Studying with children - how is that supposed to work?

Since so many students or prospective students keep asking me how I studied from home as a mother of several children and how I managed to juggle my studies, household, children and married life, I thought I'd show you in this post and give you a few tips.

Before I start, I should tell you that I have always studied with young children. I started my intensive Islamic studies programs just a few days before the birth of my second child, who was extremely premature (12 weeks early), so we spent 3 months in hospital in intensive care. I still started my studies al hamdu lillaah.

11 months after the birth of my second child, we had our third child, who was also extremely premature (14 weeks too early), which is why we were in hospital for a total of 6 months - first in intensive care and then on various wards due to various treatments and complications. I continued my studies anyway and was hardly negatively affected by the hospital stays.

In hospital you have even more peace and quiet and time than at home, which is why I have always used this time particularly well for my studies - even during later hospital stays.

But now to the actual topic:

Everyday life at home with studies and children.

When we were at home, our everyday life was of course still full of therapies and doctor's appointments. We had an average of 5 therapy and medical appointments per week with physiotherapy, occupational therapy, hippotherapy, speech therapy and early intervention. Around this, we organised our daily routine in such a way that we woke up at around 7 o'clock in the morning and then slowly made our way to the kitchen for breakfast. The slow and relaxed start to the day gave us a lot of peace and energy for the day. If you're already rushed in the morning, your energy is gone right after breakfast.

After breakfast, my husband went to work and I quickly tidied up the flat, vacuumed, mopped, wiped down all surfaces, switched on the washing machine and cleaned the bathroom. A hygienic environment is extremely important, especially with premature babies. A very important point here is that you should live a minimalist life, i.e. with as little clutter as possible. This makes cleaning easier and makes you happier - this has been scientifically proven.

By 9 o'clock, everything was clean and we could get down to learning and playing.

I had several learning/playing stations in the flat: one at our large dining table and one in the living room. Especially with small children, you can't expect them to play on their own, so they will always play with their parents. The word "with" is important here, because children don't have to play "with" their parents, but only "with" their parents.

Learning/game station at the table

At the table we had various opportunities for the children to colour and knead. We always called it "learning". So: "Mummy has to learn, would you like to learn too?" And if they wanted to, they painted or kneaded.

Tips: If you use blue play doh, there is less risk of the play doh being eaten. You can also make your own modelling clay without any chemicals.

Thick coloured pencils don't need to be sharpened as quickly as normal crayons. They are also easier for small children to hold.

Avoid felt-tip pens, this saves nerves, time and money.

If your children want to paint with watercolours, put a smock on them and use a cup that doesn't leak, e.g. with a cut air balloon.

If your child is still really small and has difficulty holding pencils, you can also give them wax crayons in the shape of mice.

Learning/play station in the living room

We had a large drawer with toys in the living room. The children could choose three things from here and we played with them that day. In the evening, these things were put back in the drawer and everything was tidied up again in a matter of seconds.

Tips: Have few toys for the children to choose from. Too much choice tends to overwhelm the children and makes the selection very difficult, which then leads to the children not wanting to play.

Setting boundaries vs. accessibility/Availability

Many sisters tell me that their children don't want to play on their own. There are usually three reasons for this: The children don't know how to play, they don't feel comfortable where to play, or the mums haven't set up enough boundaries. So, you should teach the children how to play, give them a colourful and clean play environment, but also set boundaries: "Mum is learning now and you are learning too." Or "Mummy learns now and you play now." Or "This is my toy (laptop) and this is your toy (toys)."

Of course you have to be accessible to your children, you shouldn't push them away or send them away. "Go away" or "Go and play" or "Leave me alone to learn" are absolute no-goes. When the children come to you, shower them with love, kisses and hugs so that they realise that they are welcome and loved, so that they can go and play again. You can still set boundaries, as described above. You can also encourage the children by saying: "How's your painting? Have you finished it yet?" or "Do you want to build a tower? Show me how high you can build a tower!" or "Try to put as many cars as possible on the roof of the toy car park and show me how many there are."

Going out

Of course, it's always possible that the children will get cranky and simply have to get out into the fresh air. So, off they go to the playground. Most playgrounds have benches, sometimes even with tables. You should look for one of these. Pack a few snacks and drinks, such as apple slices, grapes, small sandwiches or something similar and, of course, water or unsweetened tea. Apple tea was my children's favourite.

In the playground, the children can play quite safely, let off steam and still be supervised. It's a great way to learn. You can either just take a book with you or take some equipment that is compatible with the playground.

Here are a few tips:

Laptops can be taken to the playground, but experience has shown that it is rather unfortunate. Accidents happen with sand, drinks, rain and so on. And you certainly don't want your laptop to look like mine, which one of my children jumped on...

So two alternatives:

The old-fashioned version: a tablet with a silicone keyboard. Because I had to type a lot during my studies, the foldable, flexible, waterproof, sandstorm-proof silicone keyboard was my solution. Connected to the mini-USB port with an OTG adapter, it worked very well. However, there are also wireless versions that can be connected directly to the tablet via Bluetooth. These are not very expensive and are a real bargain considering the risk to the laptop.

The new-fangled version: tablet with tablet pen. Just pop it in your handbag and off you go to the playground. Both me and my husband, who now works and studies from home, love working with it. If you have a look around on well-known major sales platforms, you can find the discontinued models for a really affordable price. You can easily pay three or four times the price for the new models.

If you don't have a tablet but only a mobile phone: no problem. Mobile phone, mobile phone holder (available from the blue and yellow Swedish furniture store as a key fob for €0.60 (no, that's not a typo)), OTG adapter (available in electrical stores for less than €10, even for Apple devices) and a foldable, flexible, waterproof and sandstorm-proof silicone keyboard (available from the major well-known sales platforms for less than €15). You can actually use it to type and create text documents on your mobile phone.

If you only have a mobile phone but don't want to type, we have a solution for that too: you can buy a tablet pen for around €30 that is compatible with all devices and write on your mobile phone.

Or you can make it even easier: pen and paper.

But now back to everyday life.

After a few hours, the children get hungry and your head needs a break. Breaks are not breaks if you do nothing. It's scientifically proven that it's more relaxing to do something else than you normally do. So, taking laundry out of the washing machine and hanging it up, ironing, these are all activities that give you the opportunity to be physically active. Household chores are excercise!

By the way: When buying clothes, make sure that you don't have to iron them or that they are very easy to iron. This saves a huge amount of time. I actually didn't touch an iron for years - and nobody noticed. How do you manage not having to iron your clothes? Really covering clothes for women don't need ironing anyway, so khimar, jilbab, abayah made of madinah silk are really the best here. Otherwise, you can either tumble dry your clothes if you have a tumble dryer, or leave them to dry in the wind. The motion of the dryer or wind breaks the hydrogen bonds that cause clothes to wrinkle or stiffen. Caution: never dry your Madinah silk in the tumble dryer! This creases the Madinah silk so much that you will hardly be able to get it out again, no matter how much you wash or iron it. You need extreme patience to iron it out again - patience that I don't have. My husband saved all my khimars back then when I learned this the hard way - he has the patience.

So after the children have eaten, the learning and playing continues.

Midday nap

Is your child taking an afternoon nap? Perfect! Then you can learn best of all during these 2 hours. Yes, you may also want to cook, clean or sleep while your child is asleep. But you have to prioritise here: When the child is asleep, it's quiet. So you can concentrate best. Cooking and cleaning can also be done when the children are awake. They can chop vegetables themselves with a children's knife or you can put a play kitchen in the kitchen and the children can cook while you cook. That's how we've always done it and it's worked really well.

What if the child only sleeps in the pram when you go for a walk? No problem, pack the child up well, go for a walk, don't forget the outdoor learning equipment and off you go. I've often listened to lessons on walks so that I know what it's all about. And when my children were asleep, I sat down somewhere and worked through the lessons properly. If the child wakes up while you are standing, you can put one foot on a tyre of the pram and push it back and forth.

A great alternative is of course the baby sling. This was the best with children under 6 months, maybe even under 9 months. The children slept better than anywhere else and I was able to learn better than ever before.

Nachmittags / Kochen

When the child wakes up again, you have ideally been able to study for two hours. So time for a break. What have we learnt about breaks? That's right, breaks aren't breaks if you're not doing anything.

So we need a useful activity: cooking. And you can also learn while cooking: listen to lessons so that you know what the lesson is about, or listen to motivational podcasts, or learn vocabulary.

Also very interesting: you don't have to watch the potatoes being cooked. You can also sit down at the kitchen table and set up another learning/game station.

If the meal is ready but the husband hasn't come home yet, you can ... you guessed it... learn. And when the husband comes home, dinner is ready, the flat is clean and ideally you've already had about 6 hours to study.

When the husband comes home, it's family time. Eating together, drinking tea or coffee together, playing together, having dinner together, etc. If something needs to be done around the house, this can also be done during this time.

Bedtime routine

The children should go to bed at 6 pm. It always depends on the child as to how best to do this. With our children it was as follows:

Child 1: We went to her bed, she lay down, I sang a short bedtime song, then I said: "Good night, lie down, close your eyes and go to sleep." I sat in front of the bed and held her hand, counted to 100 in my head, got up and left. By the time I got to 40, she was usually snoring.

Children 2 and 3: We lay down together in our bed, both children on our stomachs or on our sides in our arms, I sang a bedtime song, by the second round they were usually asleep, I got up, put the children in their beds and left.

Child 4: When child 4 came along, the other children were already grown up. So I had more time for the evening routine and he needed more time to settle in the evening. We would watch a prophet story on YouTube for 10 minutes or read a very short book, and he would usually turn on his side and fall asleep before I was even finished with the story. On average, this took 7 minutes.

The key to falling asleep so quickly is, of course, firstly the blessing of Allah and secondly a fixed routine.

By 7pm at the latest, everyone was in bed and I could do the rest of the housework and prepare for my lessons, which usually took place live at 8pm and went on until midnight. As time went on, the lessons increased until there were 16 to 17 hours of live lessons per day.

Of course, it sometimes happened that the children couldn't sleep or woke up again. I would then lie in bed with the children with my headphones on and cuddle up with them while I learnt.

After the lessons, my husband and I prayed and recited Quran together, so that we not only prayed during the day, but also really focussed on our spirituality in the evening. And then the day was over.

When things don't go as they should

When I talk about this, there are always a few people who say: Yes, that's all well and good, but it doesn't work like that for me.

Let's look for sources of problems.

Television.

Do you have a television? An absolute disaster in terms of your spirituality and your studies. End of the world. Get rid of it.

Option 1: Open your window, make sure nobody is standing under the window and teach the TV how to fly. It will land rather roughly on the floor, but that's where it belongs.

Option 2: The TV is scrap. Where does scrap belong? Exactly, to the scrapyard. So, take it to the scrapyard.

Anti-social media.

Do you have antisocial media? An absolute disaster in terms of your spirituality and your studies. End of the world number 2 - get rid of it.

Option 1: Become reasonable and delete the rubbish.

Option 2: Become reasonable and implement option 1.

Guests.

If guests are coming, say from the start that you also have lessons. Please understand one thing: If someone says: "I'm sorry, I have to go to university straight away, I have a lecture", nobody will look stupid or expect you to stay. Even if you study from home, your laptop/tablet/mobile phone is. your. Uni. And the lessons, whether live or recorded, are. your. Lecture. So don't let that stop you from going to uni to take part in the lecture.

"But my family-in-law expects..." What do they expect? That you educate yourself so that you can raise and teach their grandchildren in the best possible way? Then do that. Or do they expect you to be their housekeeper and serve them and their guests? Then they should hire you with a proper employment contract that also requires your consent. It's not that simple? Then move out and teach them what their rights are and what their rights are not. Tell your husband to be a man. He should fulfil your rights. And it is your right that you educate yourself and that you are not kept as a slave to your in-laws. It's even your right to have your own home.

"But I can't say anything against my in-laws..." Can't you? Or don't you want to? It's your decision whether you want to gain the knowledge or not. Either you want the knowledge and you stand up to those who keep you from the knowledge, or you don't want the knowledge.

"But that would be disrespectful..." Nope. Not if you don't become disrespectful. You can say no in a respectful way. You can set boundaries in a respectful way. Only toxic in-laws would see that as disrespectful because they can no longer control and manipulate you and your husband.

Somehow I can't get myself together.

Or: I can't concentrate.

There are many possibilities here. But the solution is to find your own focus. What helps YOU?

Option 1: Body doubling. Find someone who works or studies from home. Meet up and study together at the same time. If the sister also has children, the children can even play together - like a kindergarten at home. One sister can do the cooking and at the end of the day the food can be divided up so that one sister is always cooking for two families. And you can take turns.

I actually did it that way for a while. A sister who worked for an Islamic book publisher came to me with her daughter, who was about the same age as my children at the time. We went to the playground together, learnt and worked together at home, one of us always cooked and we shared the food according to the number of family members. That was a very productive time.

Now I have a desk in my office where four people can sit at the same time, and I also have three additional seats. The whole family comes together in my office and studies for school, works for madrasah or learns alimiyyah.

Option 2: Break your work down into really small steps. So, first sit down and switch on your laptop. Done. First task done. Then log in to the campus. Second task done. Then select the course you are currently working on. Third task done. And so it goes on. So really tiny baby steps.

Option 3: There are people on YouTube who record themselves learning. Some videos are three hours long. They can also help.

Option 4: Some people need a certain background noise to learn. Natural sounds without music, white noise or brown noise can help a lot. For me, it always depends on my mood, but these background noises sometimes help me to concentrate. If I have tasks that aren't really mentally appealing or I just can't get anything else into my head, I also like to listen to crime radio plays or crime audio books on the side. Sherlock Holmes is right at the top of the list. Of course, apart from his addictive habits, he is a person who is quite similar to my own personality: somewhat eccentric, extremely rational, with a strong sense of justice, sometimes melancholic, then again full of zeal and excitement, often having incomprehensible leaps of thought, loving the perfect chaos where we find everything and nothing, sometimes socially distanced, whereby we usually limit our social contacts to our professional activities, cultivating few but extremely good and trusting friendships, forgetting about eating and drinking (you have to take care of everything on your own! Even of eating!) - people either like us or they don't. By the way, I'm sure that Sherlock Holmes also had ADHD. He pretty much fulfils all the diagnostic criteria.

Option 5: Contract with yourself. Write a contract about exactly when, what and how you want to do it. Sign it and keep it safe. And stick to it, because Allah says in the Quran: "O you who believe, fulfil the contracts/agreements." (Surah al-Ma'idah, 5:1)

Option 6: Reward yourself. Whether it's a candy bar after every class you finish, or a book (or 10 books) after you've completed a certain number of classes, reward yourself.

Option 7: Keep the boredom at bay. Studying gets boring. At some point. You'll get sick of the teacher's voice one day. Even if you only hear "As-salâmu 'alaykum", you think to yourself "not again...". Stick it out. Just hang in there.

Option 8: Read books that teach you how to be successful, with the help of Allah. Atomic habits,for example. Or the 7 habits of highly effective people. Or the 8th habit. There are so many books that can motivate and build you up.

Option 9: Don't put yourself out there. Sit down and just do it!

My child wants to play with me all the time.

Option 1: Grow up and set boundaries.

Option 2: There is no second option. Grow up.

My everyday life just doesn't work as perfectly as yours.

Who said that my everyday life works perfectly? Everyday life never works perfectly. You have a burst pipe, a broken washing machine, sick children and so on. You have to be creative in how you deal with these absolutely normal catastrophes and how you find solutions. Where there is a will, there is a way with the permission of Allah.

It didn't work perfectly for us either. But we organised our everyday lives around the normal madness and the normal disasters of life as best we could. Of course you will deviate from the plan here and there, but the question is how quickly you can return to everyday life or how you can change the plan so that disasters and madness don't affect your studies.

The question must always be: Where can I optimise my everyday life even more? Where can I learn even more? Where can I benefit even more?

I always get so tired.

Jo, this is called the "dead point" in German. After around 90 minutes of full concentration and productivity, there are 15-20 minutes in which you are totally exhausted and just want to sleep. But the important thing is that you don't do exactly that.

Option 1: Go out into the fresh air for 15 minutes - on the balcony, in the garden, by an open window (note: don't open the window if there are children or pets nearby!), outside the door, etc.

Option 2: Sit in front of a daylight lamp in the morning. You can study during this time if the light intensity is not too strong. 10,000 lux is a good level of brightness that even I with sensitive eyes can cope with.

Option 3: Alternate your caffeine and tea consumption. Instead of only ever drinking black tea or coffee, try alternating between black tea, green tea, coffee, quinine, guarana and other teas.

Option 4: I have already mentioned exercise, namely in the form of housework. So, hanging out the washing, ironing, hoovering, mopping, washing up and much more helps us to keep moving.

Option 5: Pray. Either the obligatory prayer or the voluntary prayer, just pray. This helps the most in these dead moments.

If absolutely nothing else works, option 6: Set an alarm clock for 15 or 20 minutes (depending on how quickly you fall asleep) and take a nap. However, you should only do this before Asr and really not after Asr. If it is after Maghrib or after Isha and you need the power nap to be able to concentrate on a lesson again, you can possibly do it.

Important: You don't necessarily have to sleep, especially not for the full 15-20 minutes. It's simply about allowing your body to rest.

I have a cry baby.

There are no crying babies. There are only babies who cry because they are missing something. And that is usually closeness to their mother or pain. You can go to the paediatrician for pain, because a person shouldn't be in pain. Pain indicates that something is wrong. So, off to the doctor!

If it's not pain, it's a lack of closeness to the mother (or carer). Small children are not made to be separated from their mother. They are made to be with their mother until they learn to move around on their own. In the first three months, children should be in the sling or on the lap as much as possible, very close to their mother. With a sling or baby on your lap, you have both hands free for learning.

I have to breastfeed my baby.

Yes, and? Do you do that with your head? With your eyes? Hands?

Breastfeed your child, take a book and read it to your child or listen to a lesson. If your child is a few weeks old and you put it on the left, you can already write. If you put it on the right side, you can use a breastfeeding pillow (this one is just so perfect!) to lay the child on while you write andbreastfeed. I fell in love with the nursing pillow so much that I used it all the time to study, even without the baby. The only important thing is that your face is turned towards your child and that your child gets attention when it looks at you with interest. You can also listen to lessons when you look at your baby. If they close their eyes or look round, you can also look at the book or screen. Just don't turn your head away so that your child can always see your face.

 

My family and friends keep calling me.

And when you're on the toilet or in the shower, do you take the call? No? So why do you take the calls when you're studying?

Firstly, if they really love and respect you, they will be very active in supporting you in your studies. Tell them that you are studying at certain times and when you are available for them.

Secondly, if something really important happens, they will be able to wait those few hours or still call you several times to let you know that something is going on. But honestly, how often in the last few years has something so important really happened that it couldn't have waited an hour?

Thirdly, it's not just you who should do the study, but also your family and friends. If they do it, they will understand that you need to study. If they don't do it, they should at least support you so that you can do it. That's the least you can expect.

Conclusion

From the way I am replying, you realise that I cannot comprehend some of the statements. The study of the noble knowledge of Islam should be so important to us that these excuses should not find a place in our mouths, let alone in our hearts. They simply do not belong there.

Honestly, it is only through writing that I realise how much I have accomplished in the past with the permission and help of Allah. I just never think about how much I do or how difficult it is. I think we can take away an important lesson here too: Don't think, just do. Don't complain, just do it. Don't think it's difficult, just do it.

Of course, this also has a lot to do with tawakkul (trust in Allah). Allah will make it possible for you to complete your studies.

May Allah increase all our knowledge and strengthen us all in the pursuit of knowledge. Ameen.