Homeschooling As A Single Parent: How You Can Make It Work

Full time freelance editor and veteran single homeschooling mother of three, Mary Jo Tate shares how parents can work and homeschool and do both with success!

Let’s face it: being a single parent intensifies the challenges of homeschooling.

In many two-parent homeschooling families, the dad takes primary responsibility for earning the living and the mom takes primary responsibility for educating the children. The labor is divided and the support is multiplied. Although there are also many two-parent families where both parents contribute to the education and the finances—often through a family business—a single parent is often solely responsible for both. The labor is multiplied and the support is subtracted.

But, the increasing number of single parents choosing to educate their children at home testifies that it can work. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute says his studies show that about two percent of homeschooling families are headed by single parents, but it is his opinion that this figure probably underrepresents the true number.

I have been homeschooling for eight years—four of them as a single mom. The number-one question people ask me (usually with a breathless air of amazement) is “How do you do it all?”

My answer comes in two parts: (1) I don’t, and (2) I redefine it all.

Read the full article here.