Avoiding Burnout and the Importance of True Self Care: Part 4

Continue To Cultivate Your Own Passions

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Welcome to the fourth and final installment of my series on avoiding burnout as a homeschooling parent! I hope this has been a helpful series for you as you think through your upcoming school year plans and take some time to recharge and regroup this summer. Today, we’re going to dig in a bit on why it is so important to remember to keep sight of yourself in the context of being a homeschooling parent. Grab a cozy beverage, and let’s take a moment to celebrate YOU in all of this!

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Julie Bogart has a term for maintaining your own passions: Awesome Adulting. I just love this, as it reminds the homeschooling parent that there are many reasons to maintain their own individual interests. You matter! Your needs and interests are every bit as valid as your kids’, if not more so in the context of avoiding burnout. And listen. Of course homeschooling and parenting count as interests. But in the big picture, it’s also important to have interests outside of those things. Not only is it important to think about what your life will look like after your children are grown, but it also shows your children why it’s worth growing into adulthood in the fist place. Perhaps more importantly than that, however, it also gives you a space to take a breath and stretch away from being a homeschooler, crafting a rich and vibrant identity in which you get to remember exactly who you are.

In the context of avoiding burnout, however, this also feeds the homeschooling parent’s inner needs so that on days when the chips are down, there is another focus for their attention. It doesn’t feel so all or nothing if your kids are refusing to do that math worksheet if you can take a deep breath and go for a run (where you just might have the brainstorm to make a quilt together instead of forcing the worksheet on calculating area) or look forward to meeting a friend or hosting a potluck or heading out to your own choir rehearsal. This can show the kids what emotional regulation looks like, but it can also show them why it’s important to have interests in the first place. If you were to put yourself in their shoes for a moment, a homeschooled child with a parent who doesn’t pursue any interests aside from homeschooling may think that they are the center of the universe when they’re small, and they may also think that adulthood looks kind of boring when they enter adolescence and wonder why on earth they should ever strive for it. 

On the other hand, a child who sees their parents enjoying the things they love may feel safe exploring their own interests as well and may be excited about the opportunities before them as they enter adolescence and think about adulthood. It offers that crucial and natural sense of stretching away from an attachment figure and coming back. 

Don’t just take my word for it. As the authors of the book, Raising A Secure Child, point out, it is important that children feel safe to come to us when they need to but also that they feel free to explore their own interests when they need to stretch away. Our job is to be present for them and also show them what it can feel like to have interests that are worth exploring.

In some instances, those could even be shared interests. Maybe you love biking or gardening and can invite your children to join you. Perhaps you love to read and therefore model a daily reading habit that your children might also get in on. When my kids were little, I would load everyone up in a jog stroller and let the bigger kid ride a bike and we would go for neighborhood runs a few times a week. But sometimes, I just needed to run all by myself, so once a week, I would explain that they were going to stay home and play with their dad while I went for a long run. Those runs were sanity savers as I listened to my own music and appreciated the scenery just for me. I would come home with endorphins and heard more than once that my kids wanted to grow up to be strong like mommy. 

But additionally, having your own interests gives you the opportunity for a breath. You can take the time to nurture yourself and find out more about what makes you tick, which will almost certainly bring you back feeling refreshed and energized for the day to day. 

In addition to helping to create a healthy, secure attachment, though, or even in offering you an opportunity for a breath, cultivating your own interests can model a healthy attitude toward risk taking as your children enter adolescence. Blake Boles is an advocate of unschooling who runs a travel company dedicated to giving teens healthy opportunities to experience risk in their lives, which in turn, helps them feel like they don’t have to turn to unhealthy risk in order to find out who they really are. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could also show our kids how risk shows up in our own lives so that they don’t have to be terrified by the idea of going on an adventure with other homeschoolers but could feel encouraged and emboldened by it, instead? As with so many things, modeling is the first step towards cultivating a certain behavior. Being able to share when something felt a bit nerve-wracking but paid off in our own lives can be a really wonderful aid in the conversation. But it’s hard to share that you were afraid of taking a risk and then did it anyway if you don’t get out there and cultivate a passion of yours.

If you’d like to read a bit more from Blake Boles, a good place to start could be his book, The Art of Self-Directed Learning. 

He also has his own podcast, Off-Trail Learning, and has appeared as a guest on this episode of Julie Bogart’s Brave Writer podcast. 

Ultimately, though, I would encourage you to cultivate your own interests for you and you alone. If you love to crochet but haven’t taken the time to do it very much recently, perhaps now is a great time to find a way to bring that back into your life in small, daily chunks. If you love gardening and have always wanted to attend a class on composting or what have you, this is a great time to connect with people who can help you find that sort of resource! The Nashville Public Library is an outstanding place to help find answers to how to find the groups you’re looking for, if google isn’t cutting it. The options are endless, and the importance of building a life that you feel good about living is huge. So get on out there and find a way to nurture your passions. 

Much like a three legged stool, having community, good boundaries, and your own interests all work together to offer the homeschooling parent a sense of balance that can be hard to come by when one of those legs is missing. Hopefully digging in on this will help to jump start the process of bringing you a sense of peace or further cementing what already felt like a peaceful life for you. 

Happy Homeschooling!

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