Being a Homeschooling Kidmin Leader

Have you ever wondered if you can homeschool your kids while serving full or part-time as a kidmin leader? You can!

Hear how Amber has balanced homeschooling and leading in kidmin while making the discipleship of her children her priority. 

#homeschool #discipleship #familyfirstkidmin #intentionalchildrensministry

Transcript

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Welcome to the Kidman Huddle with Amber Pike, where children as ministry leaders get equipped, encouraged, and empowered to disciple with intentionality, growing God's kingdom one child at a time.

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Welcome back to the Kidman Huddle. If you know me or you've been following me for a while, you might know that I am a homeschooling mom. At this point, I've been doing it my oldest entire schooling. We started when he was three. We did like pre-K three. I mean, I think I'm a veteran by this point. I love it. I love it. And I've been hearing from several Kidman leaders. I've been having some people reach out to me and ask questions. Hey, how can I homeschool while being a Kidman leader? So that is what today's episode is about. If you are considering homeschool, if you have friends that maybe even aren't in the ministry, share this podcast with them because I'm going to talk about how much I love homeschool, why I'm homeschooling, and then how you can do it if you are working as a Kidman leader and you can absolutely transfer out that Kidman leader to a different job if you're wondering, can you balance this with a job? So the why. I knew before I had my first child, before my son Reed was born, I knew that I wanted to homeschool. I was not a homeschool kid. Often you see that. People who went to homeschool, they were probably homeschooled. I was not. I did a combination of Christian school and then public school. I went to public kindergarten, private school from first grade through sixth grade, seventh and eighth, and then high school, all in public school. And then I went to a private university for college. And I went into homeschool. Why? Well, I knew that I wanted control over what my child was exposed to. We talk at Renew A Nation a lot about the influences that are on your child. School is a major influence on your child. The school is either teaching your child to know, love, and serve God, or teaching them not to, and there really is no in-between. So a truly biblical Christian school would be a good option if they are truly discipling, if there isn't just Bible class as the only discipleship component, but the whole school, all the teachers is discipling. But even that is sometimes hard to find. Near me, there was not a Christian school that I would have accepted as an okay option. Plus they're very pricey. My niece was in private school and I think it was like 8,000 a year. That's a lot on a children's leader salary. So I knew that I wanted to control the education. I wanted to be in control of what my kid was taught. I know when I was going through public middle and high school, there was definitely anti-God stuff. Fast forward, what, 15 years after that? Oh, you better believe it is even worse. So I wanted to know what my child was learning. have complete control. I do not want some teacher teaching my child about who to love, or how they can identify or my goodness, some of the stuff that is shown in school, they're teaching young elementary school children, self satisfaction techniques. No, no, no, no, I'm in control. I also know that though you might be blessed with good teachers, like here in the county that I live in the public schools are still pretty good. Honestly, we're one of the best in the States. We are in a Jesus-loving county. So predominantly, it would be okay. But what about the kids at school? In the early 2000s, when I was riding the bus to and from school, there were drug deals going on behind me in a good school. I don't live in the city. I live in a good school in a good county. Yeah. But that was happening. So I wanted to control the influences around my child, both the kids, the teachers, the curriculum that was being used. I wanted to do all of that. And then honestly, I wanted to be with my kids. Well, I mean, at that point, I didn't have kids yet. But when that little boy was growing in my belly, I knew that I wanted to disciple him all the time. I wanted to live... life, my days with him. And I knew that homeschool was going to be the best choice. It did take a little bit to get my husband, who is public school, tried and true all the way through. It took a while to get him on board. And it was actually a fun story. Back in the day, Answers in Genesis, who we are not that far from, used to do children's ministry conferences. I loved going. It was like a weekend getaway for us. My husband does not serve in children's ministry, never has, but he would go with me. And we would always eat at Waffle House because that was like the only place that was there that was a restaurant on like the one mealtime that we had free. And we heard Ken Ham speak, whom I love to hear speak. And I remember my husband looked at me. He's like, okay, let's homeschool. It was a children's ministry conference. So see, it's all related. So like I said, my oldest is going into ninth grade this year. We started when he was in preschool three because I'm just cool and extra like that. And I absolutely love it. It is still the perfect choice for my family, for my kids. From an education standpoint, it is the perfect choice for us. So my son was slow to pick up on reading. He was seven going at eight before he really, really grasped reading past the CVC words, you know, the three letter like rat, cat, hat. He was seven going at eight before he really grasped it. My daughter, actually, kind of the same way. She picked it up a little earlier. But both of my kids, it was that wanting to read and the knowing that they can before they would take off. But while my son was slower with reading, he was crazy good at math. So he would go around on Wednesdays at church and be like, I know the square root of this. Do you? And adults were looking at him and they're like, I do not. So if you... were like my kid or like me at church sometimes, when I was ahead of the curve, I would act out. Is that you? That was me. Fun fact, you're learning all the fun facts about me. I was kicked out of youth group and asked not to return because I was being treated like a child and I did not like it. I was being treated like a toddler. We all joked with each other and the youth pastor did not like it. And he would nail a nail in a board and then pull it out to show how our words would leave wounds. And I'm like, I'm done. At the same time, he called my mom and asked me not to come back. I definitely acted out because I was bored. Kids do that, right? So my kid probably in a traditional classroom setting would have acted out because he was bored in math. But versus when kids are struggling, they also act out. And just my kid, he's an odd duck. Love him. He's amazing. He's a fact kid. And he wants to tell you all of these facts. It's not going to fly in a school setting when the kid wants to teach the lesson, right? So homeschool from an education standpoint was absolutely what I wanted to do. However, long before Reed, I was called to be a children's minister. So how do I balance, even still to this day, homeschooling and let's call it my career, right? So at times I work multiple jobs. Now I just work for Renew Nation and I'm a volunteer at my church. But a couple of years back, I had a full-time job that was remote. And then I also was a full-time Kidman leader and I homeschooled during all of this. So can you be a full-time children's ministry leader and homeschool your kids? Yes. Yes, you can. So if that is your question, you're on the fence, do I homeschool? Can I do it? The answer is yes. Yes, yes, yes. So a couple of things with this. Homeschool does take some time because you have to teach them. Now, when I'm talking about homeschool, I'm not talking about the online digital academies where your kid sits in front of a screen and there's an online teacher. That's not the same thing as homeschool. When COVID hit and People were going to remote learning in schools and like, oh, this is horrible. How do you do it? I'm like, that's not homeschool. That's not. So this is the, you, the teacher are teaching. There's a curriculum that you've bought. You've pieced together. You've got a plan, whatever that looks like. It's not a video teacher classroom. So not that. There is some time. So there's a couple of things that you really need to make this happen. One is that you need a church that's willing to work with you. So if your church says you have to put in five days of office hours from eight to four every single week, you're going to struggle to homeschool. Unless you're okay with doing homeschool at night, which is absolutely fine. Check your state rules when it comes to homeschooling. Here in Kentucky, they really don't care. They're like, sure, homeschool your kids these number of days. Just let us know. Cover these subjects. You're good. Other states I know are more stringent with their rules. So you absolutely check that. Check your state rules on what homeschooling requirements there are. But just kind of in general, if you have to put in office hours every single day, homeschool might be a bit more of a struggle to get in those hours in those days. I also have been blessed to have the most amazing mother in the world. And from the day that my son was born... She has watched my kids almost every single Wednesday, except for, you know, sicknesses. And even though I'm no longer church staff, my mom still watches my kids every Wednesday. Now, this has been a huge blessing for me. I did not have to put in Monday through Friday office hours. So our homeschooling schedule was Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Wednesday was my work day. So if you are homeschooling as a Kidman leader, what work can you do from home? Can you, you know, maybe you got to go in Monday for staff meetings, but you don't have to stay the whole day. So homeschool in the afternoon. But take your kids to work with you when you can. I absolutely have had my kids go to work with me all the time, sit through meetings. They can do schoolwork there. Once your kids get reading on their own, there's so much that they can do on their own. And then even still, when they're not reading, you can give them instruction time. So I will go over, all right, Riley, here's your math. And we go over how to do the math. And then she works on her math on her own independently. And then we check it. We go over the answers. We fix what we did wrong. So it's not... you know, three hours intense, you need every second of my attention. So let's say I'm taking my kid to work with me and I need to work on prepping the volunteer boxes to teach Sunday school. Okay, got you rolling on your work and I'm over here, holler when you need me. Absolutely doable. But sometimes you need a little bit of focus. And this is why I recommend if you have a parent, maybe you or your husband could, or your spouse, because maybe you're the guy who wants to homeschool. That's cool too. You and your spouse can switch off. So maybe there's one day a week that they can work from home and let you go work in the church. I really recommend trying to get a day off. Half a day, a good chunk of time where you can go into the office and do those things that need to be done there. Maybe you need to clean up from last week's event. Maybe you need to run a million copies. You know, Kidman 101, how to kill a bunch of trees by making copies. How can you get some time that you can do the in-office work that you need? That is a really, really, really helpful thing when you are homeschooling. You also need to learn a very important word. It's a very easy word, but very hard word. Know. Remember what your number one priority is. Now you've been called to this church. You hopefully love where you serve and you love the kids and the families. You are happy to be there and serving and you are called to disciple. However, you are first called to disciple your kids. So sometimes as a parent, you need to say no to children's ministry stuff for the sake of your family. And that's sometimes really, really hard. I'm going to give you an example. So my last church would do their VBS following the town's big July celebration. We have a big county day. There's a parade. There's booths, all sorts of fun. So my plan was to have consistency in the VBS date so families could always know when to expect our VBS. And it was always going to be the week following this big town celebration.

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Okay.

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My church was in town, right? The parade walked right by my church. So would that have not been prime opportunity to have a big, huge, rent some inflatables, have some signs, maybe have a float in the parade? That would have been great advertising, right? Guess how many years I did that? One that I ran a booth at the church. I had a jumpy and I think I made balloon animals. One out of 10 years being there. Why? because I wanted to be with my kids at the town celebration. It is absolutely okay. And I highly encourage you say no to things that are going to take you away from your kids. You're called to disciple your kids. So, okay, did we miss out on some kids maybe hearing about our vacation Bible school because I chose to enjoy the parade and the day with my kids? Could be. But I'm called to disciple my kids first and then Kidman second. So what does this look like as a homeschooling parent? Maybe this looks like I'm not putting in as many office hours. Maybe this looks like, hey, I cannot go to this school's lunch once a month. There are times when you're going to say yes. A little girl that I had years back had a private school that would have a pastor's appreciation lunch. And so I would go take her McDonald's and have lunch with her and I'd get a babysitter for that, which was my mom. Absolutely. But are there things that you need to say no to? So that you can disciple. And that is A-OK. As a homeschooling parent, you are discipling. That is your job. Your number one job to disciple your kids. So if you have to say no to some kid men stuff, that is OK. So you have a church that doesn't need five days worth of office hours. And you're going to get creative with sometimes how you work. I work evenings. I always have, right? Because there is a bulk of my time where I'm homeschooling. So I will work some evenings. Today, for example, it is currently, when I'm recording, it is 8.15 at night. because I had a full day. We're in summer, so there wasn't homeschooling today. However, I did have like my kid time and we were doing some stuff. And I had a lot of meetings today that were kind of long. And I ran out of time to record this podcast through my workday. And then we had to eat real quick, kind of like messed up eating. We're like, I fed the kids and I ate like something real quick because we had to run up to church. My husband was, got off work, was mowing. It's been a monsoon. It's crazy. But we had a church bringing us vacation Bible school stuff from three different churches. Like we got so much stuff. Had to be Kidman leader. So I'm coming back and doing my work at 8.15 at night. The kids are hanging out with dad. That looks like that sometimes. And you guys know that. You're doing that anyways, where there are times you don't get stuff done and you're working in the evenings. But it is about balance and remembering your priorities. So homeschool wise, it is not an eight hour a day thing, right? Now, the states that have school requirements, they are asking some of them. For Kentucky, for example, I don't know all 50 states' homeschool rules. I'm sorry. You're going to have to look it up on your own. In Kentucky, it is 180, I think, days of six hours, I believe is what it comes out to. But what constitutes as school? That doesn't mean it's six hours of book work. And if you hop on any Facebook group for homeschooling, moms, groups, any pages, everyone will tell you absolutely that is not six or eight hours of sitting down doing book work. They don't have that in public school, in a class full of kids. So really, the equivalent of a school day for a homeschool kid is between one to three hours tops. Because there's a lot of life factored in. Doing chores, learning life skills, learning how to do laundry, how to cook, going to the bank, making a grocery list, or going and helping mom with all of her cool church stuff, right? There's so many opportunities that your kids get to do with you as a children's ministry leader when you homeschool. For me, this was one of those years where I got to do kind of a bucket list thing. Actually, I'll even go, I'll rewind a year before. Last year was the first year that I took my son with me to do a conference. And he went with me to Answers in Genesis VBS workshop. And he got to help lead it with me. And I let him have leadership positions. And he runs the sound. He does my computer slides. But I let him have a teaching part of this. And it was so cool to get to see my kid shine with giftedness. And then this year, he took his first ever flight with me to Oklahoma. And we did a children's ministry conference on a Friday in Oklahoma. Now, he normally would have been in school and I would have had to have, you know, made up some reason why I'm taking my kid out of school to go do this. But that was educational. That kid rocked running a booth, selling books from a booth. Way better than doing some book work. And it was ministry and who's going to tell people about why they needed this curriculum because it's going to teach them God's word and da da da da da. And it was amazing. There are so many beautiful benefits of homeschooling that you get to live life with your kids. You get to disciple. What if your kid's going to be the next children's ministry leader? I really hope one of my kids becomes the next Miss Amber in our family. And I get to help them do that because they get to work alongside with mom. They test out some of the crafts before or the science lessons or object tricks before. I did the other day, I was testing on a new magic trick, the card one. If you saw my YouTube video of the magic card reveal, and I'm testing it out for my son and he's like, try this. I truly do not have enough positive things to say about homeschooling your kids. Now, what's the negative? You're with your kids all the time. And there are those days if you have more than one that they pick at each other for sure. And I tease my mom and I tell her to come get her grandkids because I'm getting real tired of watching her grandkids. But I love it. There are going to be rough days, whether they are in Christian school, public school, homeschool, kids are kids and they're going to fight and they're going to pick at each other and everybody's going to lose their cool. That's life. Other negatives. It's a time investment. You have to prep and you have to plan. You might have to rearrange your schedule. You might have to say some no for things. You might have to bring in a babysitter if you've got a big meeting that you need a babysitter for. Okay. But the benefit is that you get to disciple your kids. Parents have the most influence on their children. But the second greatest influence often is school. It's not supposed to be. Biblically, that should be grandparents, but it's often school. If a kid is hopping on the bus, going through eight hours of school, another bus ride home, you're looking at like 10 hours of Those 10 hours of discipleship, but what if you got those back? Because those 10 hours at school, that's discipling them the world's way to not believe God's truths. But what if you had 10 hours to disciple your kids, given back every single day? Well, because we homeschooled, I had the amazing privilege of leading both of my kids to Christ in the middle of a random homeschool day. So my oldest in our Bible lesson, we were on Esther. Love Esther. In college, I did an assignment on Purim, the festival that the Jews celebrate for Queen Esther. And so we were talking about that, and I was teaching them about Purim. I think we made hamantesen cookies, which are very yummy. Check with me. I'll give you the recipe. And this was not a, are you ready to be a Christian conversation, right? This was just us talking about Queen Esther in our Bible lesson in homeschool. And there at the kitchen table, my son started asking questions and then mommy cried and he accepted Christ. Boy, was I so thankful that I homeschooled that day. Fast forward a few more years, we added Riley to the mix and she had the head knowledge for a good year and a half, two years, solid. But she did not want to become a not at all what we were talking on. I think we had finished school for the day and my kids were getting ready to be picked up by my parents, I think to go out to dinner with them because we get extra Grammy and grandpa time because we homeschool too, which is a beautiful benefit. My son built a swing with my dad this summer. So cool. From scratch. Grandpa just taught him how to. And my daughter started asking me some questions that had just been really tugging on her heartstrings. She had been, she'd been fighting God. She'd been telling him no when it was time for her to surrender. So the middle of a homeschool day, I'm sitting at the kitchen table. She asks me these questions and she can't fight God any longer. And she surrenders her life and becomes a Christian. Man, two for two in the middle of a homeschool day. Mamas, daddies. This is the benefit of you getting to disciple your kid all the time. So if you are questioning, is homeschool right for me? Is this a good choice for us? I just want to encourage you with a resounding yes. As a mom who's been there, who has homeschooled for 12, 13 years, it's amazing. It's exhausting. The kids are kids. It's messy. But it's amazing. The discipleship opportunity, the discipleship influence that you get to have on your kid. Yes, you are a disciple maker in your passion, in your career. That's what God's called you to do is to disciple boys and girls. Man, but if you get to do that more at home, that's even better. So please reach out to me if you have questions about how to do it or make it work. If you need suggestions of things, I have been homeschooling for a really long time. My style might not be your style, but I might have some ideas that could help you. I highly encourage it because eternity matters for your kids. Your number one job is to disciple your children. So remember, Kidney Meter, what you do matters.