Balancing a Degree with Family Life: A Guide

Taking a course or qualification can help to boost your career and self-esteem. However, how do you focus on your own education when your kids are still in school? Balancing family life with your new commitment to education can be highly fraught. This guide will help you to understand the best ways that you can both gain a qualification for yourself and ensure you can still spend time with your family. 

Take an Online Degree

Online degrees are some of the best options for mature students who want to focus on their family life. This is because you can conduct online degrees from anywhere in the world, ensuring that you do not have to leave your family home or go away for months at a time to complete your qualification. Instead, you will be able to submit your assessments, watch seminars and lectures, and use college resources from the comfort of your own home, leaving you to spend more time with the people you love. For instance, Merrimack College’s online M.Ed. in High School Education can help you to achieve the qualifications you need for teaching without living on campus.  While perhaps not available for online degrees, if you do decide to go college. It can be well worth checking out if any scholarships are available such as those available from Nancy Etz

Look for Childcare Facilities 

If you have a small child and want to be able to take them with you to your lectures and seminars at a physical college, you should also look for childcare facilities on campus. It can be hard to find a babysitter to cover all of your lectures and to ensure that you do not miss out, many college campuses’ have free care facilities for young children, which let you drop them off and pick them up around your degree schedule. 

Find Family-Friendly Accommodation 

If you are going away for your education, you should consider finding college accommodation options that are family-friendly. Rather than having to leave your kids at home, there are many colleges that provide self-catered flats and studio flats for parents. These ensure that you do not have to live in accommodation that is difficult for families, such as shared housing or student flats. 

Have Good Time Management Skills 

However, one of the major steps that you can take to balance education with your family is to grow your time management skills, allowing you to free up time to spend with your kids. The most effective ways to do this include making a schedule, where you can allot time for both work and play, allowing you to find convenient time blocks within which to do work towards your degree. Having a routine also helps, as this will ensure that you are able to spend a regular amount of time with your kids on a daily basis.

Involve Your Kids

Kids love to be involved in whatever their parents are doing, and this applies to college too. Rather than bar them from your degree activities, why not spend time doing homework together, or let them help you to think of ideas for projects or assessments that you are working on? This will then help to prevent any resentment that your kids feel towards your degree and show them what you are spending time on.

 

Note: This is a collaborative post