Fall 2026/Frierson
Can a working parent homeschool? We often hear this question. Sometimes it is framed in a hopeful question, and other times, it is offered as a discouraged statement, “I wish I could homeschool my kids but I have to work.” The good news is that the answer is, “Yes!” Many families successfully juggle homeschooling as working parents. It is a little trickier and will take a lot of commitment, but you can do it. If you’re considering this path or are already navigating the unique challenges of balancing work and homeschooling, these practical tips can help you find a rhythm that works for your family.
Since one of the best aspects of homeschooling is its flexibility, you have a huge advantage. In fact, depending on your situation, you may even find that it turns out to be easier to manage homeschooling than getting your kids back and forth to the bus stop each day, getting homework completed each night, and handling all the afterschool activities that come with a traditional school setting.
The reason is that there are no set hours for homeschooling. You can do it whenever, wherever, and however it works best for you! So start your planning by looking at your work schedule. Do you work a regular shift or do your hours vary? Do you work from home or leave each day for the workplace? Depending on your answers to this, you can begin to plan out where to fit three to five hours per day to set aside for homeschool. And remember, they don’t have to be together in one time block. To get you started, I’m going to share some examples from my own experience to show how we’ve made different situations work.
My mother worked third shift as a nurse when she was homeschooling my six siblings and me as a single parent. She would come home from work as we were getting up in the morning. We would have breakfast together, then she would get us started on our schoolwork and head to bed. While she was sleeping, we older kids would help the younger ones as needed and do our own assignments. If we got stuck on anything, we worked on another subject and set it aside until she awoke. When Mom got up, she would go over our completed work and answer any questions we’d had. While she worked with the younger ones, we older ones helped get dinner together. After dinner, Mom headed back for another shift. Was it hard? Very! But ask her now, three decades later, and she will tell you wholeheartedly that she would do it all over again if she had the chance.
As a homeschool parent myself, my husband worked, and I stayed home with the children for twenty-eight years. We graduated six of our ten children. Then our situation changed, and I needed to begin working. My husband, having reached his seventies, retired, and I began working. My hours away from home varied but were typically from 7:30 am to mid-afternoon, four days a week. I also worked many hours from home each week for my freelance business. What worked best for us was for me to select the books we would use, give an overall timeline for doing them, and Dad gave out daily assignments. When I got home each afternoon, I would do history and science with them, the two subjects I really loved doing with the kids. I gave help where needed, such as with more challenging math problems or grading written papers with a more particular approach. We used Fridays for field trips, co-op class, and doing all the more hands-on homeschool activities I had grown to love over the years. When I needed quiet time to focus on working from home, Dad took the kids into another room to play board games or out to the park when the games got too loud and boisterous. Other times, they would read in their rooms for an hour or so while I worked. We quickly learned what worked and what didn’t. They loved to play outside in our yard, but I loved watching them play outside, so that was quickly recognized as a distraction to me. This was where the park solution came in.
Some working parents are able to take their children along with them to work. I have been in various places and caught a glimpse of a child sitting tucked away in a corner somewhere with a schoolbook on their lap. Others utilize a grandparent or even a hired sitter to oversee their children working on daily assignments for a few hours each day and then do some of the work with their children when they get off work. I always say that if you want it badly enough, you can find a way to make it work.
One other option that has helped many families is finding another family that homeschools near you. Since the North Carolina law permits us to homeschool children from up to two households, you may be able to find someone willing to add your children to their own family’s school. You should compensate their efforts in some way, either financially, or perhaps your trade could be something else that is beneficial to them. It could be accounting services, lawn maintenance, bringing dinner home to them each weekday from a restaurant (what homeschool mom wouldn’t jump on that!), legal services, housecleaning (another winner!), or any number of trades that would make it worthwhile to barter for them to homeschool for you. Just be sure to have the terms and expectations clear on both sides and maintain good open communication to ensure that it continues to be a positive situation for all parties.
The most important factor in successfully juggling work and homeschool is time management. Some things to keep in mind:
- When choosing curriculum, you will want to select materials that require little to no prep work, strong parent support (such as fully working out math problems in the teacher textbook, a.k.a. Answer Key), and clear explanations for the student.
- Set well-defined expectations for your children and have both rewards and consequences that are consistently applied for meeting—or failing to meet—those expectations.
- Make a designated place for each child to keep their school materials. One of our greatest enemies in our battle for time is missing books, assignments, pencils…you name it, we’ve lost it! This goes back to the consequences mentioned in #2. Whether it’s on a bookshelf in the living room, in a crate under their bed, or a cubby in the garage, follow the well-known mantra, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
- Have grace for yourself and your kids; you are all in this together and need to make it work as a team.
- Utilize online shopping, such as Amazon or Walmart+, to order groceries and household items and have them delivered to your home. This not only saves you the time spent driving to a grocery store and fighting the crowded checkout line, you will also save money from impulse buying in the store.
- Keep a family shopping list where everyone can add items that are needed as they run out. You can use the Alexa or Google Nest devices or the old-fashioned magnet on the fridge holding a blank piece of paper. Also, get the kids on board with helping to plan a weekly menu and helping with meal prep. They learn valuable life skills doing this as well as making your load much lighter.
- Just as the aforementioned meal prep goes, divide up household chores according to age and ability. Even small children can help out and learn that they are an integral part of the family by contributing in this way.
- Schedule regular “catch-up” days to give yourselves a breather now and then. The stress released from this will more than make up for any time you think you will lose by building this into your routine.
- Remember that you don’t have to figure it all out immediately. Learn as you go, make adjustments as needed, and don’t lose sight of the big picture. If you find gaps that you missed—and we all do—you can fill them in as you go.
- Homeschooling is a lifestyle. It doesn’t have to fit into a set time block, meet anyone else’s standards, or look like any other homeschool. As unique as your family is, so will your homeschool be.
Homeschooling our children as a working parent offers so many benefits that outweigh the difficulties that we must maneuver to make it happen. We regain much of the time we would otherwise have lost with them. It eliminates the stress of getting everyone up, moving, and out the door on time each morning and completing homework in the little time we would have together each night. It allows us the freedom to take breaks when we need to regroup or recharge and to plan vacations around what is best with our work schedules.
NCHE has a couple of Facebook groups that you may find helpful. One is NCHE Working Parents for working parents in general, and for those who are single parents, NCHE Single Parents Homeschooling is an encouraging online community just for you. We also have a single parent coordinator, working parent coordinator, and a webpage dedicated to helping you so you don’t have to make the homeschool journey alone. We want to help all parents, including working parents, homeschool with confidence and joy!
