Not every homeschool mom is excited to start the new school year. Here’s what to do if YOU are that mom!

Get these books to help you manage this homeschool year!
Home Management for the Homeschool Mom
Resources mentioned:
- The Truth About Burnout (post) (podcast)
- Burned Out Mom (video)
- A Mother Who Never Burns Out (post)
- How to Put Your Homeschool on Autopilot (post) (podcast) (video)
- Simply Convivial classes
- How to Take a Homeschool Mom Sabbatical (post)
- How to Take a Jubilee Homeschool Year (post) (podcast)
- Year Round Homeschooling page on Raising Arrows
- Homeschool Planning Inspiration (podcast) (video)

Transcript
A lot of people assume that homeschool moms are super excited to start the new homeschool year, kind of like a public school teacher putting up all the new things on the bulletin board and on her door and arranging her classroom for all of her new students. They think that’s kind of what homeschooling is like as well.
Now, some of us are absolutely excited to be getting back to the normal routine of homeschooling, but some of us are not. And some of us really wish August and September weren’t even a thing and that we could just keep on summering as long as we possibly could.
However, that’s not the case, and we do have to figure out how to keep on keeping on. And this podcast is going to help you do that.
Hello, friends. Welcome to the Raising Arrows® podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from raisingarrows.net, and this is episode number 169 – I’m not ready to start the homeschool year.
Perhaps you had a rough year last year, or you can foresee that this is going to be a tough year as well. There’s already obstacles in your way. Maybe you’re going to have a new baby, there’s a move coming up, or you just aren’t feeling like you have the energy to put into what it’s going to take to homeschool this year. And so in this podcast, I want to give you some encouragement. I want to give you some tools and some resources and ideas for you to face this head on and find your joy again in homeschooling. So grab a cup of coffee or tea, maybe even a snack, sit in your favorite chair, and let’s just kind of relax and feel that love and prayer coming through from me to you as we work through why we aren’t necessarily wanting to get back to homeschooling and what we can do about that.
Is it burnout?
First of all, if this is burnout, we have to address that. Being burned out in anything from homemaking to homeschooling to parenting, to things at church, all of those things – you can hit a place of burnout. And sometimes we just say, “I’m burned out,” but we don’t really talk about why and we don’t really talk about how to fix it.
Years ago, I did a video on mom burnout and what you can do to combat that. But we also need to talk about why we’re burned out and how to kind of nip it in the bud even before it actually happens. And honestly, very rarely does a homeschool mom escape burnout at some point in her homeschool career. It just happens to all of us. You aren’t going to escape it. It will happen. At some point, you will have to come face to face with it, and often it’s because your priorities are mixed up. That’s really the root cause of it.
You have priorities that are over here, when your priorities should be over here, and you are focused on the wrong priorities. And therefore your focus and energy going into that priority actually drains you instead of being focused on what you’re supposed to be focused on.
Where are your priorities?
As Christians, our focus is supposed to be on Christ all day, every day. My word of the year several years back was abide, and I have actually continued to use that over and over and over because it was such a strong and powerful word in my life at the time, and it has continued to be that way. Abiding in Christ will keep you centered and in the right place because abiding is actually not a real physical activity. It is really more of a sit still, wait, chill out, calm down, and just be. Listen to the Lord, follow where He leads, and stay focused on Him.
So if you have put academics first in your homeschool, that is one big reason why you might be burned out. You have been hard charging for years, possibly toward this end goal of your children being these perfect students with this well rounded education that has all of the best subjects and you have worn yourself out when actually you need to focus on faith first. And the best way to do that is to start with your own heart, start with your own relationship with the Lord. Are you focusing energy on that? Then you will naturally be leading your children to Christ.
We always start our homeschool day in the Bible, in the Word, some sort of Bible curriculum or just the Bible itself, a story Bible, whatever it is. We start the day, the homeschool day, talking about Jesus, talking about God, talking about creation, talking about where we fit into this story. And it gives my children a sense of, first of all, how strong my faith is, and secondly, what their faith needs to look like. So we start there.
First, we start with our faith. We build on that foundation because otherwise everything else is in vain. Knowledge puffs up. It’s not going to stand firm, it’s going to crater. You’re going to crater if that’s where your heart is. So start with faith.
Second is character. And this kind of goes hand in hand with faith, the character of your children. Are you building their character? And this doesn’t take a character curriculum. This really takes that foundation of faith. And then anytime that you see issues that need to be disciplined or talked through, you immediately stop those academics and you go back to the character issue.
A lot of character issues in your children will often cause you to feel like a failure, feel like you’re burned out, worn out, because you’re dealing with these character flaws in children, which everybody has them, but actually, rather than dealing with them, you are ignoring them, you’re pushing them aside. You’re doing the academics instead, and you just keep pushing through, and you’ve still got these character issues niggling at you, sometimes throwing bricks at you, and you’re not taking care of them.
So faith first, character second. Knowledge is third. It’s third. You build the foundation on your faith. You take care of the character issues next. Then on top of all of that – because now your heart is ready, your children’s hearts are ready – you now put the knowledge on top of that.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you’ve got to work out all the kinks and the sin issues in your children’s lives before you ever move forward. With homeschooling, what it really means is that you just keep your priorities and your focus in the proper order.
I have a fantastic resource called Homeschooling with a Purpose. It’s a very inexpensive ebook that gives you some of these foundational ideas. It’s got some workbook pages in it as well that can help you really walk through this, work through this, and help you get back on track and get your focus back so that your priorities are in order before you start homeschooling this year.
Slow down your homeschool
Okay. The next thing I want to encourage you to do is to slow down your homeschool. It’s possible that you’ve been going at a breakneck speed, and that’s what has caused you to not be looking forward to this next school year. Sometimes all you need is permission to slow down, and that’s going to look different for every mom. What I feel like is slowing down may not be exactly what you feel like is slowing down, but I’ll give you some ideas here that will hopefully get the wheels turning as to maybe what the issue is with why you’re not looking forward to the homeschool year and what you can do to slow it down and make it a more enjoyable process this coming year.
Create a “Mother Culture”
Okay, so the first thing is creating mother culture. Now, this is kind of a weird phrase, but if you start to mull that over, you will see just how incredibly important this is. Charlotte Mason, who is one of the homeschooling foremothers, said that if mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children, we would have happier households. This is basically where the idea for mother culture came from. It is the feeding of your mind, your body and your soul as a mother so that you are also creating a rich environment for yourself and not just your children.
Now you might be wondering, what in the world is this mother culture and how in the world am I going to fit this into my day? I’d like to give you a few tips on how to do this. You can also take a look at my blog post, A Mother Who Never Burns Out – The Secret of Mother Culture. I’ll have that linked in the description for you as well.
So first of all, find some white space in your day. My day is absolutely filled to the brim. I’m sure yours is too. But you need to find some white space in your day that is key to everything. You cannot go, go, go and expect to be able to relax and have an enjoyable journey. It’s just constant movement and you don’t have any space to actually abide like we talked about earlier. You don’t have any space to just relax and chill and think. You’re just moving, moving, moving. And that is not good for anybody.
We were not created to constantly be moving. We were created to be still, to rest, to lay our burdens at Jesus’s feet. He wants us to give those things over to him. But if you are constantly moving, you will not ever hand those things over. So find some white space in your day.
One really practical way to do this in your homeschooling is to put your school on autopilot as much as you possibly can. Autopilot simply means that you’ve got workbooks, you’ve got online classes, you’ve got things that are done in a certain order day after day. You don’t have decision fatigue. Your kids don’t have decision fatigue. You always know what they need to be doing, and they also have an order that they need to be doing it in. I have a post and a podcast and even a video on autopilot homeschooling that you can check out and teach yourself and your children how to do this because that automatically will put more white space in your day because there’s an order of operations. And when those things are done, you should be able to sit back and relax just a bit.
The next thing you need to do to slow down your homeschooling is to pare down your to do list. You probably have too many things on the to do list. Mystie Winckler, from Simply Convivial talks about her daily card and how there are just three things on the daily card. Do not add so many things to your day that you can’t possibly get them done. Set priorities. Three things. Knock them out whenever you can. That automatically will also give you some white space in your day if you haven’t filled your to do list to the brim.
Next, put some systems into place. See if you can pinpoint exactly what’s bugging you about this upcoming homeschool year. And I can almost guarantee you some of them are going to have to do with your homemaking as well. Perhaps you feel like you can’t get certain chores done. You don’t have enough time to be a homemaker and a wife and a mother and a homeschool mom. And so you need some systems to put in place.
Think about the things that most need systems in your home. Work through those. Try to figure out some doable ways to take care of those things. If you need help with some of that stuff, I have a book, Home Management for the Homeschool Mom, that helps you to put together systems that work really well for homeschool moms. This is on my website, raisingarrows.net/store. And you can pick this up in audiobook, ebook and paperback off of Amazon.
It will help you learn to manage your home while you homeschool, which can be kind of tricky and especially considering that so many books and websites and things out there don’t take into consideration the homeschool mom. It’s much, much harder for us who are living and educating in our homes to figure out how to manage our homes at the same time. You know, people are like, well, you’re home all day. It should be a piece of cake. It’s not a piece of cake. It’s actually harder because I am home all day and all those other people are home all day too, and they are messing up my house all day long. And so if you can put some systems into place that will really, really help you again with that autopilot, that decision fatigue, you’ll get things done. You’ll have more white space. You’ll have more energy in turn to actually do the things that need to be done.
Now, I keep talking about white space. One thing I want to caution you on is don’t fill the white space. The white space is where you’re going to get the breather. It’s where you’re going to get the relaxation and refreshment. Don’t fill it. If you’re like, whoa, I have like an extra hour, I think I will record a podcast. You know, that’s not a good idea. That’s not something I should do. I should take the extra hour and do something that is going to refresh me and isn’t work. It’s something that’s going to feed my mind, body and soul. That’s mother culture, instead of just filling it with more work.
Now, as you get better at just taking down time, you will start to see that there might be some hobbies, there might be some things that you have interest in or you used to have interest in that you don’t have any time for anymore, that you now have time for again.
Or maybe you start doing things alongside your children. Like when my kids took an art class and I did the art with them. So often, I would get them started on the art project, and then I would run into the kitchen and I would take care of a bunch of things, and then I would come back just in the nick of time to start the next lesson. And instead, what I started doing was sitting down with them and doing the art with them. I was trying to feed my soul with beautiful things, just like I I was laying before them. I wanted to become more enriched the same way that I was wanting to enrich my children.
In that post that I talked about, The Secret of Mother Culture, I give a huge list of lots of different ideas of what you can do to instill a sense of mother culture into your world. And there’s lots of things that I’m not going to be able to cover in this video, but I would encourage you to go check out that post and just kind of work through some of those ideas and figure out if maybe this is what you need to slow your life down, slow your homeschool down and find some of that margin in your life that will actually make the journey of homeschooling more enjoyable for you because you’re not just pushing and pushing through all the academics.
Another thing you might need to do is take a homeschool mom sabbatical. And this is a little difficult for homeschool moms to really even wrap their brains around, especially if you’ve taken a summer vacation, then you’re coming up on the school year and it’s like -“Sabbatical? I can’t take a sabbatical. I can’t take any more time off.”
Yes, you can.
If you are not ready to start in the middle of August, don’t. Wait until the middle of September. If you’re not ready to start the beginning of September, don’t. Wait until the end of September. Whatever it is you need. It is quite possible that taking the pressure off yourself to start on a certain date is exactly what you need. You might just need an extra week or two, and that is okay.
You also might need a totally fresh approach to homeschooling. Those of you who have been listening to me for a while know that I’m a big advocate of something I call Jubilee Homeschooling. It’s where you take a Jubilee homeschool year. You turn homeschooling on its head and you change something majorly about your homeschooling in a way that helps you to refresh, reconnect with your children. I do have a post and a podcast on this topic that you can check out (I don’t think I have the video up yet, but I will soon) where I just share with you how we came to this place of me needing to take a Jubilee homeschool year, what we did, and how it became such a beautiful year for us. And really it was turning the way that we had been homeschooling on its head, doing something completely different, changing the paradigm. And in that process, I found my joy again with homeschooling.
Homeschooling Year Round
One last thing I want to put into your minds is the thought of homeschooling year round. Now, you might laugh at me and think, wait a second, she is talking to us about not being ready to start the homeschool year, and she wants to talk to me about homeschooling all year long.
That does seem like it’s contradictory, but it’s not. And here’s why – we have homeschooled year round for 15 plus years, and it was born out of a time of great tragedy for us when our daughter passed away back in 2008, and I realized that I had taken months and months to grieve. Then I had gotten pregnant again and I had morning sickness, and then I had a baby, and I just kind of felt like I lost almost a whole year of my life. And from there, I decided that we were going to homeschool year round so that I didn’t have to feel guilty when I needed to take a break.
And so we started in 2009, and we just homeschooled year round, took breaks as we needed to, and it turned out to be one of the best things we ever did as a family! We took vacations in the off season. My kids don’t like summer anyway because it’s hot, so we just homeschooled through the summer. And I was able to take breaks through morning sickness and new babies and vacations and moves and all the things that were happening in our lives without feeling like a failure, without feeling like I wasn’t doing enough.
On top of this homeschooling year round, we also only homeschool four days a week. We do not homeschool on Friday. That’s the day that we clean the house, and we only clean the house during the morning hours. And then our weekend starts and we have basically a three day weekend. So four days of homeschooling year round. It took a lot of pressure off of me as a homeschool mom, and I think that’s part of the reason that I rarely feel feel burned out with this. I actually feel like it’s just the right amount at the right time.
One last thing I want to share with you is a podcast and video that I did not too long ago called Mom Breaks Versus Mom Escapes. And in this podcast and video, I talk about whether or not your breaks that you’re taking as a homeschool mom are actually breaks that refresh you and get you rejuvenated and ready to get back into things. Or are they escapes that are actually draining you and making you never want to return? They aren’t actually doing anything for you other than hiding you, and you’re not really getting back to your job. You just keep hiding.
And you really need to assess your breaks because it’s possible that even this summer break that you took was not very rejuvenating. It wasn’t very relaxing. And in my mind, again, going back to the homeschooling year round, if your summer break is not rejuvenating and makes you excited to get back to school, it may be the wrong kind of break in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you need to reassess. So you might want to take a look at that video, listen to that podcast, and just really think through the breaks that you are taking as a homeschool mom and whether or not they are serving you well.
Is it your homeschool plans?
Now, my last podcast was on homeschool planning inspiration. So if you are feeling like that’s actually what’s holding you back, you might want to go back to that one.
But I also think a lot of times that burnout has nothing to do with planning. You don’t even want to sit down and plan. Instead, what you need to do is just turn everything on its head. So start by focusing on prayer. Focus on your relationship with the Lord. Get that foundation set. Give yourself some breathing room. Start school a week or two late. Slow things down. Give yourself time and space. Maybe try out a four day a week schedule and see what you think.
These are all things that you can do to give yourself a little more grace and mercy when it comes to starting this homeschool year, especially if you are just not feeling it this year. You need that grace. You need that mercy. You need to feel calm, and you need to feel loved.
I hope that I have encouraged you today in a way that helps you to see that starting the new school year does not have to be a stressful thing that you’re not looking forward to. You can just slow and steady move into it, ease into it, dip your toe into it, and just move forward at a pace that is not so unforgiving – breakneck, go, go, go, academics all the time. That is not necessarily what you need this year.
All right, friends, I am so glad that you joined me here today on the Raising Arrows Podcast. I hope that you have a beautiful week and that you start to see a light at the end of the tunnel and you know that you are ready to get started with this homeschool year in a way that maybe isn’t hip, hip hurrah. You know, I’m all ecstatic and energetic, but maybe just that simple, slow, steady start.
May it be a wonderful, calm homeschooling year.
Thia says
Get out of my head, woman! 🤣 Can’t wait to listen in.
Amy says
Ha! Hope this helps!