Homeschool Burnout Is Real, and Here’s What Actually Helps

Homeschooling wears me down all the time. And if you searched for homeschool burnout, you’ve probably already read a few posts telling you to light a candle and give yourself grace, so you deserve a straighter answer than that from someone who’s in it.

It is not an easy choice. Anything worth doing is going to be hard, and the question was never whether you’d pick something hard. It’s which hard you pick.

Pick your hard

Send your kids to school and you’ve picked a hard. They come home crying. You deal with bullies. You live with the stress and anxiety of school shootings, which have been traumatizing children for a very long time while the people making policy in this country do absolutely nothing to stop them. And it isn’t only the shootings themselves… when researchers at Georgia Tech, working with Everytown, analyzed nearly 28 million social media posts around local active shooter drills, they found the drills were associated with significant increases in depression, stress and anxiety that lasted at least 90 days. That’s a very real part of why we chose to homeschool. And then on top of all of it, you live by the calendar of spirit day and pajama day and all the things that come home, and the early wake-ups for the bus. That’s a hard.

Choose homeschooling and you’ve picked a different hard. Nothing you do with intention is ever going to be easy, and this is very much a lifestyle choice, not a curriculum choice.

I would never choose anything else, because this particular hard lets me help my children grow, be there for them, and get thousands and thousands of hours back with them. It’s a childhood they only get once. So the sacrifice is worth it to me… and it is still a sacrifice, and it still wears me down.

What homeschool burnout actually feels like

For me it shows up in two places.

The first is boundaries. My kids know our expectations, very specifically, and sometimes they push on them anyway, because that’s what kids do. That wears on you when you’re the one holding the line all day, every day, with no bell at three o’clock to hand them off to someone else.

The second is doubt. Sometimes I question whether they’re doing enough. And every single time I’ve gone through that, without exception, something happens within days, or a week at most, that shows me we’re absolutely doing the right thing, that my kids are thriving, that they’re honestly crushing it. The doubt is real, and it is also very rarely accurate.

Why homeschool parents burn out

A lot of homeschool burnout isn’t caused by homeschooling. It’s caused by rebuilding school inside your house and then making yourself every single job in it.

I know that can sting if you’re exhausted right now, and I’m not saying it to blame you, because almost all of us do it, and I did it too. In my first year I thought we’d do every subject every day. I had every lesson in every curriculum planned out, and a timetable with 9:00 to 9:30 for math and 9:30 to 10:00 for reading. And for the first few months, just starting at 9:00 was a fight every morning. It never worked, not for us, and not for most kids, because things happen.

Think about what that model actually asks of one adult. In a school, the bell runs the day, a curriculum department decides what’s next, and thirty kids at a time are handed off to someone else every class period. At home, if you copy the shape of school, you become the bell, the curriculum department, the teacher, the substitute and the principal, all at once, all day, with no end time. Of course that burns you out. It would burn ANYONE out.

What helped us wasn’t trying harder at that model, it was dropping it. I had to keep reminding myself that the whole point of this was flexibility, to live alongside our kids and grow and learn and explore alongside them, not to run a classroom at the kitchen table. You can read how our day actually runs now and why we use a rhythm instead of a routine.

Stop being the only place to look

The single biggest change in our house was giving each kid a board (ours are in Trello) that lists what they’re working on that day. Before the boards, it was up to me to tell each of my four kids what to do every day, and the days fell apart every day. Now, when someone asks what’s next, I send them to their board, and I get to be the support instead of the schedule.

If you’re burning out, look at how many times a day someone asks you what to do next. Every one of those is a small withdrawal, and they add up to an empty account by about two in the afternoon.

Is there a part of the day that belongs to you?

There is in mine, and I’m very deliberate about it.

I read in bed every single night before I go to sleep, and that’s mine. I get out of the house for myself when I need to, to meet a friend or get my nails done or whatever it is. It isn’t at the same time every day, but we weave it in through the week so that everybody generally gets what they need, me included. My husband and I both work for ourselves, so we tag-team, and I’m very clear when I need it: “I need some time today to do the work that I need to do.”

And that doesn’t always work. There have been whole stretches where I needed more time than I got, and so I stayed up super late, or woke up super early, or worked on the weekends, or worked from the sidelines at soccer practice. If we’re being honest, I’m running a business, my husband’s running a business, we’re homeschooling four kids, and we’re very intentional parents. The days are long and we are very much in it. It’s sometimes very stressful, and it’s the good kind of stress, the kind that comes from putting real work into something that matters.

What your kids see when you’re struggling

One more thing, because I think it changes how this feels.

Our lives are completely intertwined with our kids’ lives. When I’m launching something or learning something new, they’re in it with me. They know I’m working, and they’ve watched me stress over trying to learn something I don’t know yet. So they see, every day, what it looks like to persevere, to build something, to take a risk, to show up fully, to ask for support, to say out loud that you feel like you’re failing, and then to come back from it and keep going.

That isn’t a failure to protect them from your hard days. That’s an education they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

How to recover from homeschool burnout this week

Pick one part of the day, or one part of the week, that belongs to you, and say it out loud to whoever else is in the house. Then give your kids somewhere to look for “what’s next” that isn’t you, even if it’s just a list on the fridge. And drop one piece of school you rebuilt at home that isn’t earning its place, whether that’s a start time, a subject that doesn’t need to be daily, or a timetable nobody keeps.

So, is there any part of the day that belongs to you?

That’s the same question my homeschool assessment ends on. It’s twelve statements, it takes a couple of minutes, and it shows you exactly where your day gives out, and whether any of it is yours. Find where your day falls apart →

Sources

• Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and Georgia Tech Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab, study of active shooter drills in schools (press release), September 2020. Link