Avoiding Burnout and the Importance of True Self Care: Part 2

Build A Community

Welcome to the second installment of my four part series dedicated to avoiding burnout as a homeschool parent! As I mentioned in the last post, burnout can be sneaky and show up in various ways that can make us think the only choice we have is to throw in the towel. But hopefully, with a little creativity and a healthy dose of genuine self care, we can help turn burnout around or even avoid it in the first place. Today we’re going to dig in on why it is so important to have a community as a homeschooling family and how to go about building it. 

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Let’s face it, human beings are a social species. We need other people around us in order to feel relaxed, comfortable, and supported. Even the most introverted people I know had a very hard time during the lockdown and isolation days of the pandemic. While we absolutely did the right thing in trying to save lives by avoiding close contact with others, the ease with which we would interact with strangers, even nodding a hello at the grocery store was replaced with an undertone of anxiety. That obviously took an incredibly hard toll on the people in our society as relationships were fractured, society became more fragmented, and our collective and individual mental health suffered. 

It is hard to be alone. And it’s especially hard to homeschool alone. It is quite sad to me that the world got a taste of homeschooling on such a grand scale during a time when our ability to access community was nearly impossible and when everything felt so tricky. I can assure you that there’s a better way! We are supposed to have the support of friends, extended family members, and our various communities as we raise and educate our children. 

But how, exactly, do we go about building that community? It does take time, for many, but it also takes a willingness to continue getting out of the house and meeting people. Maybe there’s a park day you can attend with your kids once a week where you can chat with fellow homeschooling parents and the kids can go off and play. Sometimes community comes from the folks who all show up to the same dance class or music class or gymnastics class on a repeated basis. Or perhaps you could look into a co-op or a tutorial, where your kids could, again, build relationships with their peers and you could get to know fellow homeschooling parents. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was able to identify the heart of my own burnout as needing help with childcare. I was able to hire a parent’s helper in the form of a neighborhood homeschooled teen who I’d met through my son’s homeschool 4-H club. By attending this club on just a monthly basis, I got to know the fellow homeschooling parents who were also sending their children to 4-H, and I lucked into a close friendship with a family who lived just a couple miles away from us. This family had to move away a few years ago, but my daughter still talks about the “big kid who used to come over to play with just her,” which always brings the biggest smile to my face, knowing that she felt so seen during that time. 

I’ve also been fortunate enough to have incredible neighbors who all know and love my kids. Whenever we’re out playing in the cul-de-sac or riding bikes, they stop to say hello, sharing a bit of our day with each other. This has grown into bringing each other meals when life is hard or dropping off extra cookies when we have too many. It has given us people that I know I could call if we had an emergency and folks who feel comfortable asking to borrow a cup of sugar (yes, literally). 

This has also meant that, one family in particular, has become a bit of an extension of our own. They live right around the corner from us and have a child just a couple years younger than my youngest. During the pandemic, they were in our “bubble,” as we all navigated living in such an unprecedented time together. Since we both had members of our household with immune system complications, we would isolate and talk about any potential exposures, then we would generally get together for back yard, masked playdates before vaccines became available. This relationship has deepened into a sort of sisterhood among me and the other family’s mother, and we continue to call upon each other for things like childcare for doctors visits or sharing pet sitting duties or just casual playdates. We have included them in family time, and they have done the same for us. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t value this relationship and the sense of community it has brought to our collective lives, and I suppose I’m saying that it is worth getting outside and meeting your neighbors. 

And maybe you also have extended family who lives close by and are able to nurture a healthy and loving relationship with them. We all know that a village of aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, is incredibly helpful – if not completely priceless – when a new baby arrives in the family or when a child is adopted. Short of having the sort of close knit family that helps share in the nurturing and care of a new family member, it truly does sometimes take having close friends who will gladly come and sit with the baby while you take a shower to make all the difference in the world for your sanity. 

When my oldest was a baby, I joined a mother/baby hiking club that grew out of a lactation support group I had been attending. It was intended as a way to give parents who were responsible for the regular care and feeding of a small infant a way to start getting a little bit of regular exercise (and the associated mental health boost that comes with endorphins) while sharing community with their peers and not having to put their baby in childcare. We talked about our challenges as new mothers, we reminded each other of what was normal, and we formed a sort of village that I honestly can’t imagine not having had at this point in my mothering journey. This group was truly pivotal in my early formation as a mother. It gave me the confidence to see that I could care for this child and take care of my own needs, and that I had a whole team of fellow mothers who would share their experience with me or jump at the chance to briefly hold a baby if I needed to do something with my hands, like tie my shoe. 

This group grew into a parent and child running club that we called Run Like a Mother. We would alternate homes each week, with one family taking on the challenge of hosting as many as eight or ten families at a time. We would then split the group in half so that one group of moms would go out for a run while their child stayed back at the house with the other moms and kids, and then we would all trade. The kids got to play, the moms got to exercise and talk, and we all shared a casual lunch together afterwards. It was a foundational piece of my understanding how important my own exercise needs were, what a tangible form of that elusive “help” looks like to a new mother, and also in seeing how to met the needs of many with just a half a day’s time investment. 

Another example of a homeschooling specific community that I built was a weekly cooking and culture club that grew out of a play group I had attended when my eldest was about kindergarten aged. We decided to meet up weekly to share a little conversational French over a tea party, but that quickly evolved into a brief focused time on a specific global culture, their language and perhaps history or mythology or folklore or holidays, and then we would all cook something together. I am fairly confident that this club is one of many foundational pieces that gave my son his passion for cooking. And I am positive that it gave me some absolutely irreplaceable experience with fellow homeschooling parents. Much like that mother/baby hiking group, we were all at the beginning of our homeschooling careers and had an innate sense of how to support each other with shared ideas, a common goal, a space to bounce around educational philosophy and talk about struggles or successes for each of our families. It offered us a way to lean on each other a little bit, easing the load on each of us as individuals. This weekly breath of fresh air also led to deep friendships, as I am still close friends with one of the other parents. She and I both know that we can still absolutely call on each other for sleepovers or playdates for our kids if we need a date night or other time for ourselves. 

I can not begin to overstate how crucial having a community is in avoiding burnout, as we take these small moments to support each other. It’s a lot like a forest, really. A single tree by itself can bend and sway in the wind to an extent, but it is buffered so much more by being surrounded by other trees. Trees offer each other protection from the elements, shade for the more vulnerable species, and even trade nutrition through the fungal system at their roots. If you’re like me and want to learn more about this little tangential simile, here’s a podcast that digs in on that a bit more. https://radiolab.org/podcast/from-tree-to-shining-tree 

We humans aren’t so different. We need to be surrounded by people who can share the journey with us a bit. If you’re still looking for ways to build community, check out my post on Finding Your People and check out this website’s Resources page for loads of high quality, secular, in person homeschooling resources all over Middle Tennessee. 

Next week, I’ll go even deeper as we continue to explore this series on avoiding burnout and discuss how to maintain good boundaries while homeschooling. 

Happy Homeschooling!

diverse. inclusive. community.

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