Yep. I failed at homeschooling. And it’s the best thing that ever happened to our parenting.

The biggest mistake we made, in both parenting and homeschool, was believing that the children of two rebels (who may or may not probably be diagnosable for some kind of defiance disorder), would ever simply allow anyone (who may or may not be their parents) to control their education through required subjects, schedules, and all the attendant coercion.

Looking back at it now, it’s a super cute mistake, a case of just never putting two obvious things together. Parenting and education philosophies obviously come together when you start homeschooling, right? Not if you haven’t done your deschooling, apparently.

How and why we left the compulsory school system:

Our older child seemed biddable enough, but she also lived through our authoritative early parenting, and started school at age 3. Had we not chosen home education, she likely would’ve turned out like me in school: good grades even though she didn’t care, reading constantly as escapism, never knowing who she was which would fuel a deep anxiety about her future once performing school was over.

Our younger child though? He started the conversation about homeschool at like, age 3, when we started talking about preschool. I made him the deal that we would continue talking about it, but he had to try one whole year of school before he could decide he didn’t want it. 

Our biggest concern was the fact that there were zero other kids in our lives for them to play with. 

He attended exactly that one year of prekindergarten before convincing us that homeschool was his best option. His biggest argument was the behavior of his age-mates. He was emotionally and academically light years ahead of them. So much so that his teachers came to rely on him to wrangle the emotions and behavior of the rest of the class. Obviously, he was NOT interested in the social opportunities supposedly provided by school, and the one good friend he had was moving across the country before the year was over.

During that year, my husband/their father and I had discussions almost daily about how we would want to run our homeschool, what we considered required subjects, how much time we would spend each day, how to offer a social life… we both strongly believed that there were just some subjects one needed to spend childhood learning to be a functional real life adult someday, never mind that we didn’t use them as fully functional real life adults.

When we had settled most of it, we offered the idea to our daughter, then in second grade, turning 8. After 5 years in school, she had become infected with the idea that schools and teachers were necessary for learning, like most of us do, and also very attached to her social life, she mostly only saw her school friends at school. 

She came to the conclusion, all on her own, that the vast majority of the kids she believed to be her friends were actually just forced-proximity age-mates who simply got along well enough not to offend each other enough to disrupt the peace. We had started her schooling as a social outlet, and as attached as she was to this idea, she could see plainly that it wasn’t working like that at all. 

(She told me later that she had actually taken a little notebook to school and started a pro’s and con’s list. There were no con’s for homeschool, because we promised we would do our utmost to find her some real friends and keep seeing her few real school friends. She is still quite close with one of them. The two pro’s of homeschooling were not having to get up early and not being stuck in one room with a class all day.) 

In case you wondered, allowing our 5 year old to convince us homeschooling was valid was NOT our mistake, neither was exiting the mainstream school system. Sometime , I’ll write about the benefits of home education that we have enjoyed in the time since, but that is another story for another day.

Our biggest mistake as new homeschoolers: recreating at home the system we meant to leave behind.

The system says adults know better than children because children are empty headed adults in training, and that there is a certain body of knowledge that must be more or less mastered so that a child can become a functional adult in real life, and we believed it.

We decided they would finish out the school year, as that was the deal I made with our son originally, and I spent that time researching home education philosophies and curricula, with as much input as the children could give. I happen to love learning, and the curricula we pieced together was awesome- I learned so much new stuff that year!

It was new and fun and that lasted most of their first year, which, now that I think about it, seems like a long time. We had SO MUCH more time to do fun things now that we didn’t have to wait for a whole class to do something or settle their behavior, and we didn’t have to get up early ever, and we didn’t have to schedule our days around school bus pick up and drop off times. 

(Our first clue that unschooling might be for us should have been that the math curricula my children chose was written to the student, demoting me from teaching to helping. Obviously, if kids can learn math on their own from work texts they can learn whatever they want whenever they choose.)

My son, who wasn’t required to start kindergarten until the following year, was doing first grade math, because the curriculum we chose didn’t have an earlier grade. Unless you have seen this yourself, you probably won’t believe me… he discovered fractions on his own at age 6 after creating a story problem in his head about money and washing shirts at a laundromat. I kid you not.

After that, I never worried that they COULD learn, at home or from me or anything else, but somehow as parents, we still believed that we had to FORCE them to do it, through requirements and expectations and scheduling, which of course, ended up at coercion. Threats, rewards, punishments, etc. We believed that they must learn academic subjects, and that they would never choose them given the choice.

The next year, they began resenting their assignments, and while I let them wear me down on some things, there were some I would not let slide. 

The next year, our third year in, we hit a wall in the requirements department. My husband had some health complications that left him not only out of work forever, but having to sit with his feet up for like 4 months straight, and I had to go back to full time work to support us, and he was not confident enough to teach math or language arts, my two non-negotiables. So academics slid, and while I burned myself out at work, the three of them mostly sat at home with steadily increasing cabin fever.

Once the kids saw that I could allow my expectations and the schedule to really be anything we could make work, they realized exactly how malleable a learning schedule could be, which increased their resentment and fueled their arguments. 

Why do we have to do a lesson of math every day? Why do we have to do math? What if we only do 2 pages today? Can we just do one page? Spelling is hard and boring. WHY DO WE HAVE TO DO ANY OF THIS?!?

Why indeed. I did not allow their frustration or my exhaustion to convince me to abandon curricula. Instead, I dove back into research. Side note- I am so grateful we have the internet. Homeschooling before that was HARD, and I know I would have given up without the internet.

I jumped down all the rabbit holes, headfirst. Reading blogs for hours and listening to podcasts for even more hours. 

I found June at This Simple Balance, and Pam at Exploring Unschooling, and Rachel at Sage Family, among many others.

Unschooling it is!

They gave me the (belated) realization that our educational philosophy, while relaxed, was very different from our parenting philosophy, which revolves around consent and choice and respect. 

After I was convinced, my husband and I went back to daily discussions, and I allowed the academics to slide further and further, without announcing anything to the kids, just to see what would happen. 

It was really really hard for us parents to let go of our social conditioning around how learning happens and what needs to be learned and when. With enough evidence, we decided there was at least room to experiment. After all, we could always go back to regular homeschooling, or even public school.

We told the kids about unschooling, explaining that we we experimenting with allowing them to choose academics when they wanted to learn, trusting they could learn anything whenever they wanted or needed to, and how we expected whatever they actually needed to learn would come up as we lived real life, because, if it didn’t come up in real life, do we really need it?

And THEN….

OUR CHILDREN THRIVED.

(and so did their parents)

while their parents held onto hope and the examples of others, and sat in our discomfort long enough to learn to trust that yes, unschooling brings academics as they are needed when they are needed, and anyone can learn anything they want or need to know whenever they want.

After all, we learn new skills all the time, and we’ve been out of school forever. Honestly, when was the last time you learned a home or car or computer maintenance skill from YouTube? It’s a pretty common occurrence in my household, for adults and children.

How we live now:

It took us about a year to learn that trust. It took our children about the same amount of time to learn we could be trusted not to make them learn something they didn’t want to, or ruin their interests by making them lessons. It took them another half year, probably, to show that trust by allowing us to see their interest in academic things. Our daughter loves history, and requested we continue purchasing the rest of the curriculum we had started. Our son wanted to become a truly fluent reader, which happened mostly through learning Spanish on a free phone app, and started practicing his handwriting. 

We spend as much time as we can outdoors, on adventures, and reading books aloud as a family. We are currently in the middle of book 2 of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase trilogy, and I love it! The kids spend a lot of time playing MineCraft together. We are a quiet family so our social needs are met by being out of the house with other families or at events about twice a week. They recently learned to play Dungeons and Dragons, and are loving the fantasy adventures they get together for at our local library. We are at the library at least twice a week, not counting the days we go there for events. We all love the beach and the forests near our home, and highly prioritize long hours there. The kids are both becoming rather entrepreneurial, and making plans to start a couple of their own businesses.

We parents/adults spend lots of time unraveling the tangles of why we want our children to do certain this at specific times. Sometimes there is a totally valid reason, but mostly we want them to do these things because we want to feel powerful but currently feel out of control of some parts of our selves or our lives, or we simply want the things done but don’t want to do them ourselves. It is called emotional projection. You would be amazed how much we adults want to believe we are right about everything and therefore project wrongness onto everyone and everything, including our children. This is actually why most relationships are broken, but kids are an easy target given how we were all taught that children are less deserving, less whole, and less worthy of respect than adults.

I hate to look back and think about how much our socially conditioned fear and subsequent need to control their learning hurt them, and hurt our otherwise very connected and respectful relationships. I hope I never forget that pain, it helps fuel my resolution and commitment to conscious parenting, because I’ve seen what authoritarianism brings, even when only applied to education, having been previously abandoned in the rest of our lives. It was (and is!) a very long learning process for all of us, backed by an epic journey of unlearning and deschooling for the adults. 

It is incredibly difficult to admit that the suffering you endured as a child was entirely unnecessary, and the coping mechanisms you adopted as part of your identity aren’t authentically you, and that the people who were supposed to protect you either didn’t know how or were to afraid to try or truly believed they were doing the most right thing they could. 

None of us have ever regretted this journey, though sometimes it is insanely hard to treat children as whole worthy people when you were conditioned all your life to believe they aren’t.

Our children are amazing people who astound the general public at every meeting. The compliments we receive make us blush, and also pity everyone who has the expectation that children are unruly untrustworthy manipulative beasts. 

Recreating school at home was our biggest mistake and worst failure as a homeschooling family, but it lead us unerringly to radical unschooling, radical respectful conscious parenting, and radical family relationships. It was a hard hike through the worst terrain, but every step was worth it, because the view here is priceless.

There is a path out of the pit of suffering we call school. A process to shed the social conditioning we were given there, on purpose and without our consent, to keep us under control. An educational philosophy that fosters connected relationships. 

I didn’t have anyone to help me up the mountain, no one to help me connect the map dots between trust, respect, consent, and education. It took me way too many years to figure it out on my own, and I want to make your journey easier, help you hack your own path, as it were, because your path will of necessity be different from ours, because your family isn’t my family and your past isn’t our past. I would love to offer you my hand, the tools I have collected, and the knowledge and trust I have gained, to help you on your deschooling journey, whether you intend to homeschool or unschool. 

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