Can we afford to homeschool?

Let’s jump right in, because there’s a lot to unpack here. My husband works a typical 40-hour office job: Monday-Friday 8:00-5:00. My daughter goes to daycare Monday-Friday, usually from about 9:00-5:30. My weekly hours and schedule are a little harder to pin down, since I work for myself and often adjust my schedule on the fly. I'd estimate that I work about 20 hours a week, mostly Monday-Thursday between 11:00-6:00. We send our daughter to daycare on Fridays even though I'm not working because (a) we pay for it anyway and (b) sometimes it's easier to run errands alone. Technically this schedule “works” and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. I don't like that my daughter spends 9+ hours every weekday at daycare, and I only get to see her for about 2 hours each weeknight. It's a bit of a pickle though, because while I'd love to keep her home longer in the mornings and/or keep her home on Fridays, again (a) we have to pay for the 5-day option (there is no 4-day) and (b) she'd miss what little “preschool instruction” they do in the mornings at daycare, which is one the main reasons for sending her to daycare. So while there are some things I wish I could change about my daughter's schedule, I feel like we're currently stuck with it… unless someone else’s schedule changes.

I would love to rearrange my own schedule so that I work more daytime hours, but unfortunately when my target audience is children I end up with a lot of demand for after-school appointments. Throughout the week, it often feels like I'm waiting around during the morning/day, alone, and just getting started with my workday by the time my daughter is wrapping up with hers. We're like ships passing in the night. With my husband, too, I feel like we barely have any time together on the weekdays. He leaves the house around 7 AM, I often don't get home until 6:30/7:00, we parent together until almost 9:00 most nights, and then we're lucky if we have an hour together before one of us heads to bed. We're all doing really long days, and so much of it is spent entirely apart from each other. There are several positives to having two working parents, of course, the main one being more monthly income; but you have to take a critical look to determine if that increase in cashflow offsets any negative impacts on the family dynamic as a whole.

My mom was a stay-at-home mom for the majority of my childhood. When I was about 13 or 14, she took a very part-time position as a teacher's aide in a local preschool, but that took up 10 hours a week and was only during the mornings, when we were off to public school anyway. So for my early and middle childhoods I always had my mom there to play with, talk to, and just hang out with as we did whatever we were doing. Even with four kids she always kept the house clean (too clean if you ask me lol), got us to all of our appointments/practices/clubs, and managed to put some kind of dinner on the table every night. While my dad worked hard and supported us financially, my mom supported us by orchestrating our daily routines and ensuring we were growing as little members of society. This shaped my view of how a normal family household could operate. I don't believe it has to be the mom that does all of the household duties, but I do believe these duties need to be prioritized and managed effectively in order to have a happy, wholesome family unit. If the house, meals, schedule, etc. become afterthoughts, the family relationships suffer. And they can become afterthoughts so easily when both parents are working high-demand jobs.

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm very good at working with kids. I mean, I've built a successful pediatric speech therapy practice from scratch as a solo therapist. I've worked in schools and private clinics with all sorts of kids. I've even had a gig as a nanny. As the fifth-oldest of 18 cousins, I've been around many kids as they grew through all the stages of childhood. All this to say, I'm more than qualified to raise my daughter to be a functional, happy, and well-educated human being. I know some parents aren't cut out to be their child's educator (or simply don’t want to) and that's totally valid! But given my background and skill set, I know I'd build a very successful home/homeschooling environment within my house. I have moments sometimes when I think to myself, “Why am I expending all of my talents and passion in my day job, when I could be applying them to my own family and my own child?” I get very excited at the idea of orchestrating a beautiful home life for my daughter. It ignites a little flame in me and makes me want to go all-out to craft the perfect education of life skills, community involvement, and academic structure that will meet her unique needs and highlight her talents. And then I come back down to Earth and remember I currently have a private practice that needs attention.

Can I work a 20hr/week job and homeschool at the same time? Ask different subreddits and you'll get some pretty varied opinions, but most people tend to agree that you'll be giving 50% of your attention to both tasks, and therefore giving neither your best efforts. What if I just work one day a week? It would give us some pocket change, but I know it would still steal my attention outside of my scheduled working hours. In my line of work (speech pathology), and especially as a private practice owner, it's pretty near impossible to not think about work off the clock. If I jam-pack one full day of therapy sessions, I'll end up using other time throughout the week to plan lessons, write chart notes, catch up on emails, and more. And I know myself too well; I know I'll slowly let it take over more and more of my time until I'm right back to 20 (or more) hours and bending over backwards to make it all “work”.

So what's the alternative? Is it truly black and white? Either I work a job and don't homeschool at all, or I fully homeschool and stop working outside of the home? I know there's room for nuance because I've seen people do a blend of things. Lots of people try to supplement public/private school with extracurriculars that align with their homeschooling values. They “homeschool on the weekends” and squeeze lessons into small gaps in their family schedule. Some people even shirk their WFH job duties a bit to teach their children between work tasks. But for me personally, I think it would be unnecessarily stressful and a setup for failure if I tried to run a private practice in some capacity alongside homeschooling. I think I'd end up resenting both - I'd be frustrated that my speech job takes me away from my family, and I'd be frustrated that I couldn't get any “speech stuff” done during my SAHM time. I'd also have to find childcare during my working hours, so I'd be juggling the transportation and communications with that all over again. My job is not the type of job where I could just bring my child along with me. That’s just ethically and logistically impossible. Not to mention, if I can't keep my one working day packed with sessions, I might not earn enough to break even anyway. And to be totally honest, I'm kind of ready for a break from the whole SLP field, at least for a little while. It's a big part of my identity, but it's not my whole identity. I know I went through a lot of schooling, took on student debt, and earned my state licensure to get into this field; however I don’t like to use a sunk-cost fallacy to guilt myself into staying the course, especially when an alternative pathway may be more beneficial to me overall.

It's all well and good if my heart is pulling me toward homeschooling, but it doesn't matter much if we can't afford it financially. If I stop earning an income, we lose out on approximately 33% of the monthly income we're used to. We have bills to pay just like everyone else, including a car loan and a house loan we took out for some major renovations last year. We've made huge payments on both of those loans already, but of course we wouldn't have as much to throw at them each month if I stopped working. My husband says we'd need to make significant changes to our money habits, and I don't disagree, but I struggle to see where those changes are going to come from. We hardly ever make big impulse purchases; we have exactly one streaming service (YouTube Premium); we have barely any subscriptions (the YMCA is by far the most expensive one); we use cash sparingly because it's easy to lose track of how much you spend that way; and we scour all over to buy secondhand or score freebies whenever we need something. Tweaking our budget categories would result in some small changes, but I don’t know that they’d be significant enough to make a noticeable difference. I truly wonder if/how we can strap our belts any tighter to make sure we're living within our means if we're bringing in less money. I’m trying to be self-aware here, because I'm certain I live a life of comfort and privilege - someone else might look at my financial habits and scoff, seeing 50 ways I could cut back on what they deem “wasteful spending”. And maybe if we just bit the bullet and started living off of one income, I'd very quickly realize some of the bigger sacrifices we'd need to make. It’s just hard to know for sure how our financial situation would change before making the decision.

If I'm being fully honest (and why wouldn't I be - this blog is my diary that literally only I read lol), I worry that choosing to homeschool might lead to growing resentment from my husband. I have no logical reason to think this, especially considering I've straight-up asked him about this possibility and he very thoroughly assured me it wasn't a problem to worry about. But I am unnecessarily hard on myself, and so my brain convinces me to worry about problems that don't actually exist. If I leave my job and put my career on an indefinite hold, is that fair to my husband? After all, if the roles were reversed and he came to me one day saying he wanted to quit his job to be a stay-at-home-dad… we'd be homeless! Like, financially, it just isn't an option. So I feel guilty, whiny, privileged, and resent-able when I admit to my husband that I'm feeling called to homeschool. Like I should just be quiet and keep working, because it isn’t fair to ask to change things up. Overall we have a good thing going, and this whole homeschooling adventure would be a big risk. I wouldn't ask my husband to work more, pick up another job, or somehow start earning more* to make the homeschooling dream happen, but he'd still have to go through the budgeting adjustments and lifestyle changes alongside me. We'd have to put other house projects and personal wants on hold for who knows how long. And part of me worries that if I don't do a “good enough job” homeschooling and running the household, he'll be disappointed in me and resent me for making our lives harder. Luckily we have strong communication skills as a couple, so the likelihood of this actually happening before either of us initiated conversations & took actions to stop it… is incredibly low, if not zero. Still, I wonder if I can afford to risk my marital relationship in this way.

I need to consider my daughter's feelings on the matter, too. She's been at the same daycare for almost two years now, and even to this day she still cries at drop-off at least once a week. During a recent conversation, I asked her if she liked school and she said “I love it!”. I followed up with, “Given the choice, would you rather go to school and play with your friends, or stay home?” and she picked “stay home”. Even when I reminded her that she has friends at school, she responded with “Yeah, but I have Mommy and Daddy at home”. (Cue the tears) Logically, I know she would be just fine at daycare/public school. On a more inexplicable, perhaps instinctual level, I know she would flourish and thrive in a homeschool setting. Obviously it's impossible to know how one option would've turned out once another has been chosen, but I think homeschooling would have her leaps and bounds ahead of her peers in multiple academic categories… and it would also make her happy. She loves being my little shadow, going here and there on random errands and adventures, learning new things as we explore the world together. She is inquisitive and thirsts for knowledge, and it brings me such joy to provide her the information or teach her how to find it on her own. Her feelings may change as she gets older, and maybe someday she’ll decide she’d rather go to school than stay home. If we never take the chance to explore homeschooling, we risk never knowing if it truly would’ve been her preferred childhood experience.

There are risks. There are huge stakes involved. Any choices made now will affect all of us now and for the foreseeable future. I know which way my heart is leading me, but I’m still nervous to act on it. The what-ifs plague me daily. When faced with big life decisions, can anyone truly know what will happen by choosing one option over the other? The best we can do is consider all the facts, listen to our instincts, and make the most informed decision we can. Once the path has been chosen, we have to do all that we can to make it the best journey forward. And so we must consider, choose, commit, and carry our decision through… because we can’t afford not to!

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*Though obviously we wouldn't turn down more money if these opportunities presented themselves. We're not crazy lol