Tips and Strategies for Managing the Demands of Being a Teacher-Mom

I can see why a lot of teachers when they become mothers, decide to be stay-at-home moms. And I know that’s also not for everyone. So in my personal life, I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. Like I love my children, I love being with them, but being a stay-at-home mom. For my personality–it was never in the cards.

But I also am very aware of the feelings that I have felt from being a mother and a teacher. As a full-time working mother, it’s been really hard. There’re a lot of feelings of guilt when you’re spending more time with someone else’s children than your own. A lot of times on a day-to-day basis,  especially if you’re doing things after school, in addition to during the school day.

So here are my three tips and strategies to help you manage those demands of being a teacher Mommy.

Welcome to the Secondary Teacher Podcast, the podcast for middle and high school teachers juggling multiple preps to get the strategies to reduce overwhelm so that you don’t have to choose between being an effective teacher and prioritizing important relationships. I’m your host, Khristen Massic, a 10-year high school engineering teacher, former middle school assistant principal, and teacher coach. Every week, we will discuss strategies, systems, and time-saving tips to help you not only survive but thrive as a multiple prep teacher.

My very, very first tip, and probably like if you only listened to one of the three tips, would be the one is: to get your time-sensitive tasks completed while you are at school.

I will say from personal experience that the most stressful thing is if I have something that I need to do the next day like I haven’t finished my lesson planning or, or there’s just something that’s like looming over my head that I must get done. It makes it harder to spend quality time with me especially as the night kind of like draws on. So sometimes I have like tried to like multitask and I’m cooking and I’m like on my laptop and then I’m not really like that present.

So I’ve definitely done that. Then the other times, the other things that I’ve done are that I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten short with my kids, like when I’m putting them to bed if I have something that I have to get done that night in order to be prepared for the next school day.

It is so hard for me to relax and enjoy the time with them, and instead, I get like I said, I get short with them because I’m like, you just need to close your eyes. You need to go to bed. I need to get something done. Getting those time-sensitive things like having those as your like top priority items will save you a ton of, I guess, that added stress.

And then your relationships with your children, your spouse, whoever, your partner while you are. at home. Now, I do say that I do some things like after they’ve gone to sleep, but I try to have those be items that are not time-sensitive. So maybe I’m planning for something like it’s happening in a couple of weeks or even the following week, or I just wanna update this or something.

Or it also lets me, if I’ve already finished up that like time-sensitive stuff, then I can spend time doing things that I want to, okay, so that is like my number one overall tip and strategy is get that time-sensitive tasks completed while you are at school. . Okay. Then the next two are very similar. So one is to simplify as much as possible at home.

So with your meal planning, with your prep, with your cooking, with your cleaning, with your laundry, how can you like systemize, and automate whatever you need to do to make that super, super, super simple. So with meal planning, We like to plan on a weekly basis. So on Saturday, we will decide what we’re going to be eating the next week, and we go to the grocery store just for that week.

We already get everything done, and you could even simplify that further because we go to the grocery store. and we could order it. We could order that and pick it up on Monday. We could actually even pick it up on Saturday. So that is one thing that, one way that we have simplified our meals at home. The other thing is the cooking part of it.

So we really use our pressure cooker, our instant Pot, five out of the seven days a week, we use it all the. and there might be some other appliance that you would use all the time. And so we do use freezer meals. So even with like our meal planning is we are planning which freezer meals to take out of the deep freeze and move inside our house so that we can cook those that weak.

So that really has simplified things. We actually, go once a month and we make 20 meals at a. . So we just always have them in our freezer and we just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And that has really, really simplified our stress. Because when you come home from school, you are tired.

Like you have been, you’ve been having like all these like decisions. You’re having to switch things. You’re, you’re fatigued. You are very fatigued, and then you’re, you go pick up your kids and. All sorts of other dynamics happen. I know like with one of my children in particular, I think she is like the model student at school, and when she comes home she kind of lets out, like all of her emotions that she wished she would’ve been able to let out at school.

but it’s a safe place at home, so there could be like heightened emotions. So being able to like have things simplified at home makes it so that I’m not super stressed. Getting the cooking done, getting the cleaning done, getting all of that done. And I can focus on like helping her regularly, her emotions, and then, as I said, then kind of like decompressing myself because of what had happened during the school day.

So then my third tip, which is like pretty much the same as the second tip, but in a different location is to simplify as much as possible at school. . So this is with your unit, planning your lesson, planning your grading, your emails, like any of those other tasks that you do on a day-to-day basis. Just simplifying things as much as possible will really, really help you.

First off, it will help with that decision fatigue. So you’re already going, you will. Decision fatigue no matter what because it’s, it’s decisions that you’re making as you’re teaching. When students aren’t getting something and you’re having to figure out how to explain it in a different way, you will still have that.

So what you want to minimize is the planning and the decisions that you need to make within your planning. So one of the things that I love to do is I love to have templates and things that I just repeat over and over and over again. With protocols, if I’m using a jigsaw, maybe I don’t use a jigsaw every single week in all of my classes.

Maybe it’s like every other week, but I could be using a jigsaw every other week in all of my classes, and quite honestly, I could even do a jigsaw on the same day. in all of my classes just with different content. So I’m not having to like think about like rearranging my room or what are we gonna do?

Are we gonna do like all of our labs on certain days? And sometimes it is easier to have all of the stuff out so that I’m not having to like jump between like one class and another class and one’s doing a lab and one’s not doing a lab and one needs things out and one doesn’t, and equipment and everything.

It just simplifies things so, . I always know what’s happening and so do the students. So Jared also does something similar and he teaches like every Monday, so he’s on the block schedule and every Monday is when he does his lectures. He does just in time teaching all the time when he is in the shop. But that main like, Hey, we’re gonna come together.

We’re going to do like direct instruction that is on Monday. , so it is every other week for students when they get that direct instruction lecture. He also knows every Sunday night that he will be doing a lecture on Monday. He’s made it that way. He knows that it’s going to be there. It’s, it’s predictable.

also doesn’t really switch up how he does the direct instruction, which could seem boring, but really he’s only doing this every other week for his students. It can get like a little monotonous for him, but super, super predictable. The kids are taking notes the same way They’re, they’re like interacting with each other the same way.

There’s formative assessment the same way every two weeks, every other week. , it has simplified the planning and the prep that he needs to do while he’s at. I could probably talk about this stuff forever, but I’m gonna wrap up this episode so that you can get on to doing whatever you need to do for the remainder of the day.

And I just wanna recap what I went over. So we’re talking about three tips and strategies for managing being a teacher-mom. First and foremost. One is to get your time-sensitive tasks completed at school. The second one is to simplify as much at home as possible, and then finally, simplify as much at school as possible.

If this episode was helpful to you, it could be for others. To help with the word about this podcast, take a screenshot of this episode, add it to your IG stories, and tag me at Khristen Massic, K H R I S T E N M A S S I C. Until next week.