Solutions for Your Over-Scheduled Homeschool

1.5 years ago I vowed I’d never do it again.

In fact, I vowed I’d never even come close to doing it.

Making my transgression even worse, I actually coach and advise homeschool parents on how to not do it.

Yet here I am, Fall of 2016, pulling my hair out and suffering through a torturously OVER-SCHEDULED homeschool season.

You see, we moved to London for 15 months and had the most amazing year of our life in every respect but especially in regards to our homeschooling there.

We shockingly discovered that if you whittle homeschool classes down to NOTHING and eliminate all the traditional organized activities like team soccer, girl scouts, boy scouts, gymnastics, karate, etc….that you and your kids don’t actually miss out on ANYTHING!

In fact, on the contrary, by opting out of everything we thrived like never before. So that year abroad was the control experiment that proved to me something that I had long suspected but was definitely too chicken to implement.

Of course moving abroad, we were forced to declare “activity bankruptcy” and had the luxury of a clean slate.

Then we came back to hyper-charged New York, with all our legacy activities, classes, social networks, etc.

We somehow survived a relatively quiet first year back but then this Fall came…

The calendar started filling up and I was already stressing out in late August, weeks before I had to forcibly pull my daughter out of bed at 6 am or drive my son in New York rush-hour traffic anywhere. My wife Inez tried to assure me it wouldn’t be that bad.

Guess what, she was right. It was WAY WORSE! New classes, activities, events, social obligations, and can’t-turn-down-opportunities kept pouring in and onto the calendar.

Just to paint the picture…after totally and fully booking our calendar:

We then stumbled across an amazing art teacher who would come to our house for 2 hours (win!), in one of our only open time-windows on Friday at 11 am, and only charged $12 per hour. Art has been in deficit in our homeschool and in the metropolitan NYC-area, $12 an hour is BASICALLY FREE, less than what you would pay for a Friday night babysitter!

In addition to all my homeschool coaching clients and my accelerated math students….I had the opportunity and I began teaching an online Entrepreneurship class for homeschoolers. It has been going really well and you should definitely contact me if you are interested, but it has also taken another massive bite out of my scant free time, not to mention my bandwidth.

Then my 11 year old son, the computer-wizard, landed another couple paying clients – so there went another solid 5-10 hours per week of his free time! How could I possibly say “no” to this? I mean, him earning money and supporting me through my dotage is THE ENDGAME, right?

Oh, and a new (Catholic) co-op started up. It’s actually incredibly hard to obtain terrific “space” anywhere in (downstate) New York like they did, at a now-defunct elementary school replete with a ballfield. Furthermore, it is close to my house, features dozens and a variety of practically FREE classes, taught by terrific and highly competent teachers, there are 125 beautiful, thoughtful, well-behaved kids participating – a concentration of homeschoolers that we don’t ever have up here in the “lagging” Northeast homeschool universe. So how could we pass this up?

And you homeschool vets know that adding ANYTHING to our schedules delivers an impact far beyond the mere hours blocked out on the calendar. There’s the time to get ready, the travel time to, the travel time from, the homework, and there’s of course the momentum-killing disruption.

Happy, experienced, and successful homeschoolers need strict rules about what they commit to. When I was a rookie I had that rookie’s “huge radius”. I would drive upwards of 60 miles for a science class, for only one of my kids, because I was still trying to survey this whole, vast, new landscape. With every year of experience, I continually narrowed my radius and tightened my criteria for what we’d sign up for and commit to. In fact, I got my circle so small that not only was I organizing my own co-ops filled with the subjects I valued, with my handpicked teachers, and fitting perfectly into my weekly schedule, I was also using Skype lessons to the max. In other words, my edu-travel radius collapsed from 60 miles….all the way down to ZERO.

Now my harsh rules and criteria are still honored, still top-of-mind, and still firmly in place.

I mean EVERYTHING on our calendar is loaded with goodness. Everything is relatively close by. Everything (except for my wife’s Crossfit membership!) is inexpensive if not profitable – like my son’s paying clients.

So exactly how did I get into this over-scheduled mess?

I think in part because my wife and I have become so proficient at finding worthwhile endeavors. And that reminds me of that annoying, naive if not ignorant question all homeschoolers get pestered with,

“You homeschool? So tell me, how do you know what to study???”

Of course us homeschoolers have so many wonderful things WE WANT to study, the real problem is the complete opposite – trying to fit everything in!

I also think we’ve been overrun because the homeschool community here in the metro NYC area has grown and matured to the point where there are simply more worthy offerings.

But this doesn’t tell the whole story. As many of y’all know, or will soon know, a lot of my OVERSCHEDULED pain descends from the mixed, community activities like karate, dance, Scouts, and soccer – all of which have continually ramped up their time commitments or I should say time demands. (My kids are 10 and 11 now.)

Slice and Dice

For years my son John had practiced the piano for 60 minutes per day. He loves the piano is and quite the player BUT we had to cut him back to 30 minutes a day. You see as far as I’m concerned, he wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as he is at it, and thus wouldn’t like it nearly as much if we had taken this tack from the get-go. Diligent practice leads to competence which leads to increased passion….a virtuous circle. I’m a big proponent of “long sessions” and “no breaks” but the young man’s future is not in the piano. So sadly, we’ve had to take a 50% step back.

On the plus side, it’s been totally okay.

I’ve also had to cut my daughter back to (an average of) 30 minutes a day of math. Now I’m a proud math wacko – probably the only one you’ll ever come across who believes in 3 hours of daily math for kids as young as 5. Seriously. In fact, the first thing I tell parents who inquire about me tutoring their kids in math is that I require a minimum of 2-hour long sessions. And that’s not merely because of personal economic reasons, it’s because “long sessions” work 10x better. No highly-functioning adults are sitting around in an office doing wimpy 40-minute sessions on important projects, now are they?

Slaughter Sacred Cows

When the youth soccer league asks for your child for 4 days a week, with tournaments far afield on holiday weekends, and they are conscripting for indoor winter practices,….AND your child isn’t one of the absolute best players on the team…

It’s simply time to quit.

It doesn’t matter if your child is reluctant, if they feel attached to the other kids…

It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve already invested. Google the “sunk cost fallacy“.

It doesn’t matter if “Dad” played his whole life either.

You would never invest all your money in one stock, would you? The law of diminishing returns and the principle of diversification certainly applies to our kids – assets far more valuable than anything else we own.

And if you aren’t comfortable with slaughtering your sacred cows….then think of eliminating them as simply pressing the “pause” button. Just take a season off from soccer, from baseball, or from dance. Remember, I took a whole year off from EVERYTHING in London….and thrived.

Schedule Free Time

Most homeschoolers have an “open” day or two with very few, if any, outside-the-house activities. That’s when everyone takes a deep breath, catches up on academics (“seatwork”), and the house may even get tidied up a bit. Who knows? Maybe Mom and Dad will, at least temporarily, unearth a dining room table under all those books, workbooks, papers, science projects, and “drying” arts and crafts.

We’ve had these blank days too; however, because of all the craziness before and after them, we end up having so much “catch up” to do that they’ve become almost as frantic as the OVERSCHEDULED part of our calendar. It’s like when you go on vacation and run around so much trying to hit all the sites….that you actually have to go back to work or your daily grind in order to relax!

I used to think simply having a hypothetical quiet day of the week was sufficient. But against the growing onslaught it has been no match. And the unfortunate casualty can be your kids’ really free time. That’s the space they have for daydreaming, pretend play, pleasure reading, and for cultivating their NEXT new passionate hobbies.

So set some rules for these formerly quiet days too. Slice and dice your expectations. And relax.

Well this is what I’m going to try to do from now on.

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to write this post up. Thank God the Fall is over, a calmer winter is on the horizon, and I’ve learned my lesson. I think. Again.

~Dan