Your kids never stop needing you, but there are certain stages of life when they are needier than others. When children start kindergarten, moms, and stay-at-home moms in particular, can feel as though they have a chance to slow down and take a breath for the first time in years. This is a good time to take stock and consider a few changes.
Consider Your Career
If you’ve been working outside the home, a good chunk of your salary may have been going to childcare, and you might have felt stretched pretty thin while your kids were young. If you’ve been a stay-at-home mom, you might have started to think about going back to work either part-time or full-time.
In either case, this might be a time for you to reassess your career options and ambitions, with an eye to rededicating yourself to them. Some moms may want to consider going back to school to get a degree, additional training or certification.
Look at Your Finances
This is also not a bad time to organize your finances. How you approach this will vary depending on whether you are a one or two-income family, how you make financial decisions and who is primarily in charge of the finances. However, things to look at might be whether you need to budget better, whether you are putting money away for retirement and whether you need to start a college fund for your child.
If you have student loans yourself, you may want to look at whether you can cut back on your monthly expenses with an Earnest student loan refinance. This can free up money you could put toward your child’s college fund or other necessities.
Review Your Routine
The change in your routine is probably more significant if you’re a stay-at-home mom, but even if you work outside the home, this is a good time to take a look at your routine and figure out if you want to change up some things about it. If you’re not quite ready to go out to work yet, you might want to consider some gig work or part-time remote work to get your foot back in the workplace door and make a little extra cash.
This might also be the time to take on some household projects you were never really able to get done with little ones underfoot, whether that’s finally organizing that extra room that’s supposed to be a guest bedroom, scheduling some needed repairs or renovations, or organizing family paperwork.
Give Yourself Time
There’s plenty of talk about the empty nest parents experience when their kids head off to college, but there’s an empty nest feeling about your only or youngest child starting kindergarten as well. Whether you were looking forward to or dreading this day, find ways to manage parental stress and anxiety and understand there is going to a period of adjustment.
There’s nothing wrong with letting yourself grieve for your child’s babyhood and toddler years as long as you aren’t conveying that grief to your child. Let yourself feel the full spectrum of emotions, from sadness to pride and excitement at this new stage in your child’s life.
