Personal Education Blog

As lifestyle challenges go, combining earning a living while at the same time home educating your children, has to be one of the toughest. If you’re not one of the few home educating families where the parents can afford to go out to work and employ someone to supervise and home educate their children for them.

For most families these days, school provides a large chunk of free child-care and this is what many parents exploit in order for them to be able to earn a living whilst raising children. So, what do you do when you do not have access to hours of child-free work time each day?

What can you do if you are a single parent and/or home educating very young or disabled children? Tough challenges indeed, but certainly not impossible judging by the number of families I’ve come across who are, apparently successfully and happily, doing just that.

There are many different ways in which families achieve this, although the process of changing their lifestyle has often taken place over several years. How do they manage it?

Balancing income and costs.

In absolute terms, of course, it doesn’t matter how much income we have so long as it is equal to or greater than our costs. Most of us can decide, to a large extent, what our costs will be and therefore how much of an income we need, but if our income drops, then it follows that our costs must decrease too.

When I decided to take my two boys out of school in 1998, I was already running a small business from home, but it quickly became apparent that I would not be able to continue with this. My job, though home-based and part-time, took up around 30 hours per week, some of it spent away from home.

I wasn’t happy spending that amount of time working or being away from my children while they were young (age 8 and 6). So, I quit my job in order to home educate. My doing that left us with one income (I was married at the time and my husband was working) which was not sufficient to cover our bills as they stood.

So, we decided to downshift to a part of the country where it was less expensive to live, buy a much less expensive home and lower our sights in materialistic terms.

During the months and weeks that followed, I read many books and websites on home education and, just as importantly as it turned out, I started learning about something called “Voluntary Simplicity”. The tenets of Voluntary Simplicity are frugal consumption, ecological awareness and personal growth.

However, this change in life path and priorities i.e. my children’s education now rated above my quest for material possessions, felt like deprivation or even poverty sometimes. I realised there were seeds of resentment threatening to germinate as a result of our decision to home educate.

I needed to stop feeding them. I needed a change of perspective.

It was a revelation for me to discover that taking the path of voluntary simplicity was not about poverty at all, but about unearthing a simpler, freer way of living that gave us more time together. I quickly realised that this was really an opportunity for us to lead a much richer, more meaningful life emotionally, physically and spiritually.

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