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As a parent, balancing work and homeschooling can be a challenge but not impossible to achieve. Homeschooling is often possible for parents who work remotely or from home. The idea of homeschooling has been quite popular recently for many reasons, such as personal preference, safety, and more. The truth is, homeschooling is not as difficult as you may think it to be. Although, if you work full-time in a specific physical office space, it may be impossible to homeschool your children. However, if you work from home, here are some key tips to help you balance your work and pay quality attention to your children’s education.
Have a Stable Schedule
Success requires planning. When it comes to homeschooling and working from home, you need proper planning to make it work. It’s no easy task. So, if you must make a success of it, you need to make a solid plan. First, assign time to attend to your children and when to work. Use a calendar and a reminder on mobile software to keep track of time. The alarm or timer helps you know when to take a break from secular work and attend to your child and vice versa. This way, you will be able to pay appropriate attention to both responsibilities.
When you plan, do well to assign a constant period. This time must be permanent to help your children get used to starting early like every conventional school. While you don’t want to start too late, you can choose a good time.
Part of the planning includes how you want your children to study. There are lots of online resources or platforms to use. Simply research the most suitable method and employ it.
Be Proactive
Being proactive is essential to running your task for the day smoothly. For example, if you work for a business, your situation is different from that of a self-employed individual or a freelancer. While the latter can choose when to take frequent breaks in between work, you may have to request permission to work flexibly from your employer. By doing this, you can decide the period you want to give to your children; either you respond as they need your attention or use an alternative format. For parents with older children, creating a “Ask Me Later” arrangement is an ideal option. Except it’s urgent, your children will take note of their questions and ask later — at an agreed time. For younger ones, you may have to find an alternative to allow you to work with minimal distractions.
Engage Them in Household Chores
Simple household chores are activities you can involve your children in. Let them take on simple house chores such as cleaning and making meals that don’t require cooking. In this aspect, we can talk of breakfast and simple lunch. This will help them to be independent to a degree and in the same vein build basic skills. Hence, before you start working, you can inform the children what to make if you’ll be too busy to attend to them at lunch. In this case, older children can help younger ones while you get to focus. Take note that you are not trying to shift your responsibility to an older child. So, only delegate according to the capabilities of the children.
Make the Environment Fun
One of the fundamental things a child needs is recreational activities. Even standard schools have facilities designed to help pupils recreate. So this is an avenue for you to manage your time well. Recreation times can fall in the period when you are most busy. When kids are having fun, you are less likely to be disturbed. The caution here is to make sure their playing tools are totally safe. You can choose cartoons that you’ve previewed or any other types of safe games. Regardless, the play area shouldn’t be too far from you and must not be outdoors to ensure maximum safety.
Lean on Available Help
Learn to use the help of others! If you have a spouse or partner, do well to make an arrangement that helps you divide the responsibility well. By sharing the workload, you get time to focus and rest more. For single parents, don’t shy away from reaching out to other parents whose kids are friends with yours. If they have similar situations, one parent can agree to take charge of teaching the kids on a particular day while the rest get to use the day freely. Then, the mothers take turns keeping the arrangement going.
In this case, you can also consider a private tutor. A tutor or helper is most useful when your children are quite young. Such individuals with the right experience and qualifications will achieve the work you do. This can help you focus well.
Conclusion
Homeschooling and working can be balanced as a single parent or when both partners are available. You simply need to plan adequately and know when to get assistance. If you make use of the suggestions in this article, you can confidently work well and give your children the education they need while you also give your best to your work.
