Inside Our Homeschool… Working Mom, Homeschool Dad

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This post is part of a series of homeschool snapshots.  No two families are alike so why should your homeschool.  Head to the Event Page to read the rest of the stories and find your tribe.

Take a peek inside our homeschool and see a serious partnership with a full time working mom and a stay-at-home homeschooling dad. Yep! Though I help our homeschool by supporting it financially, keeping the house clean (ish), and teaching reading after work hours… my beard growing, plaid wearing, firewood chopping husband is the primary caregiver and teacher of our 4 young children. This post may come across more as an ode my favorite human being, but it’s my goal to encourage you that the Homeschool Dad with Career Mom can work.

A Homeschool Dad’s Daily Routine

If you have young children (especially aged 7 and under like us!) you know that you never know when your day is going to start or how. My husband and I tag team nighttime duties, but in the mornings, I am gone to work writing courses and prepping paperwork for the day’s speech therapy well before the sun is up.

This means my guy is the first one to wake with a small person’s face in his face whispering a request for cereal. When they come down for breakfast, he gets his own morning routine done while they munch. 

He sets out a notepad with instructions for the day’s school tasks for our oldest, who’s a whopping 7 years old, using the same kind of yellow papered notepad he used to line out his electrician crew with the jobsite’s responsibilities.

It isn’t fancy, but it’s practical and I love the connection from the first way he provided for his family to the current way he takes care of us.  The individual tasks range from book reading I asked daddy to assign the night before, to some new math concept on a worksheet my husband put together.

While our oldest does some independent work using that notepad to guide him (the difference having a reader makes!), most of the day the kids follow their dad around his day, soaking up incidental learning about carpentry, home and car repair, canning, companion gardening, and kitchen skills (ever come home to your fella making homemade bread at 9:30 at night? GLORIOUS.) 

Since we don’t have internet access, his teaching is experiential, hands on, with real books, and curriculum we can print or copy. It’s a beautiful way to learn and it works for us. Somehow, he fits in lunch and when the littlest munchkin is down for her nap, that’s when my homeschool husband works on more serious home projects, developing a worksheet for later, or sometimes getting time in his workshop to work on his carpentry business. 

He reads to the preschoolers while making dinner unless it’s a hands on cooking class time. Then it’s more incidental learning with discussions about measurements as they help him prepare meals with spices from all over the world and that they made from the garden they nurture together.

So…can a stay-at-home dad homeschool?

A woman told me it was “ok” for me to homeschool since I had “the right credentials” and education. I gushed about how proud I was of my kids’ learning and how it was on track or above… but I shared that I couldn’t take credit for it. She got quiet when I shared how my husband, a homeschool grad himself, with his trade school certificate was the hard work and resourcefulness behind the academic competence of our kids. It was not what she expected. When people assume I do it all, I talk about how gracious, patient, creative, and kind he is while teaching our children 24/7, 365. Our children learn in that space he creates. 

How hard is it to be a stay at home the Homeschool Dad?

• Assumptions: Our culture can be hard on the homeschool dads, I’ll be honest. Folks assume I don’t like my kids, or he doesn’t like to work. Neither is true, but it is still hard to hear. People seem hardest on him, maybe because our culture wants women to do all the things all the time. We know the truth though, and we support each other with encouragement and reminders of our “Why.” We both love kids and we both work hard, this is just what works best for our family right now and we are going to find joy in each day!
• Questions: It can be tough getting the “why do you do that?” and “don’t you want to ___ instead?” questions. Practice your answer, your “why.” You’ll be glad you did, even if you only need that answer once.
• The Same things that make it hard to be a homeschool mom: Not a cop out. This is the real deal here. The same stuff applies. The exhaustion, the need for grown up conversation, feelings of inadequacy, the constant responsibility and noise of children that need you all the time. It took a while after we transitioned for me to realize that it affected him too, but after you find a stay-at-home dad in a “mommy time out” when you come home after work… you know. He even names the kids the wrong name sometimes (I still do too…). 

What’s it like being a working Homeschool Mom?

• People assume I still do all the homeschooling and cooking. They have obviously not tasted my cooking. 
• I MISS being home. I would love to be the mom doing the homeschool stuff especially since we each like very different curriculum. (He’s organized like a Saxon math textbook and I would love to be considered reminiscent of the entire Rabbit Trails curriculum)
• It’s hard to fit it all in, so you get good at cutting out unnecessary things and prioritizing a routine. Like no facebook at home and those free MA Rooney Foundation Orton Gillingham phonics flashcards while kids brush their teeth.

What makes being a Working Homeschool Mom Great?

I get to test out stuff on my kids. My “little man” had trouble with “TH” and “F” and it was making it frustrating for him to sound out and read those words. That inspired my Quick Course Speech Sounds & Reading: 5 Things you can do to make teaching reading less frustrating and more successful.

Then my “baby man” was a delayed talker and the strategies I shared with his stay-at-home parent (you know that guy I keep bragging on?) influenced how I’ve been writing “Late Talker to Chatterbox: 4 Simple Strategies.”

It keeps you passionate about the homeschool community and advocating for its freedom. I was a homeschool graduate, so I will always feel “home” in homeschool circles. But teaching my kids reading at home is a sharp contrast to what I see in the public schools, and it keeps that passion fresh.

My free “Homeschool Parent’s Guide to Speech Therapy: Starter Kit” is a result of working with homeschool families that need speech therapy services, but didn’t know their options, didn’t have access or only had access that violated their family values. Put that together with my years of experience as a speech language pathologist for various government entities and tada, relevant resource! 

What Makes a Homeschool Dad Awesome?

Consistent, Immediate Correction: “Just wait until your mother get’s home” doesn’t have the same place in history, though I know moms can be good at tough love too (“Are you ok? Time Out” is one sentence for many of us.)

He can juggle 80 million things: “He feeds us” & “he makes sure ____ has a nap” were two contributions from my littles… and its true. He is a great juggler. Not every parent is a juggler, but it certainly is handy at home. That might be you, but that might be dad!

He plays like one of the kids: Once he’s accomplished his canning goals for the day (today I came home to quite a few quarts of made from scratch marinara.) He’s “The Job” even when the job is joy. Who “plays” at your house?

He’s a builder: Our house gets fixed up because dad is home to do house repairs not working late for someone else. He also applies that urge to build to custom made curriculum (and furniture!)

Stay at home homeschool dad and working homeschool mom can work.

Our homeschool is a little different. We’ve made it ours and if a “flipped” or “reverse” role switch up might be the key to your homeschool logistic issues, know that it can be done and done well. You can work together and respect each other’s contribution, flex to what is needed and your children will grow. You don’t have to stay in your traditional lane. If you come from a faith or culture that doesn’t endorse a switch in traditional roles of “leadership” in the home, we have the mutual understanding out of mutual consent; my husband is the head of our household. Nothing in our chain of command has changed, just our daily tasks and activities.

This post is part of a series of homeschool snapshots.  No two families are alike so why should your homeschool.  Head to the Event Page to read the rest of the stories and find your tribe.