How I Went back to School with Kids

It is wonderful and important to further your education, if that is what you want to do. Otherwise you may feel incomplete or like your kids somehow stood in the way. I feel our government can and should do a lot more to help student parents.

Here is what I did. I had to re-think traditional college...I started right after high school in 1989 when I was 17. I also had a 4-month old baby that I had a month before I graduated from high school. This baby turned 15 a month before I graduated from college. 15 years! That is how long I had been going to school off and on, trying to force traditional college into my life. I also had two more children along the way and got married. I found out about the University of Phoenix (UOP) in 2000, and enrolled in October of 2001. I marched in 2004 with just 9 credits to go, and officially finished early 2005.

The beauty of UOP is that they have degree programs you can complete online, or for folks like me who need more discipline/structure, offline programs where you only have one class, one night a week, for 5-week segments. You meet with a study group/learning team one day or night a week (you get to decide). It was a world of difference from traditional college programs of semesters or quarters with 4-6 classes at a time. I won't lie to you, academically I found it to be a lot more stressful because there were papers due every single week. Sometimes even the first class. I remember with regular college being able to let weeks go by without really doing anything but study. However with UOP by the time I got burnt out by a class it was over. The time just flies by.

If you do traditional college you can work, but you might have to just go to school part-time and work part-time. Only you really know what your stress level is and what you can handle. If you have one, talk in detail with your husband or partner about how they can support you in school and help with the kids and housework...like coming home after lunch from a study meeting and your kids haven't eaten since you made them breakfast is a sucky, sucky feeling. I've actually had this happen, and my husband said, well they didn't say they were hungry! Like he had no idea two little boys needed lunch.

Anyway. If you are the major childcare parent, you may have to go into basic detail with your husband about feeding, cleaning, safety (like if he takes them bike-riding, make them put on helmets), recreation, friends over, bedtime, etc. And keep in mind that dads do parent differently. He's not going to do things anywhere near like how you do them. But as long as they are fed and clean (relatively, ha ha) and safe that's ok.

Also, if you have friends who are also student mamas you can try doing book swaps and childcare swaps. Trading and sharing books helped me out a lot back in the day. College textbooks are so expensive. In regards to money I qualified for grants and loans. That enabled me to go back to college as we didn't make the kind of money to pay for college outright. You can get financial aid for any degree program from any accredited school. Check with the school you are interested in to find out all your financial aid options.

Subscribe to Trula's blog by email