RAR #255: The Five Habits of Happy Homeschoolers

Sarah Mackenzie (00:00:00): What do happy homeschoolers have in common? Over the years, I've spoken with thousands of homeschooling moms all over the world, and do you know, when I ask experienced homeschool moms what they do or don't do that gives them peace and joy in their homeschool, they quite often tell me the same five things. Those are the five habits that happy homeschooling mamas share, and today we're going to talk about them. I'm Sarah MacKenzie and this is the Read-Aloud Revival, the podcast that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. Here's the good news about what I hear from experienced moms and what they tell me makes for a happy homeschool. (00:00:54): No matter what kind of homeschooler you are, no matter your personality or which curriculum or method you're using, no matter what your budget is or how many kids you're homeschooling or how many babies you might currently have underfoot, you don't need a new curriculum or a new schedule or a new homeschooling philosophy. You don't need to become a new person. I know, this is the time of year. We all hear New Year, new you is right around the corner. You don't need to be a new you, you don't need anything new. It's possible to feel happier about your homeschool exactly as it is right now. Today I'm sharing a talk I gave last year at several homeschool conventions. Now I should take a minute and tell you that I'm not speaking at any homeschool conventions in 2025. (00:01:41): I'm pouring all of my homeschool mentoring energy into Circle with Sarah instead, which is my online mentoring program for homeschooling moms. It's inside RAR premium and you can join us by going to rarpremium.com, but I wanted to share this particular session from my speaking circuit last year, because I think it's really tempting for us as homeschooling moms to think that if only we had the right curriculum or the right schedule or less whiny kids or more sleep or a tidier house or da, da, da, right. You fill in the blank. If only we had whatever it is that we feel like we need, then we'd be happy and we'd have a happy homeschool. But the good news is, you can have a happy homeschool today. Listen in to find out how. How is your conference going? All (00:02:39): Good. Sarah Mackenzie (00:02:40): Good. There are stickers, bookmarks, postcards, most of them based on my new picture books all up here that are free, so they'll be up here afterward too. Feel free to finish and you don't need to sit down yet. Feel free to take as many as you like. Anything you don't take, I have to bring home to Washington and I would rather not have another 50-pound suitcase to carry home. So help yourself. I am so glad to be here. Tell me how many of you have been, this is your first GHC conference. Let's start there. Oh my goodness, welcome. That's so fun. Okay, how many of you have been homeschooling, let's say three years or less? Excellent. Welcome to the dark side. Like I said yesterday, we're all super normal here. (00:03:33): I'm Sarah MacKenzie and today in this session we're going to talk about five habits of happy homeschoolers in particular. I did a survey this last year. I asked women who had been homeschooling for at least 10 years what they wish they had done more of or less of. What they wish they could tell themselves years ago when they were starting their homeschool journey, 726 women responded to that survey. About a 100 of them had been homeschooling for over 20 years and the results were amazing. They were very affirming to me. I was crying as I was reading every single one and what I did is I compiled their five. I mean, what happened really is when you looked at the results, the same things came up again and again and again and that's when we should be paying attention to this. So that's what we're going to talk about today. What are the five habits that helped these homeschooling moms feel like they enjoyed their homeschool. So if you're here, you probably want a happy homeschool. (00:04:35): You probably want to be a happy homeschool parent. We don't always feel like we're, I'll tell you, my oldest daughter used to come more often, now she's 22. She used to come more often to these conferences with me and one time she was with me and somebody came up to her and said, what's it like to have a mom who smiles all the time? She was like, I don't know how to answer that. It's like, I'm not teaching my children at home getting hit in the head with Nerf guns and fixing an overflowing toilet right now, so I am smiling. Before we get going though, what does a happy, when you think of a happy homeschool, oh yeah, that would feel good to me. That would be a homeschool, that would feel like a good homeschool to me. What comes to mind? I'll start us off and then you can just shout things out. One of the things that comes to mind for me is that we don't feel like we're frantically rushing from one thing to the next. (00:05:34): Like, I am not feeling like the whole day we're behind on this and behind on that and hurry up, I'm just rushing, rushing, rushing until finally we eat a terrible dinner that I threw together at the last minute and we still didn't get half of our school day done. I remember when our kids were 12, 10, eight, one, and newborn, my husband would come home from work and be like, "So what did you guys today?" I'd be like, "I don't know, I'm exhausted now." I mean you're looking around the house and I'm sure he was modifying the way he said, "So what did you guys do here all day?" It just felt very frantic. I was just running from one thing to the next, so a happy homeschool to me feels like there's time enough to get to what needs to be done. What else comes to mind for you when you think of a happy homeschool? Yeah. Speaker 2 (00:06:27): Kids who don't complain. Sarah Mackenzie (00:06:29): Kids who don't complain. Homeschooling would be a breeze if it wasn't for the children. What else? Speaker 3 (00:06:41): Enthusiastic learners. Sarah Mackenzie (00:06:43): Enthusiastic learners. I had this idea before we started homeschooling that, I read one too many homeschool philosophy books and I was like, the only reason children don't like school is because the schools school out of them, so my children are going to love learning. And then we started learning multiplication facts. I mean even way before that and I thought, oh no, what am I doing wrong. The other thing that happened that kind of reminds me of that whole enthusiastic learners is forever. I really wanted kids who had their own interests and then I thought, we'll have so much time to explore them, but if you have a 12, 10, eight, one, and newborn, it doesn't matter if they're interested in anything. (00:07:32): There is no time to explore anything except the diapers. That's what we're doing all day every day. And then a lot of times for these kids, they're not, what am I going to do? Put them in front of the computer and say Google it, not going to happen. So I just was frustrated too by, I thought this was going to be more interest led. Instead, I feel like I am a drill sergeant every day wondering why we're not getting further along in our math book. This is not how I envisioned it. What else? Sorry, I keep interrupting you all with my little side notes. What else makes for a happy homeschool? Yeah. Speaker 4 (00:08:05): I remember at one of your podcasts that you said, once. If you see somebody doing something wonderful, good for them or [inaudible 00:08:12]. That means not being envious of what others are doing [inaudible 00:08:20]. Sarah Mackenzie (00:08:20): It's so easy to be envious of what other people are doing and it's easier now than it's ever been because we carry these little comparison machines around in our pocket. We're going to be talking about that specifically in the next hour. Because I think that actually, you've probably heard comparison is the thief of joy. That I think was said by Roosevelt or something. I don't know. I made that up. It's something like that. It's one of the old presidents. I want to read, I forgot both the books I was going to read to you this weekend, but I have it on my Kindle, so this is from Dr. Meg Meeker's book. There are tons of seats over here just so you know, you can totally stand if that's what you want to do, but there are lots of seats over here. 10 habits of, I was going to say a happy homeschooler, that is not what the book is called. (00:09:05): Hold on. 10 Habits of Happy Mothers. Don't quote me on that. Now though, that was before when all you were comparing yourself against the people who lived like, I don't know, on your street or went to your church. Now we're comparing ourselves against millions of people online who aren't even being honest with what they put on Instagram. We're comparing ourselves against these fictional ideas. One of the places that I want to start is Dr. Meg Meeker is a pediatrician. She has four kids. This book is astoundingly good. It is so excellent. It would be a really good one to add to your list for your summer reading. It's not new. It was published, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, but this is from the beginning of 10 Habits of Happy Mothers by Meg Meeker. If every mother in the United States could wrap her mind around her true value as a woman and mother, her life would never be the same. (00:10:05): We would wake up every morning excited for the day rather than feeling as though we'd been hit by a truck during the night. We could talk differently to our kids, fret less about our husbands annoying habits, speak with greater tenderness and clarity. We would find more contentment in our relationships. Let mean remarks, roll off our backs and leave work feeling confident in the job we performed and best of all, we wouldn't obsess over our weight. Can you imagine physical fitness or what kind of home we live in. We would live a life free from superficial needs because we would know deep in our hearts what we need and more importantly, what we don't need. Each of us would live a life of extraordinary freedom. Here's the great news. Any one of us mothers is a few beliefs away from living a life like this. These beliefs are simple, life altering and wholly un-American because they counter the enormous bill of goods. (00:11:09): As one prominent writer told me recently, that we mothers are being sold. What are these beliefs that we must embrace if we want a different life? First we must have a palpable sense of why we're valuable, and second, we must like who we are. Why? Because our real value as mothers comes from three places. We are loved, we are needed, and we are born for a higher purpose. These sound good, but from a practical standpoint, if we don't experience them regularly, we lose sight of the fact that they form the foundation of our value. They're difficult to keep at the center of our beings. Every day we're distracted from realizing them because we're lured into believing that our value comes from other things. What we look like, whether our kids are happy with us or how big our paycheck is. Our paycheck is huge, homeschoolers, ginormous. But we must be reminded where our real value lies because we need to have a conscious awareness of it if we are to be genuinely happy. I'm going to read you a little more from a little bit later. (00:12:16): Let me back up. I'm going to keep going, but I'm going to back up first and tell you about my family. My husband Andrew and I have been married for 23 years. We live in the Pacific Northwest with our six kids. They were all homeschooled from the beginning all the way through. Our oldest is in the white top. She's 22. She graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville this year with a degree in English and is headed to grad school in Scotland at University of St. Andrews. Next year we are definitely going to visit. Our second is right next to me, Allison. She's the one who's the same height as me. Alas, poor thing. She's 20 and she's at the Savannah College of Art and Design studying illustration. Our son in the back there, Drew just finished his freshman year at college also at Franciscan University. He went into study marketing. He's changed it to economics and philosophy. I have been accused of trying to raise my own publishing company. It might happen. I don't know. Let's see. Clara, is the one he's holding. (00:13:27): This is a very deceiving picture. Clara has very strong opinions about everything in the world and one of her opinions is that we should not step into the lake for the last picture of this very expensive photo shoot. My husband tried like, oh, I'll hold you. No, Audrey tried our oldest. Come here and I'll hold you, no. Big brother, I'll hold you. Okay, fine. And then she gave us this smile. We'll come back to their relationship in a little bit. The twins are 10. They're identical twin boys and they're every bit as much trouble as identical twin boys sound. Does anybody else have twins in here? Lots of twins. Okay, we can make it. I remember when they were two and three, I think they were trying to be encouraging, but there was this parents of twins at my church who are like, "It gets easier when they're four." (00:14:25): I was like, "That is a really long way away." It needs to get better a lot before four. This is a very posed picture. Let me show you what life actually feels like on a normal day because this feels a little more or less Instagramy and more honest. Well, it must have been nine years ago because the twins look like they're one or a little less than that. One of the things that I've noticed in this survey that I did where 726 women who've been homeschooling at least 10 years responded. One of the things I noticed is, and this is what I think we crave from answers like the ones they gave me is that seasoned mom chill. You know what I'm talking about. I remember Audrey was maybe one or two and I had gone to Michael's, I don't remember why the craft store, she was throwing a fit about something. I don't know why, I don't remember. (00:15:28): I just remember pushing her in the cart trying to get whatever I was getting and seeing this mom there with four kids and they were getting crafts that they were clearly going to do together and she was speaking nicely to her children. Now in hindsight, I'm like, oh, she was totally a homeschooler because it was in the middle of the day. At the time, I just remember being like, how is she doing that? That looks so hard. At the same time fast-forward a year or two, I'm at a Bible study at our church, I had a three-year-old, a one-year-old, Drew was a newborn and I was exhausted. The only reason I went to bible study is because they had free childcare and coffee. The Bible was good too. I get there, I had been up all night. It had taken me so long to pack the kids out of our apartment to get to church, to get them into the place where Audrey just never wanted to be further than my arm's length from me to convince her that she really wanted to go to the childcare program. (00:16:37): Finally sit down and one of the women there who had a couple of teen boys looks at Drew, who's a baby, who kept me up all night in his car seat and was like, "Man, if you think it's hard now, just wait till they're teenagers." Who says that. I mean even now I'm like, she must've been having a bad day. Teenagers are hard in a different way. I mean, what I just thought then was, if it gets harder than this, I'm going to die. The truth is, I actually think, who in here has all kids under 10, every single one of your children is under 10? Okay. I am 100% convinced that the hardest part of parenting and homeschooling is happening for you right now. And I know you think, if it's this hard, what's going to happen when they're in high school. High school is a cakewalk compared to teaching a child, and you start twitching. (00:17:42): It's a cakewalk compared to it. If all of your kids are under 10, you're in the hardest part. That season mom chill is what I was really going for, and you do get it. The longer you've been a mother and the more children you have it turns out. With the first baby, we'd be so excited about her taking her first step and walking, saying her first words and all those things, and with the twins, I have a very vivid memory of walking upstairs to where my two older girls, Audrey and Allison were trying to teach the baby twins to walk and they're like, "Come on, take a step." And I'm like, "What are you doing? Why are you ruining my life? Push the babies down." As soon as those babies can walk, it's over up in here. Life is going to get so much more difficult. That's not exactly the seasoned mom chill that I'm talking about, but we'll get into it. In this survey I've 726 ladies who responded, there were five things that showed up again and again and again and I just started keeping track. (00:18:48): What are they saying again and again that comes up so often? And it really boiled down to five things that fit so nicely into this little anagram of peace. And so these are, we're going to go through these one at a time. This was easily, something that showed up across almost all of the survey results, which was to prioritize relationships. It is really easy to give this lip service and then to turn around. I don't know if you've ever heard that saying education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail. I'm saying it wrong. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire, it's a lot easier just to turn on some faucets. It's really easy to go like, but I can't quantify relationships and also relationships don't always feel good all the time and they don't always look nice in a checklist and I can't quantify them or turn them into the state at the end of the month. (00:19:45): So it's really hard to prioritize them. But I would be willing to bet that there is not a single person in this room who would be willing to trade their child's relationship for perfect SAT scores. If I said, your kid can have perfect SAT scores, but it will cost your relationship with them in the process. None of us would take that deal, because we're made to love and we know that our relationships with our kids, that's not really what we're doing in our homeschool. We're not just going for great test scores. Great test scores are fun and great and they can be helpful, but not at the expense of our relationships. One of the things that has really proven true that I heard experienced homeschool moms say when I was a younger homeschooling mom is, your kids will forget a lot of the things you taught them. It might be really important to you right now to teach your kids history in chronological order. That is not the parts of their homeschool they're going to remember. (00:20:46): They're going to remember how you made them feel. That's what they're going to remember. When they're talking about their homeschool 20 years from now or thinking back on it. They're going to remember the way they felt in your homeschool. And the way they felt was based on relationships. Let me give you a couple examples. Just two months ago or something, one of my 10-year-old twins finished The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson, fabulous fiction middle grade novel series for eight and up, teens especially. So good. Anyway, he finished it and he brought it to me. And because homeschooled children are weird and say weird random things, he handed me the book and said, "I'm a changed human." I was like, "That's amazing. Don't say that in front of dad." He won't let me homeschool you anymore. Actually Allison, his 20-year-old sister who's at art school all the way across the country in Georgia. This was her favorite book too. (00:21:45): So I texted Allison and said, "Hey, Emerson just finished the Wingfeather Saga," and she was like, "Amazing. 10 o'clock Saturday, tell him I want to FaceTime call." 10 o'clock on Saturday, this art student who is in a million different clubs and activities and has tons going on, and I don't know if normal 20-year-old art students are super excited about spending an hour on a Saturday morning talking to their 10-year-old sibling about a book series, but he went into the bedroom, closed his door so that they couldn't let any spoilers out, the other kids who haven't finished it yet and talked about the Wingfeather Saga. Would that have happened if they didn't have all those years of, I mean we spend a lot of time together. We're all up in each other's business all the time as homeschoolers. But our siblings spend all this time together and we don't even realize exactly what that's doing over the long term, and it sure doesn't feel a lot of the time much good is happening. (00:22:43): I'll tell you, my oldest daughter, my oldest son, they're four years apart. They fought like cats and dogs all growing up. If we left Audrey home to babysit, I just had to make sure Drew went somewhere else, because he would light the house on fire just to irritate her and she would probably follow him around telling him all the things that he should and shouldn't be doing. They were just like oil and water and now they're 22 and 18 and they're best friends. He went to the same college she went to, went over to her, this last year she was a senior. He was a freshman. She'd go over to his apartment once a week and then she'd make him dinner. He'd tell her all the things. She'd call me and tell me all the things because college boys tell you nothing. They tell you nothing. I'm like, "I wouldn't even know if my kid was alive if my daughter wasn't there." My girls text me every day 14 times where I'm like, "Okay, maybe we can." My son I'm like, "Are you alive?" (00:23:44): The same boy, there we go. When he was six, was the baby of the family. We have a gap between our first three and our second three. He was the baby of the family. He was such a handful. He was not happy when I was pregnant with Clara and he decided we should name the baby nothing and maybe she wouldn't be born. I was like, "This is going to go well." We would be having dinner and he'd say, "Is the baby going to slobber on my Legos?" And I'm thinking, slobber is the nicest things babies do. He really actually slobber with his thing. It was like, he's just so grossed amount, people spit no, he just couldn't handle. Well, so funny because I was so worried. How is this going to go. This baby's going to be born and she did it, she worked her magic. Talk about a kid who got over his slobber thing. Their relationship is this sweet. I mean you saw the picture earlier. (00:24:59): He was the only one who could hold her for that family picture. When he was a senior in high school, I should not even be admitting this on stage, but he was like, "Audrey is our oldest. She was the one who baked everything." So he comes to us, she's in college now and he's like, "Here's the problem with Audrey being at college. There's nothing good to eat anymore." I'm like, "It's true. Sorry, you could learn though. I'm not going to do it, but you could bake." And he's like, "Well, do they make a Lego kit for brownies." Like a box mix, is that what we're talking about. So Clara, who's now about 10 at this time, she's like, "Drew, I got you." And she takes him into the kitchen and she teaches him how to make brownies from a box mix. Their relationship is so sweet. These are the kind of relationships where a kid can come back from college or, just today while I'm here in California. I got pictures this morning where the two older girls took all the little kids to the berry farm to pick berries. (00:26:05): There's this relationship thing that happens. It doesn't feel like it in the moment. Most of the days when we were really in it with really all little kids and everyone's fighting and I'm stressed. I would've told you, mostly I'm just playing sibling defense. I'm just trying to keep everybody from killing each other. That's how it feels. We can't see it, because the fruit comes later. We can't see it in the moment, but all those little daily things that we're doing, they add up over time. One more example of prioritizing relationships. I asked Audrey my oldest, she was 12 when the twins were born. That's not exactly an age in your home school where you feel like you can keep having survival years. You know what I'm talking about. We are doing fine, we just had a baby, so we're not going to do much. That just kept happening at our house. You hear people say, "Well, it's just a season." And then you have another one and you're like, I'm in a season and a season. (00:27:05): It starts to feel kind of a life after a while. There were several years, I would say three solid years from the time she was 11, 12 through 14, 15 where we did very little school. I mean audiobooks and online math was about what it was. And then I needed their help. I was literally swimming in babies. I needed help. And I wondered though when she was in college, what do you remember from those years? I invited her on, well, what happens is, she would come to these conferences with me and people would ask her. She's like, "Why don't I just come on the podcast and I'll answer some of the questions people ask me all the time about being homeschooled by you." I'm like, "Oh, mercy." This is a little snippet from this episode, which you can hear at readaloudrevival.com/209. I'm curious what you remember about school those years. Speaker 5 (00:28:06): To be totally honest, I do not remember what school looked like during these days. I really have no particular memories of school or what we did at this time. But what I do remember is how much I loved having baby siblings and how much fun it was to take naps with them asleep on my chest, to read books to Clara, who was one at the time, to help you feed the twins and put them to bed. It was my favorite thing to come downstairs and to help you rock the twins to sleep. And while, yes, this was a couple of years, I really think I grew closer in relationship with my siblings and with you than I did educationally. And I found this to be just as valuable, if not more so in the end. Sarah Mackenzie (00:28:48): Isn't that amazing, just as valuable if not more so in the end. Now let me be clear. This is not what she told me at the time. So if you happen to have eight, nine, 10, 11, 12-year-old who needs to help you with the baby and they're like "Again" and you're like, "Why can't you be like Audrey" I wish they are. Just give them time. They don't remember things the same way that you remember things and that's okay, that's good. We like this. This is fine. This is what it means to prioritize relationships. And in the survey results that I saw time and time and time again, these moms were saying, "I wish we had spent more time playing games together, going on field trips together, taking outings together, less time on focus curriculum schoolwork, more time having conversations and enjoying each. I wish I just enjoyed them more." I feel like this is too good of an opportunity to pass us by without taking a moment to ask ourselves, we want that. Because they can get a lot for themselves later on. (00:29:58): I'll tell you one other quick story about Audrey. She decided she wanted to be an editor, originally when she went to school. She got a degree in English. She calls me end of her freshman year and she's like, "I think I want to be an editor." And I was like, "Shoot, we should have done some grammar." We really didn't have time for that. So I knew when she graduated from high school that she had no idea how to use a comma, did no idea. She would write a gorgeous essay, fabulous essay, and then I think she was like, "There should be some commas in here." She'd sprinkle some in like cupcake sprinkles and I was like, "This isn't good." So I got one of those, I don't know, $10 little cheapy workbooks off Amazon that was commas for middle schoolers and I gave it to her after she graduated. (00:30:53): I'm like, "If you want to be an editor, you probably maybe should work through this. I should have taught you this. So sorry." She did it in a week and then she was like, "Got it, it's good. I got it." And I thought to myself, isn't that funny. I would've spent years having her slave over a grammar book to learn what she could learn in a week. Not that we can do that with everything, math you don't really get caught up that fast. I understand that. But I do think we kind of tend, it kind of reminds me of after you cook a lasagna, you could stand at the sink and be like, "Oh, I'm getting this thing clean right now, all the elbow grease." Or you could just let it soak and come back in an hour and it's a lot easier. That's what it kind of reminds me of. So we get really fretful. (00:31:38): But the thing that we can't get back, are these times where we have to build relationships and we have to talk to our kids and enjoy our kids and kind of build the relationships in our homes. It all counts. And to me it feels like so often we feel like, if the kids would just get along, then our homeschool would be successful, but the kids not getting along, that's the training ground. That's actually where all the good stuff's happening. They're going to learn how to get along with people that they, we all have to get along with people that we do not like at all. And who better than to learn that with than your brother who drives you insane. So this is really fertile training ground and we've got to count it. It all counts. Another thing that I heard time and time again on this survey is to embrace simplicity. Whew, couldn't say that word. How many of you feel like you have more to do than you can get to most days? (00:32:36): I mean I don't think there's probably anyone here who's going to walk through the exhibit hall because you just don't know what to... We're so bored, we have not enough to do, so we should find something in here. That's not usually the question we're trying to answer when we walk through there. The number one advice, I swear to you, if you ask an experienced mom, give me one practical tip for my homeschool, I think there's a 99% chance, she's going to say do less. And that's excellent advice and it's true and it's also not helpful. I say it too, do less, and then it's like, okay, so no math I guess. What part can I less. I mentioned yesterday that it reminds me in a recipe when it says add salt to taste, you're like, the reason I'm using a recipe is because I don't know how it's supposed to taste. So if you could just tell me a teaspoon or a cup, I'll have a better chance of making the soup come out right. I am not the cook in my home, can you tell. (00:33:42): We need a little bit more clear instructions. So this is my attempt to give you better than add salt to taste. You do have to choose some priorities, a couple of things that you are like, I know at the end of my homeschool time, I will absolutely not be okay with if we didn't do these things. For me it was reading aloud and books. I mean, I just know that's the most important thing for my homeschool. Commas, apparently didn't make the cut and it worked out just fine. It's a really good idea to ask your husband too like, what's most important to you. Because I'll tell you, I was just having this conversation before I hopped up here about math, and for a couple of years I tried to do all of our math with cool creative books and games. My husband was meanwhile having an ulcer about this and I did not know. And then when I finally was like, what would you like to see at the end of this school year? (00:34:42): He was like, "Math worksheets would be really great." So between reading aloud and doing some math worksheets, I now feel like the most important things are getting done. He now feels like the most important things are done. We do try to do other things. Field trips, science, we do our part of a co-op. We do some history things. You really need to know what are the most essential things. What are your absolute priorities, because if you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing. It's the opposite of a priority. A priority means one at the top. So trying to come up with your top two or three things that are like, this has to be done for this homeschool day or this homeschool week. I wouldn't even think in a day. A day is such a train wreck. A week gives you a lot more flexibility. This week, I want to make sure we've read a lot a few times. I want to make sure we've gotten through a few math assignments and what else. What is your thing. Talk to your husband and find out what does he want. (00:35:48): It can't be everything, you literally cannot do hands-on history and a bunch of science experiments and tons of field trips and Latin and art study and picture study and composer study and read aloud. You can try. Nobody's telling the truth about it on Instagram, when they say they're doing it. It just isn't how it works. You have a finite amount of time and if you want to be able to do it in a way that prioritizes relationships, that means that you can't tightly schedule yourself so tight that there's no time for the relationship because you're so busy turning from one thing to the next. There's a few ways you can do this. My favorite practical way to decide what are the most important three things in our homeschool, is just to ask myself, 20 years from now, imagine this kid is having dinner with a friend and somebody says, "What did you guys do in your homeschool? (00:36:39): What was that like?" What do I want them to say. I want them to say we read aloud tons. My mom always read to us. We read so many books, tons of time for reading. We did math pretty much every day. I mean, I'm mostly saying that to acquiesce my husband. I want to say that we had lots of time to talk. We went on some cool outings. So there I've got them. Those are my most important things. Now, we will have a chance to do some other things here and there, but again, we have to simplify and prioritize, otherwise what happens is your day gets prioritized for you and then your head will hit the pillow at night and you still won't get to all the things, you just didn't pick which ones mattered most. Another thing that I think is really interesting, my mom is a public school teacher. I come from a whole family of teachers. (00:37:29): She would tell me that, I remember her looking at a lesson plan I had one time and she was like, "Do you do science all year?" And I was like, "Well, curriculum has 36 weeks in it." She's like, "You know that's not what they do in school, right" I start thinking back on that. I'm like, "That's true." We would do a unit of science and then a unit of history and then something else. But you didn't do science and history and spelling and writing and reading and math and geography all year. But weirdly, we try to do that and we wonder why we're so stressed out. I think what happens is we go to get homeschool curriculum. The curriculum makers are trying to put everything in this world geography program or fifth grade math program or ancient history science program that somebody who's learning ancient history would need. But just think about, who went to public school in here? Okay, same. In your public school, how often did you get through the entire history book in your high school history class? All (00:38:34): Never. Sarah Mackenzie (00:38:35): Never. What about your math book? No. Your teacher picked and chose like, skip ahead to chapter, whatever. This happened all the time. In homeschooling for some reason we're like, "All right, everybody we're doing it all." My husband two weeks ago, he was like, "All right, we've got 26 more lessons of Saxon until the end of the year." I know. And I was like, "We're done actually. We can pick up there at the beginning of next year or guess what? Here's the secret to Saxon." It all comes up again. So we can just not do that. But if we do have this kind of funny thing, we need to finish it as though turning every page is actually what makes our children smarter. I always try to use this mistiest of, when I plan what we're going to do for a school year, pair it back to the very essentials. At the very beginning of the school year, I'll start with just two things, read aloud and a math page maybe, whatever, that's it. And then I'll add one more thing off my list. (00:39:45): I have a whole wish list of all the things. I mean there's so much beautiful curriculum. We want to do all the things. But as soon as I've hit a level where I can't smile at my children at the end of the day, I've gone too far and now I have to take that thing off and stay here for a while. Because you smiling at your children will go further for their learning and development and growth than everything else on your wish list that you wanted to teach them. I promise you that. Also, just in case you had a moment of, oh no, I don't smile at my children, just in case. Dr. Meg Meeker, same person as who wrote that book that I was reading says that if you smile at your children for about 10 minutes, no, she said it was fun. If you're a fun mom for 10 minutes a week, your children will remember you as a fun mom, and this is very good news. So you can smile at them in the morning and smile at them at dinner, even if you don't mean it's okay. (00:40:50): And they'll remember like, "Oh, my mom smile, she must really enjoy being with me," and that is exactly what we're going for. So we prioritize relationships, embrace simplicity, and then we talked about this at the top, avoid comparison. Comparison, we know it is the thief of all joy, but we actually keep this little comparison device in our pocket. I do not know why we do this. I do it too. I'm like, it's a stressful moment. Things are going not well. There's a kid crying over their cursive. Somebody doesn't know where their math book is. My husband's like, "Can you bring me my lunch" I forgot it. The toilets overflowing. We had to side note, we had to replace one of our toilets twice in one week with the twins. I don't mean unplug it, I mean replace it. Our twins put hot wheels down. I don't know how many, I don't remember. There was multiple. Anyway, it happened one day and three days later it happened again and my husband's like, "What?" I'm like, "It feels kind of fair." One twin did it, the other one needs the experience. (00:41:59): I know. All this crazy stuff is happening and then I will usually say something mean to my kids, slam a door, tell somebody, why can't you just get your act together. Something like that. And then I grab my phone and I go either into my bedroom or the bathroom and I start scrolling Instagram because that will make me feel better. Whoever feels better after they've been scrolling Instagram, it is nearly impossible, I'm telling you. For you to feel better about your children and your home after you have been looking at those little squares of lies, it is just the way it works. You cannot scroll and see chickens and sourdough and beautiful books and beeswax crayons. Somebody's fishing and then you look up and your kids are in your house as a wreck. You just can't be blessed. No, that's just not how it works. We do it anyway, but I think if we can at least be aware of... I actually put something, I don't know if you can see it now. (00:43:09): You can. I gave myself a new screen saver and I'm like, it's to remind me, you are not turning this thing on to look at Instagram. You can turn it on to read or you can put this back down. That's what you get to do. But it's because in those moments we want to buffer. We feel uncomfortable, we feel frustrated. We're going to talk about this a ton tomorrow in my 4:00 o'clock session. So if you're still here, I'd love for you to join us. We're going to talk about how to be more pleasant. And I'm going to share with you the tool that I use to shortcut this thing that happens in our brains when things are falling apart around us and we instantly go to, I'm a failure. I'm terrible at this. My kids are disappointing. Why is this not working. If only I had more money, if only I had a better curriculum, if only I had a different husband, if only I had a different house, if only I had... (00:44:01): We all do it, all the time. And we think to ourselves, if only all of these things were met, then I would be happy in our homeschool. And Meanwhile, our homeschool's right in front of us. So we have to avoid comparison because we're comparing against something that doesn't even exist. There was another piece that I wanted to read from here. All right, this is again from 10 Habits of Happy Mothers. Women who have a healthy sense of their own virtue are delightful to be around, because they never play games, put on airs or try to impress anyone. They don't need to because they have a sense that they lack very little. It isn't that they're enamored with themselves, quite the opposite. They're humble. They're so comfortable with who they are, that they're free to elevate others. Insecure mothers scour the territory before them to find a way to elevate themselves primarily through making another mother look just a little smaller, uglier, less informed. Mothers who constantly badmouth others are profoundly insecure, but mothers who feel secure speak with an ease and joy that lets the hearer see their confidence. (00:45:14): Whenever we feel twinges to impress our company, we know that we're struggling with poor self-esteem. One of the best ways to feel better about who we are as mothers, is to push ourselves to accept who we are. We do this by refusing to pretend with anyone and we pretend whenever we feel the tiniest nudge inside to impress someone. We all do this, but we can change because real joy and real contentment come from believing that we are good just the way we are. We refuse to give into the urge to impress others. We force ourselves to accept ourselves and this is real freedom. There's a woman like this at my co-op. I absolutely love to be in her presence. Her children are pretty ordinary. Her life is pretty ordinary. I love her. When you're with her, she just feels exactly the way Dr. Meg Meeker described her there. You can tell that she enjoys her children and her husband and her life. She's not trying to impress anybody, because she's not comparing herself against anybody else. (00:46:19): The other thing we do besides comparing ourselves with other people on Instagram or other homeschool moms, is we compare ourselves and our kids against the public schools, which is a super weird thing to do. How many of you are homeschooling because you think the kids would be better off in public school? This doesn't make sense. You don't homeschool because you think public schools would do a better job. So then we homeschool and they're like, okay, give me that measuring stick over here. I'm going to use this one. It really doesn't make sense. We don't trust them with our children and yet we're like, can you please evaluate and decide if my child is doing okay. So we have to understand, one of the things I always like to point out is, it's pretty common, we hear this a lot. (00:47:08): Homeschool kids outperform their public school peers. I used that a lot when I was convincing my husband that we should homeschool. I was like, "Oh, they'll do so much better." And then when our kids weren't reading and still weren't reading and weren't reading, you're like, oh no. The thing is, is it is true that homeschool kids outperform public school peers pretty much, almost always but it's not on this even trajectory. So very often we'll see younger homeschooled students way under testing. Why? Well, this is very obvious. In kindergarten right now they're teaching all kinds of things that are a complete waste of time and then they test on them and your kids are going to fail those tests. Also, they're testing based on kids reading at a very steady, a child being able to read at the age of five, when we know that most children do not read at the age of five, and yet we're comparing our kids against this rate. (00:48:09): Even a child who reads at the age of four and a child who learns to read at the age of seven will both be reading at about the same level by the time they are 12. And yet we use this measuring stick to think, oh no, my seven-year-old isn't reading yet. I must be doing something wrong. We're taking their measuring stick on, even as we're telling ourselves I don't want what they have. So not just comparing ourselves against other homeschooling moms, but comparing ourselves against the average fourth grader. And if you meet an average fourth grader, please let me know. I have yet to me one. All right, let's keep going. I did not realize this until my oldest went to college. You are in your homeschool longer than anyone else. So Audrey graduates and I'm like, yay. I mean, her graduation party, I felt like was mostly for me. I'm like, look what I did. Don't tell her that. She still doesn't know. I bought myself a new dress and everything. (00:49:13): She's getting into college and you're like, that is a little nerve wracking. I will say, because your like, I hope all these homeschool people are right because she didn't look that impressive on paper, frankly, and I thought, oh no, if she doesn't get into college, the colleges. As Sally Clarkson likes to say, the colleges are happy to take your money. Your children will get into college. That is not a problem. But she gets into college, this is fabulous news. And then we move her into her dorm and I'm like, wait, I'm still here. I've got all these other kids to homeschool. So you are in your homeschool longer than any single one of your children. And it's really important then that you create a homeschool in which you can enjoy it, because if you are enjoying your homeschool, it will be a lot easier to smile at your children at the end of the day. It will be a lot easier for you to enjoy your children. (00:50:10): They will think, my mom likes doing this. What a huge difference would that make if our kids thought, my mom likes homeschooling me and yet many days that might not be what my children would say about homeschooling. Have you ever eaten a meal from somebody who was in a really bad attitude, maybe it was you. I will not name the family member of mine who will make a Thanksgiving feast slamming around the kitchen irritated, angry. You come into the kitchen they're like, "Get out of the kitchen" and they're like, "Get Thanksgiving on the..." and you're kind of thinking, I mean, I'd rather eat pizza and have everybody smile at each other. You know what I'm saying? How you bake something is just as important as what you make in the end. And in our homeschools, how we're doing this homeschool thing day in and day out is just as important if not more so, than what we get at the end result as far as what you can write down on a sheet of paper. (00:51:20): I will say this until I die, I swear. The key to a successful homeschool is a peaceful happy mother, and you are in your homeschool the longest. So that doesn't mean you need to make the whole homeschool revolve around you. Doesn't mean that we need to now talk about self-care for a bunch of time or anything like that. It just means, what can you do to actually enjoy this thing. For me, it's usually doing fewer things and then having more time to do them so that I can take the kids to the park and they can play and then they can come back to the picnic blanket and we can read aloud. Maybe I brought their copy workbooks or something and they can do that and then we'll have lunch and we go back to the house. I can smile at my kids on a day like that, mostly unless the twins are acting up and then it's. The saying, if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, I'm pretty sure Charlotte Mason said that at the beginning. They forgot to appropriately mention that she said it. (00:52:26): But you need to do something in your homeschool that you do just because you love it, whether it's a certain kind of book that you're reading just because you love it. Maybe it's a certain kind of craft. It could be a million different things. It could be taking a walk in the middle of the day. You have to build in something that you enjoy. The other thing I think is really important, especially because so many of you raised your hands. How many of you have kids under two? Okay, my least favorite homeschool advice ever is when you're like, how do I get it all in? And then somebody looks at you really like they're going to say something helpful and they go, "Have you tried doing school during the baby's nap?" (00:53:11): You're like, that never occurred to me before. The one time I have sanity all day, is that what you're talking about. Also, it's not very helpful because you're tired. You do not have to homeschool during the baby's nap. You can. I almost never did. I was exhausted by the time the baby napped. Also, if you wake up in the morning and you think the next time I get to sit down to read a book or take a bath or watch a show on Netflix or call my sister or take a walk, anything that feels rejuvenating to you and you think the next time I get to do this is after the kids are in bed, that's going to be a long day sister, and you're not going to smile at your kids very often that day. So building in a little bit of time, doesn't have to be a huge amount of time about 15 minutes. I built in for years. 1:00 o'clock, I would have an alarm go off on my phone and it reminded me, drop whatever you're doing and just go read. (00:54:04): I'm a nicer human if I've read recently, and I also knew that, what would happen is at 1:00 o'clock, sometimes one twin would be sleeping and the other one wouldn't sometimes, it kind of would depend. But I could put them next to me with some toys or something and be like, okay, I'm going to sit here and read. But I would always think, I'll do that after I move the clothes from the washer to the dryer and just get that other stuff in the dishwasher, or just after I get dinner in the crock pot. No, I had made an alarm on my phone that was like, drop everything you're doing like Ramona Quimby, drop everything and read. The laundry will not stink if you let it sit there for 15 more minutes in the washer. It will be okay. And usually I would find myself feeling much less resentful toward my children for this lifestyle that I had chosen, if I'd built in just a little something. So do something that gives you a little piece of joy. And then the last piece that came up over and over again is to eliminate hurry. (00:55:07): It is really convicting to me that whenever I say, I do it all the time too, but whenever I say I don't have enough time, what I'm essentially saying is I don't trust that God's going to give me what I need. Because if I say I don't have enough time, I'm saying God's not giving me what I need. Maybe God is giving me everything I need and I'm heaping more onto it. Which kind of goes back to our embrace simplicity and doing less. We simply can't be rushing from one thing to the next and enjoy our homeschools. It's not really possible. Also, it really strikes me when I watch The Chosen, you guys watch The Chosen? I love that show so much. You're watching all these people, throngs of people who need healing. Jesus was just never rushing. He had more on his to-do list than we do. He had more people who needed him than we do, and he just wasn't rushing around. He was just doing his one thing at a time. (00:56:14): And I think, what kind of hubris does it take for me to think that I don't have enough time to do what he's called me to do, when Jesus himself was never rushing. I want to leave you with one last thing, which is to know that you are going to make lots of mistakes. You will not have a year where you're like, I got all of this. I mean, we were prioritizing relationships and I did less. Things were really simple and I was not comparing to other people and I had some joy and I smiled at my kids every day and we weren't hurried. You're just not going to feel that. You're going to have lots of experiences probably this week, where you're like, "What was I thinking?" You're probably going to buy something at this curriculum and in a year you're going to be like, "What was I thinking when I bought this." Several years ago, my six kids and I drove across the state to visit my dad. My sisters were coming, we were all going to descend on my dad's house and my husband couldn't come. (00:57:19): My husband is usually the person who drives and he's also the person that pays attention to details. That's important to know. He couldn't come with us so I'm like, no problem. It's a seven-hour drive to get from Eastern Washington to where we were going. That's an important thing to know. You just need to know I was in the car with six children for seven hours, so that you still respect me at the end of this story. We get over to Bellingham where my family is, and the thing is, we were going to stay at a hotel and then the next morning meet at my dad's house where my sisters were also coming into town we're going to be, but they'd already gotten there. We were going to be the last ones there. Well, weirdly, we were running early which never happens, and I was like, "Oh my gosh kids, we got here early. Do you know what would be fun? It would be really fun to surprise grandpa and all your aunties by showing up tonight." (00:58:14): And they're like, "Okay, let's do it." So we drive to my dad's house. My dad lives in a neighborhood that's like a cookie cutter neighborhood, where every fourth house looks the same. This is very important to the story. It's dark. That's also important to the story. We pull up and I'm like, they've been doing some construction around here, because there's a cone in the street where there isn't usually one, and we pull up and my sassy 14-year-old son from the back goes, "This is not grandpa's house." And I was like, I had enough of my 14-year-old son that day. I was like, "I know how to get to my dad's house. Thank you." I look up at it and I was like, whoa, they've really gotten into the Seahawks. There's a huge Seahawks flag up. So I'm like, okay, I should tell you this too. I do not think of let's surprise my family as being like, knock, knock, we're here. I was like, let's just burst into the house and be like, we're here. So I get out of the van, you know where this is going. (00:59:18): I got out of the van, I got all my ducklings behind me while they're taller than me but anyway. We get up and as I'm walking up, I did think, they must've painted the house. Dad's been really busy. Open the door, where is everybody? It's really quiet and I'm like, I mean my nieces and nephews are not quiet humans. So I'm like, weird. But I can hear in the back room there's a TV going. So I'm like, twins go up, go find grandpa. They run up ahead of me and all a sudden I hear a voice from the back room. Not my dad's, say, "Are we supposed to know these children?" My teens ran so fast out that door. And if you have little ones and big ones, you know that the little ones, they don't follow you. They follow them. So they're gone and I'm looking like, okay, it's not my dad's house. (01:00:33): So I walked to the back room, bless these people. It was man and a woman in their big over-chairs eating TV dinners and they didn't even get up out of their seats. I was like, "So sorry. I thought this was my dad's house." And they're like, "Who's your dad?" So I tell them and they're like, "Okay, same house, one street over." I do think it was probably a blessing that we live in Washington and not in Texas during something like this, just saying. Anyway, we get back in the car and my teenagers are like, "Mom, never tell anyone we did that." So that night I'm texting my husband and I don't want to tell him because my husband says I'm impulsive. I think he means I'm spontaneous. But anyway, this is like, if you asked him what is your wife's biggest fault? He'll be like, "It's like a ready fire aim. She just needs to stop and think for a second and then she'd be good." So I don't want to tell him I walked into the wrong house. (01:01:45): Great. So I'm texting him. Drive was fine. Mountain pass was no big deal. We got here just fine. We accidentally went to the wrong house, but it was fine. We ended up in my dad's house anyway. We had a great time with aunties. Woo-hoo, bye. He calls me, he's like, "You what? What were you thinking?" And I'm like, "Well, I don't know. It looked like the right house. It seemed like, I don't know." I'm telling you the story because I have had a million of those. What was I thinking? I don't really know. When I think back trying to teach my oldest Latin when she was seven or trying to drill that other one who turns out to be severely dyslexic and trying to figure out why he could not for the life of himself, remember that a T always says every time, all the time, every time you read it. And why did I buy this curriculum or that curriculum or try to do so much? Why did I lose my patience? (01:02:46): If I know that prioritizing relationships is the most important fundamental part of a good home school. Why do I lose my cool on my kids on the regular? And I just want you to know that's all part of it too. So we can know this and I think it's really important to know this, but I also think it's really important for you to leave here knowing you're going to mess up tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day. And all of that has grace in it too. It doesn't feel like it's working. It never feels like it's working in the moment. When you're reading a lot of book and your kids are whining and crying, someone pees on the couch and you're like, "Sarah said, this was supposed to be amazing. It is not amazing." It is working and it all works over time. It's like drops in a bucket that you cannot measure yet and you can't grab anyone else's measuring stick. It just works over time. (01:03:37): Prioritize relationships, embrace simplicity, avoid comparison, chase joy, eliminate hurry, and you'll be in really good shape regardless of how many things you tick off your list or you don't. Now, like I said, I am not speaking at any conferences in 2025, for the first time in almost a decade. If you'd like to get mentored by me for your happy homeschool, just head to rarpremium.com. That's where my circle with Sarah Homeschool Mentoring program is. It's all online. No matter where you live or whether or not you can get to a conference, you can still get some good homeschool mentoring. And no matter what, you can have a happy homeschool today just by implementing these five habits of happy homeschoolers. Now, let's go hear from the kids about the books they're reading these days. June (01:04:41): My name is June. Speaker 7 (01:04:41): From? June (01:04:41): Georgia, and my favorite book is Esther The Unstoppable because I like when she is skiing. She sings, bye. Eden (01:04:53): My name is Eden and I am six years old from Georgia, and I like Frog and Toad All Year Long because the part where Toad brings home ice cream and it melts on his shoulders. Cora (01:05:11): My name is Cora. I am nine years old and I'm from Georgia. I recommend Heidi because even though she gets homesick in the first place, she comes home and it all ends really well. Bye. Kayla (01:05:31): My name is Kayla and I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I am seven and my favorite books are The Magic Kitten book because William is really cute. Liam (01:05:48): My name is Liam and I'm nine. I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and my favorite book series was The Harry Potter book series, because it's fun and exciting. Amara Francis (01:06:02): Hi, my name is Amara Francis. Speaker 13 (01:06:05): Where are you from? Amara Francis (01:06:07): From Alaska and I love Fancy Nancy so much. Jonah (01:06:12): Hi, my name's Jonah and I'm five and a half years old. I was from Texas and I recommend the book Horton Hears a Who because Who could talk to her [inaudible 01:06:30]. Greg (01:06:30): I am Greg. I live in Tallahassee, Florida, and my favorite book is Chester's Way. I'm nine years old. I like the part that Chester and Wilson are running away, are scared from the bully. Reiken (01:06:56): Hello, my name is Reiken. I'm 11 and I live Tallahassee, Florida. My favorite book is Amari and the Night Brothers, because it's thrilling. Sarah Mackenzie (01:07:07): Thank you, kids. Hey, I'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode featuring a very special secret guest. In the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books.