Am I Doing Enough?

Have you ever asked yourself, "Am I doing enough?" I certainly did in the early days of homeschooling. Why do you think every homeschool mom asks this question at one time or another?

I believe the problem is that when you are doing enough—it feels too, too easy. So you think, I’m surely not doing enough. It can’t be this easy! Certainly my child isn’t learning enough or getting enough knowledge. I need to fill his brain with more, more, more until we are so challenged, so overloaded with information, that we simply can’t fill another minute of our supposed school day with anymore.

When we’re really doing quite enough, homeschooling is as it should be: wonderful, joyful, pleasant, and peaceful—with children learning exactly what they need to learn with time on their hands to pursue other things and other subjects of interest. Time to contemplate what they have learned and what they want to learn. Time to contemplate their relationship with the Lord, to draw nearer to mom and their siblings. Time to settle down with good books and the Bible and time to learn to cook, to learn a new skill, to build something unplanned and unscheduled, something NOT in the books—something creative, expressing who they are.

That’s what life is like when you’re doing enough. But you see, the question we should ask, the real question we should ask is…"Am I doing too much? Am I homeschooling out of fear? Am I deserting the truth for a lie? Have I fallen prey to the counterfeit for God's best and followed the world's standards? What can I cut out? What can I put away?"

If homeschooling feels hard to you, you're doing too much.

And just like with medicine, too much is not better. Too much will have repercussions. Too much will bring consequences you don't really want. And ultimately, too much will bring burn out.

Read on for more homeschool encouragement.