Roles of the Homeschool Mom – You May Be Surprised What’s on Tap for High School.
The good news first: your time doing hands on teaching goes way down when you’re homeschooling high school. But, what do homeschool moms do? The time spent teaching in the early years is more than replaced by some surprising new roles.
Let’s dive into what those new roles are for you, the homeschool mom.
First, you will become your teens chauffeur.
Driving is a major commitment as the teen years roll by. Outside classes, music lessons, sports, mentor meetings, volunteering, and the list goes on. My best tip for enjoying this role is to listen to audio books and podcasts during your time together riding along while homeschooling high school.
Audiobooks are a great way to cover school material while on the road.
Think of the literature you can cover, biographies that can round out a subject your teen is taking, or podcasts that inspire them to take their hobbies to a new level. According to studies, listening is not only just as effective for comprehension and vocabulary building, listening to a book is MORE effective at those things.
Next up, the secretarial role.
This role surprised me the most. It came out of nowhere. Sure, I had always had planning work to do and copies to make to homeschool, but homeschooling high school took my secretarial role to the next level.
Think of it this way – your teen is the CEO of your homeschool, not you.
Your role of support means that you keep on top of their schedule, tell them when they need to send emails, keep track of and remind them of their goals, and a ton of items that a good assistant does behind the scenes to make the CEO shine! Once I embraced this role and realized that they were doing the harder part of execution of tasks, I leaned into it. I believe that viewing myself as assistant in our homeschool and realizing the teen was the CEO allowed our teens to mature exponentially.
The teaching role when homeschooling high school is an obvious one, but it is reduced drastically from earlier years.
Even if you do not outsource many classes, you will be guiding your teen to learning to teach themselves from good resources. From learning to properly use and study from a textbook to learning to find experts in a chosen subject, your teen can learn to be a lifelong learner.
Outsourcing subjects – by taking an online class, finding a local tutor to teach a subject, or by enrolling your teen in a college course, can be a great experience
This gives your child the opportunity to learn material from an expert in a field of study and can ignite a passion in a subject that your teen may not have discovered with a home-based course.
No change here: you’ll be cheerleader, cook and life coach when homeschooling high school
To wrap up, you will be a chauffeur, a secretary and a teacher to your teen during these high school homeschooling years. Remember that being cheerleader, cook and life coach go along with parenting anyway and round out these roles. It’s going to be over in a blink! I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into what homeschool moms do when their teen starts. Although this is an enormously busy time, these are precious, fleeting years that will make memories for your whole family to last a lifetime. Best wishes!
