Yes I’m going there! Homeschooling during the chaotic seasons of life can feel overwhelming, but don’t lose heart!
It’s been a long time! I wrote the first draft of this blog in December 2025, shortly after I had recovered from a broken wrist. I’m sure the pictures and captions below give you a good idea why JoyfulJourney123 has been in limbo. I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned about homeschooling during life chaos!
THE CHAOS BEGINS!
The year 2025 started off as usual in our home. Some time in April, we got an unexpected call that would turn everything on it’s head. Yes, one of those dreaded communications! My mother-in-law’s cognitive health had suddenly and quite seriously deteriorated out of nowhere. Apart from the effect on herself, it also meant my frail father-in-law no longer had a helper.
My husband travelled to Korea to support his family and attempted to set up some extra supports for his parents. Cue the beginning of serious chaos. My husband was so overwhelmed with his parents’ situation that he felt like we really had to move back to South Korea. AAAAAAHHHHHHHH. I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing, even though I understood his pain.
If you’ve read our post about the reasons that we homeschool, you know that deciding which continent to live on has been a really sticky point in our marriage for a long time. We had only got back from three years of living in Korea at the end of 2022. Needless to say, I was not happy, and I did not want to move. A rocky few months ensued.
DECISION TIME
Fast forward to November 2025… I realized I had to come to terms with the fact that none of my in-laws were willing or able to return to South Korea to help my sister-in-law carry the care load, and that the burden my husband felt was bringing a mountain of tension and stress into our home.
1 Timothy chapter 5 encouraged me:
4 But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.
8 Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
God is pleased when we repay our parents.
After months of conflict and confusion, the decision was made. We flew out of Brisbane, Australia at the beginning of February, 2026.
EMBRACING THE CHAOS
Through all of this I’ve been trying to keep a stable home structure for the kids. It hasn’t been easy teaching the children and trying to maintain a godly environment in the face of real disappointment, conflict, and fear. There have been days of exhaustion. Days of emotional and mental overload. Moments of wondering if I’m really measuring up to the task of educating my children while all of this mayhem is playing like a backing track in the daily rhythm of our lives. Yet, God is always good.
Over Christmas 2025, now a distant memory, I reflected once more on the crazy chaos Mary and Joseph were thrown into. It was God’s will. It was part of his master plan, even though it was a mess from a human perspective.
Let’s replay the scene. Imagine you’re about to get married and then you’re pregnant with God’s son, but God doesn’t confirm that important little bit of info to your fiance right away. Then, when you’re heavily pregnant, you have to travel a three day journey on foot to be counted in a national census. The icing on the cake? The baby arrives while you’re away, and soon the government is trying to murder your child to protect their power. You then must flee to a third country where you are to wait until the murderous leader dies. WOW!! It’s actually the stuff of nightmares.
Sometimes, chaos is a part of God’s plan, whether we like it or not.
HOMESCHOOLING THROUGH THE CHAOS
So what is a homeschool parent to do in these seasons? What have I learned?
- To make sure that children have key people they can go and talk to if everything feels too much. I believe this provided major relief for our kids during our chaotic season, and supported their mental health.
- Through all seasons, I need to keep pointing the children toward their goals and their futures, beyond our family home. That one day they’ll have their own story, and may it be sweeter and greater than ours. More godly than the example we have set. More fruitful and love-filled, by His grace.
- To continually direct their gaze upwards to the one they can trust to be stable and reliable all the time, no matter what chaos is happening in their earthly abode. Parents are not perfect, but Jesus is. Teaching our kids to trust in God is the greatest gift we can give them.
- That the chaos they were experiencing alongside us was a part of the real life teaching that homeschooling is all about. It’s hard to hide things from the kids when they are about so often. Sometimes that feels like alot of pressure, but it is the way that the home worked for hundreds of years before global, mandatory education.
The kids see the arguments on high stress days, and how they are overcome.
The way you respond and adjust when things go wrong on huge projects, like co-ordinating an international move. Critical life skill.
Working as part of a team to get things finished. Pretty important.
I mean, they could have been at school drilling their math facts and writing an interesting short story. Or watching a teacher have a chair thrown at them and other unruly behaviour from poorly trained children, if the recent teacher strike stories are anything to go by. With that perspective, I think that the chaotic, unplanned international move was the most educational out of all the possibilities. We can’t avoid chaos. Nobody gets to live a completely calm, stress-free life in this fallen world. Every season is an opportunity for our kids to learn about real life. That is the beauty of homeschooling.
If you’re going through a really rough patch in your home right now, and life feels like chaos, may you know God is with you. God is for you, and he will help you.
P.S. The book review and booklets I shared about in this post are still on the way, and I am looking forward to releasing the first one soon.
