Hercules Overwhelmed: Dealing with Homeschool “Burnout” By Adam AndrewsHave you ever heard the story of the labors of Hercules? It’s the ancient Greek myth in which Hercules, the son of Zeus, performs twelve nearly impossible tasks for the mortal King Eurystheus in exchange for immortality.

If you are a homeschool parent, go read this story immediately. The parallels between your situation and Hercules’ are striking. You probably already know this at a certain level; in fact, I’ll bet you have described your own homeschooling as “the labors of Hercules” at one time or another. My wife Missy and I certainly have. Many are the times we have thrown up our hands as if to say, “This job is impossible—Hercules himself couldn’t do it!”

The main difference between Hercules and us, of course, lies in the goals for which we strive. While Missy and I are merely trying to raise well-adjusted, well-educated children, Hercules was trying to become a god. So while our difficulties may be “Herculean,” the goals and aspirations of this ancient Greek hero don’t really apply to us.

Do they?

Look at the story a little more closely. It begins when Hercules, in a fit of insanity, kills his six children (no, this is not the part that applies to us!). Hercules is ordered by his father, Zeus, to do penance for this sin by performing twelve labors for King Eurystheus. If he succeeds, Hercules will be worthy to enter the company of the gods. That is, if he can persevere in superhuman effort until the end without tiring, then fame, renown, and immortality will await him as the just reward of all his labors.

In other words, Hercules sets out to earn a good reputation by working really, really hard.

When I look at Hercules’ situation this way, it resonates with my own experience as a homeschool parent. This is because as I see it, part of my task as a homeschooler is to prove to the world that I can do it. I can take a job—the education of a child—that is usually performed by the combined efforts of hundreds of people with millions of dollars and decades of experience and . . . do it better all by myself. As I see it, part of my task is to prove to the world that I am just as good an educator working alone as that whole establishment is working together, and that the product of my work is as good as anything graduating from the school down the street.

In other words, part of my task is to earn a good reputation by working really, really hard.

I think this is one of the main causes of “burnout” among homeschool parents. Not only are we concerned about the academic progress of our students, but we also are concerned with our own performance as educators. Of course, we often stumble under the heavy work load of planning and teaching. In the end, though, it is not the quantity of work so much as what’s riding on the outcome that really wears us out.

This was certainly true for Missy and me as we taught our oldest son Ian from kindergarten through high school. We felt challenged at every turn to prove our worth as teachers and parents by giving him the perfect education. A well-designed, well-executed homeschool curriculum could make Ian an exemplary young man and in the process prove that we were good teachers, good parents, and good people.

Missy and I zealously embraced this challenge. We spent countless hours developing and delivering a top-notch curriculum. We gave our whole lives to the task of training Ian to be

the model boy we knew we could create. We built a case for ourselves as homeschooling parents par excellence using our son as Exhibit A.

The results were two different kinds of bad.

First, Ian could sense what was happening, and he rebelled against it. He was essentially being forced into a kind of slavery, compelled to work for someone else’s benefit, and he eventually quit. He resisted our teaching, sniffed hypocrisy in our pleas for good behavior, resented our insistence on conformity and high achievement, and styled himself a rebel—the very opposite of what we intended him to be.

On our part, the harder he pushed back, the more insistent we became. The issue of Ian’s performance and whether or not it validated our efforts became an obsession with both of us. The harder we tried to coerce his performance, the harder he resisted, until finally we fell down exhausted. The homeschooling project, about which we had been so enthusiastic, lost all of its luster. We saw ourselves as the victims of a cruel joke, pouring our hearts and souls into a project for fifteen years and receiving nothing but rebellion in return. The results on which we had hung our hopes were nowhere to be found and seemed to recede further into the distance the harder we tried to conjure them. We gave up in our hearts, threw up our hands, and despaired.

It was burnout all right, and it overwhelmed us both.

During this dark time, we came slowly to realize that in all our efforts to serve God as homeschoolers, we were actually worshiping ourselves. All of our efforts had been aimed at self-preservation and self-glorification, the worst kind of idolatry. Like Hercules, we had attempted—by working really, really hard—to become gods.

But it was worse than that. Since every idol demands a sacrifice, we had offered up our own son on the altar of self: his interests in exchange for our own glory.

What finally saved us is a well-kept secret known to only a few fortunate homeschoolers, but I am pleased to share it with you here. This secret was hidden from us for years by the most ingenious deception. It was lying in plain sight all the time, present in the simplest nursery rhyme of all. It goes like this:

Jesus loves me, this I know,For the Bible tells me so;Little ones to Him belong;They are weak but He is strong.

The secret of this earth-shattering, world-changing nursery rhyme is that it is not written to your children. They are not the “little ones” of line three.

You are.

Jesus’s love for homeschool parents is unconditional; it comes to us regardless of our behavior. He loves us in the midst of our weakness, in the midst of our insufficiency, in the midst of our idolatry. He knows that even our honest efforts to serve Him are doomed to failure and fouled by self-worship. And He loves us just the same. We are weak, but He is strong.

Missy and I had been confusing identity with performance, operating under the assumption that who we are is defined by what we do. But in the Gospel, we found that our identity as people is independent of our performance as parents. It doesn’t actually matter to God how

well we perform, because His love for us is a free and permanent gift. We are not making a name for ourselves by laboring in the trenches of homeschooling. We already have the Name that is above all Names.

The power of this realization will do more than cure “burnout”: it will completely transform your homeschooling experience. In our family, it has been the catalyst for mutual repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with Ian. It has freed us to do what we love the most—teach school—with joy and abandon. It has even led to many of the academic results we were striving for in the first place. (For example, Ian made the Dean’s list at college last semester and plans to come and work with us after graduation.)

Most importantly of all, though, the Gospel will heal your soul of weariness and transform “burnout” into simple fatigue, for which a day off every now and then is a sufficient cure.

So read the story of Hercules right away—but don’t follow his example. Rest instead in the love of Jesus, and the fruit of His labors will be yours in abundance.

Adam Andrews is the Director of the Center for Literary Education and a homeschooling father of six. Adam earned his B.A. from Hillsdale College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. He and his wife Missy are the authors of Teaching the Classics, the popular reading and literature curriculum. They teach their children at home in Rice, Washington. For more information, visit www.centerforlit.com .

Copyright 2014, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the Annual Print 2014 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the family education magazine. Read the magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on the go and download the free apps at www.TOSApps.com to read the magazine on your mobile devices.