This year we are using Wellness as our guide for our homeschool.  Last month we focused on Financial Wellness.  This month the overwhelming majority of you wanted to discuss emotional wellness in homeschool.  So, that is where we will be parking for the next several weeks.  If you are interested in more personalized strategies, please e-mail me about individual or group coaching!

Emotional wellness in homeschool is the ability to have an optimistic approach to life and to accept our feelings instead of pushing them aside.  It also means that you are able to enjoy life despite the struggles that you face.  The decision to homeschool brings stress into our lives.  Stress, if not managed well, will lead to struggles with emotional wellness.  When we take responsibility for our children’s education, we immediately have the stress of not only our emotional wellness but teaching our kids about their own emotional wellness.

If you are interested in even more tools and strategies while we explore emotional wellness in homeschool, please join the Townsend House Community below!

Wearing all the Hats

As homeschoolers we take on the unique role of wearing all the hats.  We are responsible for maintaining the home, cooking the meals, running the errands.  But, also we research the curricula, teach the kids, drive them to activities.  Many of us maintain the finances in our homes.  All of it becomes a huge weight on our emotional wellness.  You are with your kids most of the time, and they will see that drain on you.  No matter how good you are at pushing your emotional wellness to the wayside, if you continue to be completely stressed all the time, it will show to your kids.  When it shows up to your kids, they either take it as normal and start modeling that same behavior, or they try to figure out other ways to cope.

I know that I am constantly thinking about all the different hats that I wear.  It is incredibly stressful, and there are times that I am so full of that stress that I feel like I am going to burst.  Obviously, this is not what we want for our families or our homeschool.

We will never be able to completely eradicate stress, but there are ways that we can manage it more appropriately.  This is what we need to do in order to achieve and then maintain emotional wellness in homeschool.  When we figure out how to manage our own emotional wellness, it leads to a more peaceful homeschool which leads our kids to understand the need to find strategies to work on their own big emotions.

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Big Emotions

All kids have big emotions.  And they have big emotions from the beginning.  Toddler tantrums, sibling fights, and oh the tween/teen emotions.  Unfortunately, sometimes we expect that they should act like little adults.  But, we forget that we also have big emotions.  There are days that I have meltdowns because of one more mess in the house, or we can’t seem to get our shoes on so we can be on time for a Dr.’s appointment.  However, as adults, we kind of get a pass on these emotions.  We can easily get angry and yell at our kids because they are having another meltdown, but who yells at us when we have a meltdown?  Yes, we may feel guilty for having a wrong response, but do we give that kind of grace to our kids?

Kids are in a learning phase of life.  They don’t know how to cope with a lot of their feelings, so they end up blowing up at you, at their siblings, at the world in general.  In those times we need to be giving our kids the tools to manage their big emotions.  We want our kids to learn emotional wellness.  What we don’t want them to do is learn to stuff down their feelings instead of figuring out a way to deal with them right away.

I read a great book by Lysa Terkeurst several years ago called Unglued.  In it, she talked about how there are four types of unglued reactions.  They are:

• Exploders who Shame Themselves
• Exploders who Blame Others
• Stuffers who Build Barriers
• Stuffers who Collect Retaliation Rocks

If we, as adults can have these types of reactions, we should definitely expect it in our developing children.  That doesn’t make it easy of course.

Parenting & Homeschooling

When our kids are having these big emotions, it is hard, both as a parent and a homeschooler.  When you have your homeschooling teacher hat on, you don’t want to have to deal with the big emotions.  You want your kids to just get through the math lesson, not have a meltdown in the middle of it.  It is hard to go between teacher and mom constantly.  I would say draining even.  However, if we want to give our children strategies to achieve emotional wellness, we need to be able to do this.

We do need to remember that our kids are still developing.  We don’t want to back them into a corner to deal with the emotions of life without strategies to be healthy.  Now, I am not at all a doctor, and sometimes you need to get help if the emotions are too big in your kids.  That is OK.  I will say it again, that is OK.  If you are struggling with your kids and with big emotions, go to outside help.  There is no shame in that at all.  In fact, it shows how much you care when you are able to reach out for help.

Times of Crisis

Emotional wellness in homeschool while also in times of crisis will be something else that you may need to reach out in order to get help.  Times of crisis can be any big life event that causes big emotions in you or your children.  It could be an illness in the family, divorce, job loss.  It could be the loss of a parent or child.  Maybe even a big move to another part of the country, or big moves often if you are in the military.

In these times of crisis, homeschool may often fall by the wayside.  And that is OK.  It is OK to grieve, it is OK to slow down.  If your kids end up on the other side of these times of crisis emotionally well, you can catch up on the academics later.

Emotional Wellness in Homeschool

We are going to park at emotional wellness in homeschool for a little while.  It is so closely connected to individual and familial emotional wellness.  Will we have a one-size-fits-all strategy to achieve emotional wellness for you and your family?  Most likely not.  But, we will go through the steps together to get on the path to emotional wellness.  I want you to be able to develop a strategy for your own emotional wellness, as well as that of your kids.

Some of the areas we will be working on are what I mentioned above.  But, we are also going to talk about ways to re-energize ourselves.  Winter is such a dreary part of the year, and often we are all just going through the motions to get through.  It doesn’t have to be that way though!  We can still enjoy our homeschool, even in the winter time.  We will be talking a little bit about consistency, and putting systems in place so we are able to consistently get through homeschool all year.  We most definitely will be talking about how overwhelmed we all are.  Taking on the job of educating your children is not for the faint of heart.  It is a full-time job (and can be added to the other 4 full-time jobs we already have in parenting/cleaning/cooking etc.).

You will see that your individual emotional wellness ties directly to emotional wellness in your homeschool.  When you have systems and strategies in place to deal with the emotions, you are easily able to move onto the next thing, instead of derailing your homeschool day because the kids are painting the walls again.

What is one thing you need help with today to improve emotional wellness in your home and homeschool?