Transcript- EP16: Importance of Motherhood in Homeschool

Amy: You have eternal worth in what you are doing, raising your children day in and day out. It is hard and I am there in the hard with you. I see you.

Hi friends, and welcome. I’m your host AmyElizSmith. I’m a homeschool mom of three and have homeschooled each from the start. While I have a master’s in elementary ed, I want to teach other mamas that you don’t need a fancy degree to have the passion and knowledge to successfully educate your children from home.

I hope to bring you encouragement to jump in and start your homeschool journey and provide my absolute best recommendations to help you begin your homeschool journey. Thanks for joining us along for this crazy, messy grace filled homeschool ride.

Welcome friends. Let’s talk today about being a mother, mothering as a full-time job blogger Audrey Brokey said,” A mother has to remember that her family can’t be managed in her spare time, nor is mothering an interest or a hobby.” For us as mothers, we have to remember that this is the job that we have, and it’s not just a job, it’s a calling.

We can embrace that and love that, and also go against the grain in our culture today. For example, mothers should not allow their emotions to dictate their family life, and this is a huge responsibility. I’m not gonna go on and on about traditional roles, but if your husband does work and provide for your family, then your responsibilities would be to clean the home and make food so food is on your table and taking joy and pride in these things so that you can have a happy and fulfilling home life. I wanna say that I do things on the side, and I’ve loved those things for my own wellbeing. I love to write and I love to do things, but my number one job is to be a mother to my kids and a wife to my husband.

In our culture, unfortunately, those things are demeaned so much and undermined, and the traditional family is seen as backwards or really archaic, but the opposite is true. How God has laid this out in his word is the way God intended. Those traditional roles, and I’m not gonna speak to them too much. But if you aren’t working as a mom, then your job is to be with your children.

And I would say too, to homeschool and educate your children. So think about what are we as mothers reading, what are we as mothers consuming? Stepping back and looking at how we cultivate a home with what we’re reading, with what we’re consuming and how we’re spending our own time. Are we honoring God? Are we cultivating a home filled with joy?

I have to ask these things of myself too. I need to be convicted if I’m not fully aligning myself and my principles with what I believe God is calling me to. Let me say it is so joyful and it is wonderful. I feel so incredibly blessed that I get to do the work I do with my children day in and day out.

I get to feed them, I get to read with them. I get to stop their fights because they happen often. All of the things. I wanna make sure though, that I’m instilling habits in myself, and that means waking up and having a mother culture time. For myself, that means reading something that edifies me, including being in God’s word and taking that Bible study serious.

It means putting down my phone. I make sure not to bring my phone into our bedroom at night, so it’s not the last thing I look at. I like to read something in the morning my Bible and some self-development books, some prayer books. But then in the evening I like to read a novel, and that just kind of helps me unwind away from a screen.

What habits are we developing in ourselves that our children will also look to us and want to emulate as well? That includes looking at, does your family have a family mission statement or a Bible verse. All of these things can help your family culture and help your mothering. For you to think of this as just the, the highest regard that it is, the best thing that you are called to be.

We want to start with helping our children develop the habits that we have ourselves. So these are habits of obedience and respect and responsibility. We are our child’s first teacher, and you, you parent, are qualified by God to teach your children. With that in mind, we want to educate them with a beautiful wisdom and beautiful books that edify them their minds and cultivate the influence of God that you want them to have. For me, I want to again have that Bible time, religious edification, and also an edifying novel. I suggest these two books for you, For the Children’s Sake, by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. I suggest two books that I love, so I would really hope that you could pick one of these up from the library or cheaply from any bookstore around you.

But For the Children’s Sake is such a beautiful book, and it’s short too about why home education is so important and why we need to bring our children home. And Own Your Life by Sally Clarkson has been one that I’ve recently really just devoured and it’s helping me learn what God’s calling is for my life and knowing and really having my identity be as a daughter of God, but also then as the mother of my children and the wife of my husband.

Having a couple books going at once is truly perfect. I love to indulge in these reads, and this is part of, like I said, mother culture, which is a term that Charlotte Mason didn’t use in her sixth volumes, but she did talk about it to her PNEU, and this is in the late 19th century.

But all that to say she’s highly influential in my own life and also many other homeschoolers lives because of how much she valued children and how much she valued the role of mother, like what we’re talking about today. But truly purposeful, intentional reading will help cultivate your mind and then therefore your attitude, because we really are what we think.

Then your heart will be towards your spouse and your children and their education. This is not to say that there aren’t times when I am just flat out tired. That happens often, but keeping Christ first in my mind and keeping in mind what he has set before me really can help me continue to move forward.

Philippians 1:6 says, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Matthew 25 says, “Oh, that one day we may hear our Lord Jesus Christ say, well done thy good and faithful servant.” I know that that’s the aim that I have in my life to hear that from my savior.

There really is nothing more important than being home with our children and raising the next generation. Our culture is in complete disarray and decay. But I believe this is happening because many children today aren’t raising their babies and their children. This could be from no fault of their own, but if there is a will, there is a way.

That’s my prayer for you, that, please don’t misunderstand me. I know that this isn’t a possibility for many families, but I do pray that if it is possible that you bring those babies home and you raise them. Don’t allow the government schools to have the final word on your child’s character and how they’re developed.

We as women want more.

Truly why I am beginning this series is because I wanna reach other moms and help you with the desire to stay home, to homeschool, to choose the hard, in order to receive the amazing. We can put our babies and our children and our families first, and still do great things. Here I am doing something in addition to those things with my husband’s support.

That could be for you volunteering outside your home, in church, or doing something else, teaching something. It could be used any talent that you might have. It could be cooking for a sick neighbor. It could be doing online work, whatever it is. We must still put our children and their wellbeing first.

Knowing that their little souls are our first priority will re eternal bene benefits. I know that when I am on my dying day to know that my children and God-willing grandchildren, let’s say even great-grandchildren surrounding me, that truly will be my legacy and your legacy too. I just pray that that is the desire of young women, of young moms of you listening today.

That that’s what you’d love for yourself too. Audrey Brokey, the blogger that I started this episode with, she also said, and this is kind of a hum dinger. “Any woman can be super spiritual with her Christian girlfriends at a retreat or at church, but the rubber meets the road in the home.” Boy can that sting.

But there is truth there. We have to make sure that what we ourselves are consuming is aligning with our principles. And that can mean sometimes taking, a step back and what we spend our time with and how we behave around our own families. You have eternal worth in what you are doing, raising your children day in and day out. It is hard and I am there in the hard with you. I see you, but greater is He that is in you than that is in the world. This sometimes it can feel like thinkless work, but it is more than valuable.

It is worth more than rubies. Please don’t lose sight of that.