your child can focus on the task alone. It's surprising how easily your child can be distracted by the smallest of things. It's amazing how easily they're distracted from their school work yet when they're allowed to watch a YouTube clip they fall deaf to the world around them!

Take Regular Breaks

Allowing yourself and your children to take breaks away from the work form each other is going to lower your stress and anxiety levels with each other. Give your children that space to run jump scream shout and have fun. They need to expel that energy and release will also help them settle better too.

Setting tasks, explaining to your children when they have completed their work they can go on to have a drink, snack or a break in some way. With tasks that are set, try to work out ways to make it more fun so that it feels less like work and more like fun with Mom or Dad.

Be Graceful with Yourself

Remember, this situation is foreign to us ALL none of us have been prepared for this. We we're not ready to become in house teachers, while the early days of teaching our children to walk and talk, how to eat, how to be clean was something that could come naturally. Spending our time teaching our children core subjects that many of us have not spent time working on since we were back in school ourselves.

Be kind to yourself, you are allowed to feel overwhelmed and you are allowed to feel like you need more breaks. Spend some time going over the work that is expected of you, teach what you KNOW and then tackle the rest.

Embrace and Enjoy

As much as this time is difficult and exhausting for us, the one thing that I am going to try my best is to enjoy and embrace every moment with my children, this is time we would not have had with them. They would be in school, I would have been in work. So the little moments of chaos are worth the moments of quite, the moments of fun and the moments where you sigh relief into that hot cup of tea at the end of the day.