Hello, welcome to this week's Mindset Session. This week, I want to discuss a topic that is very important and near and dear to my heart: how to seek help, advice, and support when you need it, because we all do.
No matter how smoothly things are going with the curriculum, no matter how experienced you are in homeschooling your child, we all encounter those times when we feel discouraged, when life seems to get the better of us, and when things don't seem to be going quite right. In times when you face numerous challenges, you may feel like giving up, or you may not know how to overcome a particular hurdle or help your child achieve a specific learning objective.
No matter what the challenge is, there are always times when we could use a little extra help, advice, or just someone to be supportive and cheer us on.
I believe that there are no right or wrong ways to achieve this, but there are certainly better and less effective ways to do so. I'd like to share with you what I've learned.
Be careful to whom you rely on for support
I believe it is extremely crucial to surround yourself with the kind of help you need. You want to find people who are like-minded to you in what you're trying to achieve, in your parenting style, in what you believe about education, and in how you want to educate your child.
Often, just as a sort of a natural reflex, I think when we're having a bad day, or we have a challenge, we pick up the phone to maybe our best friend, our mom, or our sister, or those are the people that we lean on. That's normal and natural and great, and there's nothing wrong with that.
When it comes to educating our children, though, they're not always (they could be) the best ones to go to because if they don't align with your philosophy and your values and your strategies that you're trying to employ, then what you often are left with instead of help and support is a conflict.
An internal conflict between the help that they're trying to offer, but it doesn't exactly align with what you're trying to do.
It may run counter to what you feel you should really be doing at the moment, or it may even potentially come across as critical if you're using methods and practices that are quite different from what they would do. I believe it's very important to be selective about who you turn to in those times.
Find your tribe
I encourage you to find a tribe if you can. It's terrific if the people in your community and your friends also happen to be in the same place where you are teaching their children, using roughly the same methods and parenting styles. But if you can't find that within your community, then you can often go online and sort of craft your community either through groups like Facebook groups or even just by doing research and finding the influencers and the bloggers and the people out there who are using those styles and methods that you believe in and that really speak to you.
Those people often have communities built around them as well. They'll have a Facebook group, a newsletter that you can subscribe to, or a podcast that you can listen to and use to help you in those times. But it is important that you do that research.
All of this starts with knowing yourself and understanding what you believe, what you're trying to accomplish, and what you value in terms of your child's education and the parenting and raising of your child. So you have to do that self-assessment first.
We have resources to help you clarify your WHY and vision for homeschooling preschool.
Get clear on your homeschooling style
I encourage you to research whether you prefer natural parenting, the Charlotte Mason method, which involves extensive nature studies and living books, or if Montessori aligns with your approach. And if you're unsure about what these things are, I encourage you to explore them further.
Conduct research, discover what truly resonates with you, and then seek out others who share the same styles. Find your tribe. If you have the opportunity to have a mentor, maybe a mom of slightly older children. It's similar to having a mentor in business.
Find yourself a mentor
You want to look for somebody who has achieved the things that you want to accomplish in the way that you want to achieve them. So, you're looking for a mom who's been there and done that with children a bit older than yours, someone who shares your beliefs about the methods you employ.
That's my word of caution for this week: Don't just pick up the phone and call the person you usually vent to when you run into these frustrations. You really want somebody who's going to come alongside you and encourage you, not be critical, but offer you support and advice. That's a community that you have to build for yourself.
Whether they're actual people that you know and can go and have coffee with in real life, whether it is an online community, or whether it is simply some resources, some authors, some bloggers, and some podcasts that you know can turn to when you need that little bit of encouragement, or you run into that wall and you need some advice to overcome it.