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I'm a work from home dad (100% remote full-time developer) with a 3 year old. I was home-schooled myself, so your situation is not entirely foreign to me. As you can imagine, you will find this incredibly difficult. You might be able to pull it off. But if you're looking at 4, 5, 6 or more years of that...you'll probably end up needing medication and/or therapy. I'm not even kidding. Even if not, you'll run the risk of being thoroughly miserable and regretting everything. My mother gave up 9 years of her life to home school my brother and me. She was miserable for much of that time, and that was with one less kid and one less job than you. I know that's anecdotal, but it's also kind of obvious. So from a purely practical standpoint, don't home school MOST of your children. If your daughter is truly on the autism spectrum and the local public school can't effectively deal with that, then +1 for homeschooling her. For children who don't have special needs like that, there's no real need for it. You can send them to public school and still be involved in their education. Learning how to think and learning how to learn are perhaps the most important skills, and they can still be learned in the home. So come up with a short term plan, then worry about the long-term plan later. If you really think you're cut out for this (and yes, truly ask yourself that in a mirror), find a part or full-time remote job right now. Take whichever you can find first. Plan to send your kids to public school except for the autism spectrum one. This will allow you to give both her and your new job a reasonable amount of attention. Even with only 1 child at home you'll find it quite challenging, though hopefully also rewarding. Probably not exactly what you wanted to hear, but practical solutions rarely are. If you've read this far, allow me to vent about homeschooling for non-special-needs reasons. Please don't. There's a reason everyone thinks home schoolers are weird. We are. Despite parents best intentions ("best" ranging from individual attention to religious dogmatism), we have near zero interaction with our peers. When we do, it's a very small number of them and for very short periods. We have near zero experience interacting with anyone or anything outside the home. The real world becomes terrifying when you're stuck in a small, safe, homogeneous bubble and don't realize it. Finally, we're with our parents and siblings nearly every minute of the week. That is incredibly unhealthy for a family - being stuck in a house ALL THE TIME with your classmates and teacher. We were all a little miserable, especially in the teenage years. Now if your primary reasons aren't religious, some of that can be avoided, but it will take a concerted effort, which will take time away from your job. And your kids will still turn out a little weird and possibly resent you, even if just a little, for not letting them be "normal." |