Have you Become a Homeschooling Parent Overnight??
Almost every parent on the planet has been forced to become a “Homeschooling Homepreneur” literally overnight, and many moms feel like we’re about to lose our minds.
Especially those of us who run a business, have a fast-paced job in the corporate world, or are trying to further our own education in an effort to provide for our families. No doubt you’ve figured out very quickly that everybody all of a sudden existing full-time under the same roof is making it extremely challenging to get any work done, and YOU are going crazy.
I know how you feel, and I want to help!
All the experts are saying that the situation is gonna get worse before it gets better, so we’d better buckle in for the long haul.
That means that we’ve all gotta find a way to manage the madness of working from home with our kids…and hopefully find a way to do it where everybody comes out alive.
But I don’t want you to just survive this season…I want YOU and your family to THRIVE!!
That means you will need a plan for how to keep your kids moving forward in their education and somehow have enough quiet time to stay focused on your business. Not an easy task…but that’s where I come in.
For well over a decade, I’ve worked with highly determined, goal-oriented women to help them create a custom-built dream life that they absolutely love.
Most of my clients and students have a general idea of what they want, but for many of them, “success” always seems to be looming right beyond their reach. Some of them are going through burnout, some of them are going through life transitions, and some of them just need a little help focusing on their exact bullseye. And that’s my specialty. 😉
It’s my job to help these hungry women identify and take the strategic critical steps that empower them to cut through the noise of life and gain total clarity on the activities that finally deliver them to do their dream life…that life they know they deserve.
But right now, with the current madness in the world, EVERYONE is being forced to take a deep breath and reposition themselves. Even the most hyper-focused, high-achieving women are having to scramble for a back-up plan with kids out of school and business turned upside down.
Whether we like it or not, we’ve almost all become “Homeschooling Homeprenuers” overnight, forced to work from home while educating our children from home. So, we can choose to either become bitter or better. We can either become paralyzed with fear and overwhelm, or we can dig deep and allow this to become our finest hour.
I say let’s play a little game of leapfrog with the universe and show the world just exactly what we’re made of.
My journey & how it may help you where you are right now:
I’ve been an entrepreneur for longer than I’ve been a parent. I’ve had my own business for 17 years and been a parent for 12 years. During that time, I’ve experimented with every type of education you could possibly imagine. I’ve done homeschool, mainstream/traditional school, Montessori school, creative learning school, online school, private school, and tutors. Then we finally opened our own school two years ago. We run a private school right now, and we’re working on an international charter school expansion.
So, it’s safe to say…we’ve tried it all.
I never thought I would homeschool my kids. It certainly wasn’t something I set out to do as I became a parent.
I had a dream that I wanted my kids to learn from real life. Not just in theory from a textbook…but I had no idea how that would happen.
When my son was a toddler, I read the book 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris and my head exploded with the possibilities. I had visions of myself traveling the world with my kids, working only four hours a week (ha!), becoming a yogi, and working from a café in the Himalayas, all while becoming a zillionaire.
I decided to keep him home as a toddler, because I had heard all the nightmare stories and statistics of pre-school kids getting sick on average almost once per month, and I didn’t want to deal with that. So, when my son was 2 and 3, I purchased homeschool curriculum programs for our nanny to facilitate with him. This was back in a day when I purchased the workbooks online, and a hardcopy was mailed to our house.
We had a postcardesque picture-perfect scenario of my son happily learning in the backyard, at the kitchen table, hunting for bugs, enjoying crafts and baked goods. A real Mary Poppins situation.
Then we moved from my home state of Texas to Arizona, I got divorced, and I had to rethink my whole life.
At 4 years old, I put him in a Montessori school for half a year, then I moved him to a more traditional-style pre-school for a full year. We spent the winter that year in South Korea, so I put him in school there while I worked. He loved the travel and adventure as much as I did, and we caught the “I love to see the world” bug.
In kindergarten, I homeschooled him as a single mother, as I was in the process of moving to New York. I brought in a part-time tutor to take him on field trips, teach him to tie his shoes, and help him explore the world around him.
I was in the middle of a life crisis after my divorce, and I didn’t want him to suffer with me, so I tried my best to keep him “occupied” while I crumbled and totally went through every possible poison available in an attempt to self-soothe and numb myself.
I had no joy & was totally focused on surviving.
Fast forward: I soon got remarried, which was a whole new season of adjustment, transition, and personal evolution as I worked to blend a new family. In 1st grade, I did the homeschooling myself while we traveled the world to manage and build our international business. I used a combination of online programs and workbooks. Interestingly, I noticed that he was learning & growing just as much when we were doing the “formal” learning as when we were simply having fun and “not doing any learning”.
While we were in Australia, we also tried half a year of an alternative-style school, as we prepared to move back to the States.
In 4th grade, we moved back to the USA, because we decided that my son should probably have some stability throughout his adolescence, although he was very unhappy to give up his global travels and settle down for “boring school” like the rest of the world. We did one final year of traditional school here in Arizona, and that is when we started planning to open our own school.
Important note: if I had ever found one school that I felt did a sufficient job of educating our children to thrive in the modern world, I would have happily planted roots and stayed there forever.
We created our own school based on everything I saw and learned in our 5-10 years of global travels, educational experiments, and community observations. I had definitely come to understand that parent frustrations with education were a global situation…certainly not isolated to any one particular city, state, country, or even continent.
Our school system is built on 3 foundational pillars:
academics + character development + life skills
So, for the past two years, our life has been consumed with all the intricate details of founding, building, and opening a private school. We started with a small pilot school in the Phoenix area for grades 1 – 8, with massive international expansion plans.
… until Coronavirus happened.
And I should also mention that almost ALL of this crazy decade of educational experimentation took place while I was running a business from home.
What’s happening right now in 2020
The current crisis:
- Pretty much every parent on the planet has been forced into a homeschool situation, almost overnight.
- It’s become mass chaos and panic…mostly from the parents.
- Parents are afraid – and understandably so:
- How am I going to get any work done?
- How am I going to educate my kids?
- How am I going to make sure they don’t fall behind in their studies?
- How are they doing to get into college and succeed in life if they are out of school for the rest of the year?
- How are we not going to kill each other?
- How are we all going to cope?
- How are we going to keep money coming into the family?
- How are we all going to stay safe?
- How are we going to wipe our bums with no toilet paper?
The list of fears is ENDLESS. Some of them justified, some of them not.
There are a few strong acronyms for fear. Which one will you choose?
-
- False Evidence Appearing Real
- Forget Everything And Run
- Face Everything And Rise
But one thing I’ve also learned through my life and business journeys is that when it all boils down, fear is simply a lack of data.
Do you want to have a home, family, and life full of joy?
Yes, even in the midst of a crisis.
Do you want to wage war on the mediocrity that’s raging all around you
and threatening to overtake you??
Do you want to know how to keep your kids moving forward in their education and somehow still have enough quiet time to stay focused on your business?
Let’s do it together. I’m here to help.
This week I launched a brand-new eBook called “Chaya’s Little Black Book of Homeschooling Secrets” as a collection of survival tips I learned along the way. I only wish someone had handed this to me ten year ago. But of course, everything in perfect time.
This eBook is packed FULL of content with 19 SECRETS that I learned through trial and error over the past 10 years as a work-from-home mom.
It wasn’t my original intent to write an eBook. In fact, as of my last blog entry I was still brainstorming how I could help. But then a brilliant friend of mine made the suggestion that I compile all the tips into an eBook rather than writing a never-ending blog post.
With all my heart, I can now fully say that homeschooling is one of THE best things that we’ve ever done for our family. For whatever reasons life has handed you, it’s now your turn to investigate homeschooling options. Maybe it’s something you’re just trying to survive until the schools open back up, or maybe you’re looking for longer-term solutions.
But whatever the case, I can promise you this: life is only 10% what “happens to you” and 90% how you respond. If you choose to truly embrace this season, I know that you can become the hero your family needs. Not only can it be great for your kids, but it can become an AMAZING experience for you as well. An opportunity for you to grow, expand and develop new layers of depth and skill that you never knew were possible. I’m a big believer that every human has a SuperHuman waiting inside…let’s find yours.
Sending you all my love, belief, and support,
Chaya xo
To download your FREE copy of the eBook, click here.
PS: You’ll notice that I speak to moms all the way through the Little Black Book, because this is my area of passion and expertise. However, pretty much all the same info holds true for dads. So, for all the dudes who are courageous and caring enough to dive into this data…I salute you!
