When you make your plans, plan to delegate. The first place to delegate is to your kids. Pass responsibilities to your kids as they can handle them. This looks different for each child and each home; it will even look different from week to week sometimes. Don’t fear for their failure. You want to be wise about adding responsibility, but you also need to let them own the responsibility even if it turns out to be more imperfect than you would like.
Plan for boundaries to help teach them as they take on these new roles. They need regular checkpoints where they can see the consequences of their success or failure. This helps them learn to manage their own work. But within those checkpoints, give them freedom.
Some of them will pick up on what they need to do sooner than others. I have one child who starts his week’s work on Sunday evening and tries to come narrate to me while I’m putting his sister to bed. He’s usually done with most of his week’s work by Wednesday, even though I’ve added extra work to his already full AO schedule. Another of my children generally refuses to start his schoolwork until 5 minutes before a deadline. He’s pretty sure he can knock all the work out really fast, so why should he start on it before he wants to? The process of teaching him to manage his own work even though he doesn’t want to looks like a detour, like we’re not making progress on our route, but it’s necessary in order for us to reach our end goal, so it’s worth all the difficulty up front.
Success isn’t simply getting the work done well; it also means learning these life lessons and developing a strength of character, and that sometimes comes at the expense of completing all the work or doing it in a certain timeframe.
Delegating can also mean outsourcing some of the work to another teacher. If there’s an opportunity to do that and if you think it would be beneficial, consider using an outside course occasionally. I can’t do everything well--time constraints make that impossible even if I were good at everything. So if I can outsource an area that takes a great deal of my time and attention, that can free me to focus on another area. It also gives my kids a chance to see a different perspective from another instructor.
I’ve appreciated the opportunities we’ve had to do science labs in a group setting run by someone else, for instance. When we don’t have that opportunity, we make do with my efforts, but when we can, doing labs with a group can be a blessing. High school math is another area I’ve outsourced. I teach algebra and geometry, and then after that the kids who will do algebra 2 and higher take their math at a local university. They get college credit and a teacher who’s actually focused on explaining that subject, their homework gets immediate feedback, and they have a support group for studying. It’s been great!
Most importantly, follow the Holy Spirit’s lead. Pray over your plans, and listen to the answers. Keep praying, and be willing to adjust the plans when they need it. Pray over your children. You are not responsible for their ultimate success. That is not a burden for you to bear. You are responsible for faithfully carrying out what you *should* do, so lay the rest of that burden down. Pray over the challenges that come up each day, the small ones that soon pass and the big ones that sometimes never resolve. Pray for wisdom, for patience, for the right response.
Sometimes we’re not to fix the problem but to show grace through it. Our kids need to see us respond in love to the challenges, and we can’t do that without relying on the Holy Spirit. We can’t know the right course without his guidance either.
In the book Prince Caspian, Lucy has instructions from Aslan, but no one else does. She wants to follow those instructions, but she’s intimidated by the pushback from the others, so she goes along with their preferences. This winds up hurting them all. So often we’re in that same position. We know in our hearts, we feel it, that a certain course of action is the right one, but we talk ourselves out of it because it doesn’t look like what others expect or even what we expect.
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