Homeschooling Can Rock

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm so glad you joined me today. I'm your host, Corinne Powell.

I help people pleasers find happiness, embrace courage, and experience peace of mind through inner child healing. If you're desperate for change and not sure how to make it happen, I'm here to guide you along the way. 

In this space, you'll find motivation to live a life full of joy and resilience. We will talk all things inner wellness with spirituality interwoven at times. Being a mom to three, parenting will be a topic of conversation for sure. So happy to have you. Enjoy today's episode. 

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Hello, friends. It's good to be back with you.

I'm going to talk today a bit about being a mom and homeschooling. But in case you're not a homeschooling parent, I want you to know that there will be things that you can still pull from what I share. For those of you that have your kids remotely learning, you're going to feel in similar ways to me as a homeschooling parent, because a big piece to being a homeschooling parent is the fact that you don't get a lot of time away from your children.

When they're with us throughout the day and they're with us throughout the night and they're with us on the weekends, it's a lot. Now perhaps your children are back and forth between your home and another home. And if that's the case, I'm glad you get a break sometimes, but that may mean you're solo parenting the other times and that's tough in and of itself.

So no matter where you come from, there's going to be ways that we relate and ways that we don't. I want you to know that I'm grateful for the mothering that you do. And if you're out there and you're listening and you're a dad, I'm grateful for the involvement you have as a father.

Thank you to each one of you parents for the ways that you are impacting your children who will become and who are this next generation. How we live our life and the impact we have on our kids is going to affect our world and how things go. So I feel like it's a really important job being a parent or being a teacher of children.

And it's hard having kids home all the time and the ways that they argue and they fight. I mean, come on, sibling rivalry is real. And so are messes.

All those meals we prepare and kids, people in general, home all day. Doesn't it feel sometimes like someone's always asking for another snack or going to the fridge to find some more food or needing another meal to be made? It's a lot. Add to it education and now you've got a really super full day.

And if you're having to work from home as well, I'm feeling for you. And as much as I'm empathizing, what I want to do through these next few minutes we have together is help you see a way out of the fog. Because there are brighter days ahead and even the season you're in, if you do have children remotely learning or if you are working from home, if you are a homeschooling parent or just a mother or a father to young children who depend on you and need you, it is not always going to be as difficult as it is right now.

And you're supposed to get to feel light in the middle of even a heavy season. Sure, there's going to be days when it feels harder, but there should be some days that it feels light and a lot of days. That's my goal at least.

So I want to share with you some of the things that I'm doing and some of the perspectives that I hold to help me create some ease and create a way of living that does feel light and enjoyable. A few years ago, I was surviving and barely getting by. I was a full-time mom, so my kids were always with me.

So even before they were of school age, they were still with me all day. And let me tell you, having an overwhelmed mom is very hard on children. I know, I experienced that growing up as a child.

I was feeling not just overwhelmed, but depressed, anxious, and exhausted. I was so happy every night my husband would get home from work. I was done.

But there's not too many hours before the next day begins. And so it was this cycle and it wasn't healthy for me or my children. It just wasn't good for our home environment.

So what I've had to do is learn how to take care of myself. As much as I want to be the good mom to my kids, I need to be good to my own self. And that goes for all of us.

My kids need good meals, but I also need good food. There will be times where I make my children great meals, but I don't eat them myself. That needs to change.

And I've been changing. I've been really working on those type of areas, that I'm not going to do something for someone else and not include myself. Because you may not be like me, but I am the type of person who's had to unlearn some really negative patterns and habits that I carried through life, where I was for everyone else and disregarded myself.

I made sure everybody else was comfortable, had what they needed, got the rest that they needed, but I was running myself ragged. And so I've had to learn, basically, how to take care of myself, how to grow in loving myself, and how to reparent my inner child. Now, my husband is a great support, and I'm really happy and appreciative of everything he does.

But even in that, there's ways I have to be careful, because I will want to make sure he's always doing less, but adding more to my plate, because I'm taking tasks away from him. And yes, he needs to be noticed. And certainly, I don't want him to get burnt out, but I need to keep being aware of myself, too.

And I say that just so that you can also reflect on that. How do you interact on your involvement in your family, or just in the life you're living, whether you have a family or not? 

How do you interact with your co-workers? How do you interact, in general, in the relationships you have? Are you always doing for other people, but not taking good care of yourself? Are you making sure that they have everything they need at the expense of yourself? It doesn't have to be that way. 

There may be days and times where you need to do more for others than for yourself, certain events that happen, but it shouldn't be that way all the time.

So going back, though, to parenting, or especially teaching children at home, here's what I want to say about that. Kids learn by example. So how we live our life as the adults in the home, it matters so very much.

Our kids are watching, whether we know it or not. They're picking up things from us all the time. Education is so much more than academics.

Think about the home environment. If it is chaotic or dysfunctional, that has a negative effect on your children's body and their brain. Now, I'm not saying this to cause you to feel badly.

I'm not saying this to point a finger at you. No shame here. I'm only bringing this up because I think sometimes we can focus culturally, focus so much on education, which is important, that we miss this piece of the development of the inner self and a child learning how to self-regulate and how to manage their emotions, what to do with the thoughts that they have, managing their minds and their thinking.

It's so important. It's all a piece to educating them, in my opinion. So my days aren't just spending time with my children in their books, learning their academics, even though that is a big piece of education.

I'm teaching them things like what to do when they have big emotions and they don't know how to express themselves or they don't know how to express themselves without yelling or without hurting their siblings. How can I help them to learn how to self-regulate, to take some deep breaths, to pause, take two, try that again? 

Can you say that with a different tone? Can you use your words to express what you need to your sibling or to me, your dad? So I'm helping them. I'm taking them step by step and helping them to know how to actually go through their days as a powerful person.

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I see children as people. I don't see them on a different level as us adults. So my encouragement is to us that we should be intentional to bring lightness and laughter into our family life, especially at a time in the world when anxiety and stress is being felt from so many directions.

We're feeling it from all over the place, and that's affecting our kids. It's affecting us, so it's affecting our kids. There's been so many changes in this last year. That's affecting our children. So just being empathetic, recognizing where they're at, but then also holding that compassion towards ourself as well. 

My son loves to cook and bake. I involve him in those processes. He's the type of kid who will probably go to tech school for high school. You know, he'd rather hands-on.

Let me build something or take something apart. Let me learn how to cook and bake. How does this work? Behind the scenes, what's going on here? You know, he loves all of that.

And so I see helping him develop in all these different ways is vitally important. For my children to know how to put a load of laundry in, switch it over to the dryer, or to be able to do just routine household chores, unloading the dishwasher, sweeping or vacuuming the floor, cleaning up their room, basic chores. I feel like that's important.

I'm actually looking at it as not a help to me necessarily, especially when you're teaching a child. Sometimes it's extra time involved to teach a child. It's easier to do the task yourself.

But I see teaching them as so important and key for their development to be human beings who aren't just book smart, but are able to function in all sorts of areas and arenas of life. And so this in part goes back to my own story. And when I think about how it was for me growing up, I know that really no matter the education I got or didn't, the home environment I grew up in shaped who I became.

And actually I've had to unlearn and heal from so much trauma, dysfunction, emotional abandonment, and the list goes on. I don't want that for my children. And no, I'm not talking about perfect parenting here.

I'm not hoping to be a perfect parent. Good enough is okay by me. But what can I do to give my children something I didn't receive? I actually was homeschooled until high school, and I didn't get a great education, but that's not because homeschooling isn't good.

My husband, in fact, was homeschooled as well, and he had a really positive experience. He is super intelligent, as are all his siblings, and he's really grateful for the education he got. But my home environment was dysfunctional, chaotic, and traumatic.

So I actually didn't learn what I needed to academically because the structure of the home was so out of control that it wasn't even a good learning environment, let alone the fact that I started taking care of younger siblings and became a parentified child. 

So my education got put on the back burner. Remember how I said I help other people, but I don't focus on what I need sometimes? Well, that is a piece of it.

So I was helping other siblings learn, but my own education wasn't being focused on. Not okay. So when I went to high school, I was put in at the grade level that I would have been at.

I wasn't so behind, but I knew within myself that I sat in a classroom and just felt like, I don't know where we're going with this. I don't feel that I know everything that the other students in the class do because I hadn't had the same education up through that point as they did. Now, others of my siblings didn't experience the same.

They were well on their way when they went into school, but my personality type and the way that I adapted to the trauma going on in my home resulted in me not getting the education I needed and not focusing enough on Corinne. So each of the children, my children or children in general, are unique. They learn differently, and so the idea of tailoring education to their specific needs feels absolutely right.

This is one of the reasons I love homeschooling. We will not always homeschool. At least that would be my prediction.

We're homeschooling right now. We feel like it's the best for the family right now, but once we transition out of that, it won't be that all of my children necessarily transition out of homeschooling. It will be the ones that we feel is best for them, the ones that feel ready to sit in the classroom all day and learn that way.

For example, if my son does better with hands-on learning than just bookwork, certainly he needs to know how to sit, how to be able to listen, how to be able to do the work in a book, but there are going to be other pieces of his education that may look different than those of my daughter's. And so I say that because I want to convey the idea that each person is an individual, and so for you with the people that you interact with, whether it's your children or just other people in general, see them as individuals. Nobody has to be like us, and nobody has to be like the perceived ideas that we have.

Let's give people freedom to be themselves, to not fit our mold, to not have to fit the box that we've created for them, and let's see who they become. There's so much beauty in letting people have their own personalities and their unique ways of doing life, and I think it's important that we see children through a lens where we give them the opportunities that are best for them. I also want to make note that through homeschooling, we're focusing on each one of our kids, and we don't have a classroom full of 20 students, so much learning takes place in a very short amount of time, and that's a benefit.

My kids can do arts and crafts. They can use their imaginations and have play together, and they can do many things in the course of a day because the time we need to spend in the books is less than if they were in a classroom. Think about the classroom that you sat in.

Weren't there times you were done your assignment, but you were waiting because other kids in the class weren't done yet? Or you understood the concept the teacher was sharing, but hey, everybody hadn't picked up the concept yet, so you had to wait. 

Well, when you're working one-on-one or one-on-three, it's different. Things can go more quickly, or if a child doesn't understand the concept, you take a little more time in and help them, but it really is this beautiful ideal setting.

Again, I am not saying that homeschooling or teaching your children from home is for everyone. Please hear me. I'm not at all saying that.

I don't think it's the perfect way. I don't think it's the best way. I think it works really well for some children, and it works really well for some families, but I am just wanting to share some of these things because I think that changing our perspective makes the difference.

So we all have a perspective. It's been shaped by our experiences, the underlying beliefs that we absorbed through childhood and life, and the mindsets we carry, but hearing someone else's experience or their take on something is great because then you have this opportunity to look at something through a different angle, a different lens, and I hope that what I've shared and just giving you a little peek into my home and our days helped you to just feel like, you know what? There's a way out of this fog. There's a different way of doing things.

There's a lighter way, an easier way, a more fun way of doing things that I've been doing, and that's what I hope for you. I hope that you were able to pull something and bring it into your life to create some ease and to create some joy and peace in your home. So I'm wishing you and your family so much good.

I want to close out today's episode by thanking you for being here with me. We've made it to the end, and I hope what I shared has been helpful. If there is anything I've mentioned that you want to talk about in more depth, I would be so glad to connect with you.

You can always find me on Instagram @corinne_changeradically, or go directly to my website, changeradically.com⁠. Of course, within the show notes, there's other ways that you can connect with me. And if there is someone that you think would benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. To help my podcast get more growth and reach more people, please subscribe, review, and rate it.

And until next week, I'm wishing you the very best