When Homeschooling Feels Like an Unfolding Disaster
Learning to trust, to let go, and to see that “enough” was always enough.
Homeschooling always felt like an unfolding disaster.
Well, not always.
Some days shone, but they felt rare, probably only one or two a week at best. It never felt enough. And I blamed myself.
I found that my perception, warped by my low mood, usually coloured my experience of homeschooling. As someone with chronic health issues I constantly felt tired, and that quickly descended into overwhelm.
People asked why did I keep doing it, why didn’t I just put the kids into school? Even my doctor suggested that. I said no, I couldn’t.
Because I knew that it wasn’t the whole story. Our life was actually way better than I — and those other doubters and naysayers — thought it looked.
And I knew this because I kept records, in a fairly haphazard but effective way, for the first decade of our homeschooling life. Evidence that the good days actually did exist.
A lot of that ‘evidence’ found it’s way into my first three books about homeschooling, Getting Started with Home Schooling: Practical Considerations, Learning in the Absence of Education and Learning Without School. Reading them always gives me a reassuring buzz: we did okay, homeschool worked, it was enough.
It bugs me that it doesn’t seem to matter how old I get I am still terribly plagued by those feelings of inadequacy, both as a mother and in my role as The Educating Parent, even though my children are now adults, home educating their kids! If nothing else says success, that should, right?!
I often wonder sometimes if home educating parents get a double dose of perfectionist, control-freak genes. I know I’m not the only one that forever questions this choice and the consequent accompanying lifestyle.
But then, chatting with parents who don’t homeschool, whose kids go to school, I find they have the same self-doubts about their parenting and their educational choice, and I starting thinking that maybe this is a generational issue…
That’s not it though, not the whole story, not yet.
Talking with older people, my parents’ age, it becomes obvious they used to worry about this too. Although they’re more philosophical about it now, and think that in hindsight they did a great job, and that we should definitely emulate their approach to parenting and education. Ah, the good old days. I love nostalgia. I’m almost old enough to start wallowing in it too. Almost.
So okay, if it’s not the educational choice, and it’s not a generational issue, it’s probably a cultural thing: perhaps I can blame my Anglo heritage for my persistent insecurities?
Every so often I am beset by another period of believing that the work I do as The Educating Parent is either not good enough, a waste of time, or useless, and that I should really be doing something else.
All of my life I have felt like I should be doing something else.
And on my really anxious days, when depression is starting to knock on the door, I feel like I should be somewhere else, anywhere but here.
And then, suddenly, I become convinced I shouldn’t really be anywhere at all.
How can a young person in her teens feel like this, and then in every decade since?
Not ‘measuring up’ continues to be a huge bugbear in my life. Yet you wonderful people, my homeschooling and unschooling buddies, keep sending me the most treasured messages of love in your comments and emails.
They sustain me. I started collecting them in a doc file a couple of decades ago and some days read them to myself, to ‘ground’ me, bring me back to reality.
In the same way reading through our homeschool records used to do. It’s enough, you’re enough, they say.
I know that what I receive from you is a mirror of what I give out, have given out, and will continue to give out: and that, year by year, it’s getting more nourishing, more supportive. And I thank you for that. We’re a team.
I am ever so gradually learning to let go of the need to be ‘perfect’, to shut up the incessant and damaging voice of the inner critic, shush the negative talk-talk, and counter it with affirmative and compassionate self-care.
The psychobabblists of earlier decades had me believe that my father is at fault, and boy of boy, does he have the whole perfection thing bad. Trying to live up to his standards — and I recognise they are a metaphor for role of patriarchy in my life —has caused havoc in my life. But I’m older and wiser now and see a bigger picture.
And I realise it doesn’t really matter how all this nonsense got into my head, heart and soul: it’s not in control of me, I am in control of me. Right now, in this moment, I can do something to negate the nonsense.
And that’s why I do what I do. That’s why I’m sitting here, typing this, telling anyone who wants to listen that it’s okay to be real, to be true, to make sense, to question the nonsense, to listen to our hearts and minds and souls, to beat back the nonsense with a huge stick, stand up for ourselves, notice and celebrate the imperfections in life because they are necessary and okay and are what makes us human.
We don’t have to be okay everyday. Some days we can be not okay.
What matters is that we’re supported.
You know, it’s not just home educators who fall prey to feeling inadequate and lost.
Parents of school kids do too, especially around strident voices promoting home education (and I’ve been one of those for decades). They can interpret our zeal as judgements on their choices for their kids. And some of us do judge them, as they judge us. We’re only human after all. Our actions challenge each other and neither of us like it.
If we succeed at homeschooling we set a benchmark for parenting that elevate us to elitist status, by default. It’s not our intention, but our need to protect our desire to home educate often translates into us loudly proclaiming how great it is, spouting the many benefits often. Probably too often. But I’m not going to apologize for that. Only 1% of children are home educated: parents of school kids have nothing to fear from us. It’s not an idea that’s going to catch on and spread out-of-control. No one is ever going to force them to homeschool their kids.
But parents fear stuffing up their children’s lives and opportunities almost as much as they fear losing their children, and anything out of the ordinary is automatically challenging.
And, for a very long time, while I was a parent and for years after, that’s how I felt every day. In a constant state of needing to justify and defend my decisions and actions. And it was exhausting.
I believe that gradually relaxing into learning naturally as an educating parent helped insert a pause button into that madness. A button that said slow down, rethink that, is this really necessary, why are we doing this, why is it important, is it important?
This was the work of deschooling, something I know is an ongoing, never-ending aspect of my life.
Most of the time as an educating parent I’d feel compelled to do the culturally driven or personally meaningless (to myself or my kids) activity, or ‘play’ school-at-home for a while.
I’d have to trust that this urge had a purpose, as yet hidden to me. I felt — and was — disconnected from a sense of my authentic self. It felt like I didn’t know myself, or how to identify and meet my own needs.
How could I work to identify and meet my children’s needs when my own sense of self felt so disconnected?
I had to learn how to parent myself along with learning how to parent them. It was very hit and miss, experimental, full of mistakes (which I affectionately, and very positively, renamed ‘learning opportunities’).
The best I could do at any given point was to trust. And boy, was that a hard thing to do. But I knew instinctively that it was what I needed to do. And what I needed to give my children, what they needed more than anything else.
Trust.
We need to trust that our children will grow as nature intended into strong, competent and responsible adults, given that their basic survival needs are met. I believe that, for too many generations, this trust has been missing from family life.
Handing over all the big decisions to trust requires a commitment to faith. Faith is something I’ve noticed that very young children have in abundance, until we scare or disillusion it out of them. I believe there is a lot we can learn about faith and trust from infants!
I am so lucky to have read books by John Holt when my eldest was four years old, which I followed up by reading Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept. And it’s why I am now enjoying reading the words of Tom Hobson, aka Teacher Tom.
Back when my children were young these radical writings on the role of trust in parenting and education began to answer some of the perplexing questions and concerns that plagued my own childhood and teenage years.
Respect, trust, faith, autonomy, connection, authenticity.
I needed that as a child, and my kids did too. It’s what I hope to give to my grandchildren, to any children, anywhere. Everyone really.
Feeling lost and disconnected from my sense of self wasn’t the only thing undermining my self-confidence and battering my self-esteem on a regular basis.
I was unwell. We lived frugally, partly from choice, but mostly because I needed support and care, so my partner only worked part-time for years, meaning that we lived on a very low income.
When we’re in the middle of a stressful situation, particularly if it is ongoing, our mental health suffers. It’s no wonder we end up doubting our abilities as parents and home educators.
Add to that the radical nature of our choice. For the first couple of years of homeschooling we knew no one else doing it. That was tough. I relied on receiving homeschool newsletters from the USA. And most of those were full of stories of child prodigies, kids that didn’t look or act anything like my very non-talented, very average kids.
I had zero support to continue, so naturally would end up questioning the sanity of homeschooling every time our impoverished living conditions and my health issues gave rise to feelings of doubt and confusion.
All up, it probably took me a couple of decades to discover most of the factors that triggered my depression, but luckily somewhere along the way I realised that home educating the kids was not one of them.
I’d also get overwhelmed whenever money was short, or one of us was sick, when the kids’ cousins won prizes at school, or when the nay-sayers and critics visited at Christmas. Eventually I learned to see these were actually the problem, obstructing me from being present and attentive in the way that I wanted, and needed, to be.
Being able to help my children meet their learning and developmental needs in ways that honoured their natures was part of my personal healing process. In time I was able to start honouring and respecting my nature too, instead of trying to be something everyone else seemed to think I should be.
I started to give myself what I gave my children: respect, trust, faith, autonomy, connection, authenticity.
It’s hard when something outside of my control would ruin my day, casting long, negative shadows on my attitude, resulting in a low mood. Sometimes it would be as simple as my body reacted to as yet unknown or not identified food or environmental trigger. It took a long time for me to recognise that emotional disturbance was a symptom and not the cause, in the same way as coughing was a symptom of my asthma. I’d blame my mind for being faulty, when the poor thing was being bashed by the physical effects of allergies and intolerances.
My sister, herself severely ill with cancer, taught me that it is possible to mediate the effect of my low mood by thinking affirmative or positive thoughts, cultivating a constructive, ‘possible’ mindset to help combat the inevitable negative self-talk of my inner critic. I started ‘grounding myself’ by focusing on my senses in the here and now, a simple form of meditation.
I also found it helped to have a collection of quotes from my personal heroes, people I look up to, admire and wish to emulate in some way. Over the years I’ve collected many such quotes. Here’s one that reminds me to value process over product: something that is easy to forget as a home educating parent.
“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The words spoken by our heroes and role models can have far more impact than a thousand snide or hurtful remarks from people that don’t understand us, or our situation, and who have little empathy for us.
Reading through my collection of quotes can really help to lift my spirits on my dark days.
And it can help our children too. Why not encourage them to create posters or memes or simply write down a few quotes by their favourite characters, mythical or superheroes, famous men and women from history, or great religious leaders?
It’s okay if the quotes are by fictional characters. One of my favourite fictional quotes comes from Yoda of Star Wars fame: “Do or do not. There is no try.” And one I’m always muttering under my breath is: “Always look on the bright side of life”, from Monty Python.
What is one of your favourite quotes from your personal heroes? Why not have some fun, play around with some graphics in Canva and turn them into a creative memes you can print and put up around the house?
I’ll mention again how it was my haphazard of keeping records of the how and what my children were doing most days that helped to prove to me that they were constantly learning, even if their activity didn’t look anything like schoolwork.
It wasn’t easy but at some point I had to acknowledge that my memory wasn’t particularly good at remembering, and it seemed especially terrible at remember all the good times we had learning at home. It only wanted to remember the tough times, when things didn’t seem to be working at all.
Glancing back through our homeschooling records every now and then helped to set the balance straight. They were the concrete evidence I needed to build faith, and thus trust, that we were doing okay, better than okay, that homeschooling was good enough.
I encourage all home educating families to keep records in whatever way works best for them, not to help them jump through the registration review hoops each year, but because I know it is a great way to build confidence in their home educating practice.
Plus, the kids love looking back through photos of their earlier selves, remembering the activities and excursions.
My daughter, April, at Always Learning Books still sells copies of the diaries I developed when home educating her and her brothers, although she’s incorporated it into an extensive and comprehensive planning and recording tool with references to the Australian Curriculum outcomes.
Accept that homeschooling isn’t idyllic. It’s not the answer to everything in education or parenting. It can be hard. Really hard.
And the bit that sucks the most (for me anyway) is the way it isolates us as parents. I found the fact that society doesn’t reward or recognise parenting adequately or appropriately really depressing. Having a ‘nice’ house and car gets more attention than having ‘nice’ kids.
I was doing such a good job with teaching and parenting my kids but no one cared. I got the message that they’d like — and approve of — me more if I had a job, working somewhere, with my kids in child-care or school. I always felt the pressure to ‘be’ someone other than a stay-at-home mum.
We home educators are pioneers and pioneering is naturally hard work. We’re forging a way through wilderness: few parents actually want to spend that much time with their children, and because of that we’re made to feel weird, or worse, accused of abusing our kids for not sending them to school.
Sure, we have bad days, weeks and sometimes even months. It can be hard to continually bolster one’s faith in what one is doing when everyone else is doing something different…
I liken my journey to that of a pioneer settler. Twenty years of hard work with little to show for it, apart from a small win here and there to sustain us, like a sudden downpour of rain after a long drought. When we’re in the middle of it, day after day, it can feel relentless.
But now I sit and look back over on my carefully constructed life, built on firm foundations and strong values, and smile fondly at my adult kids and my lovely grandkids, at their full and busy lives, I know I did okay. I know it was enough.
One of the reasons I edited and published Michele Hasting’s book The Homeschooling Trail - A Journey of Faith was because although we have different religious beliefs, her very clearly expressed feelings of inadequacy reflected my own.
Her story, which tells of one year in their unschooling lives, is one of searching for and constantly reaffirming her faith, not only in unschooling, or her own parenting ability, but also in God. It is is a wonderful story of learning to let go of the need to control, and to instead, lean into trust.
Michele doesn’t miraculously find trust or faith or answers or solutions at the end, but you can see and feel her progress.
And that’s the best that any of us can really do.
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That’s all for now, happy homeschooling and unschooling!
Beverley
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Themed Weekly Focus: Each week has a clear focus, helping you strengthen key areas of your homeschool without feeling scattered.
Encouragement for the Hard Days: Because we all have them, and sometimes a fresh perspective is all we need.
Practical Tools & Ideas: Information about homeschool resources, hands-on activities, exclusive templates, and ways to simplify planning.
Real Talk About Homeschooling: Honest discussions about the challenges and triumphs from someone who has been there and done that, and whose kids are now homeschooling theirs!