Should I Homeschool My Kids?

An Honest Reflection

I never thought I’d be a homeschool mom. It was never on my radar. People who homeschooled were, well, in my opinion, weird. That was a quarter century ago.

Opinions change.

When my firstborn was 4, we lived 22 miles from the public school. Yep. It’s the Chequamegon National Forest. If you take a left at the end of our driveway and keep taking left-hand turns, it’s 9 miles with no road in-lets that cross through before you get back to the house. That’s a long walk around the block!

The school bus was a two-hour ride, with K-12 on the same bus. I pictured taking my precious daughter, whom I love more than my own flesh, and surrendering her to the language and activities I knew would happen on the bus. I couldn’t do it.

“We’ll just try homeschooling for a year or two until she’s a little bit older and less vulnerable.”

But that first year was one of the most rewarding years of my life. To teach a child to read is an experience like none other. Her eyes opened to the wonder of words. Her confidence grew. She loved books and couldn’t get enough. At the end of the first year, before she even turned 5, she was reading at a second-grade level. How do I put her in school now? She’ll be ahead of everyone else. Besides, I was still home with her younger brother. We decided to wait and put them both in school at a later date.

But that later date never happened for my oldest 2 children. Each year we prayed about the best route for educating our children, and each year it was very clear this was the path for them. If I had it to do over again, I would still homeschool my oldest 2 children as an act of obedience to the Lord.

But that doesn’t mean I recommend homeschooling. Homeschooling my kiddos is one of the hardest things I have ever done in my entire life. The yellow bus, which I didn’t want my kids on when they were so young, would drive by every day. I would stare out the window and wonder what my life would be like without the heavy weight of the education of my children on my shoulders. Instead of “Calgon, take me away!”, I wanted to scream, “School bus, take them away!”

But I digress.

The beauty of homeschooling is the time you get to spend with your children. I homeschooled before the public schools introduced ‘public school at home.’ I chose all of my own curriculum. The reading primers were Christ-centered. The history was not historical revisionism. Grammar books taught capitalization of Jesus’ pronouns. Even math had a Christian element to it. We started our days with the Bible; we read dozens of missionary biographies, and we prayed together each morning. I screened every book they read. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” This is the standard I used to filter the filth of the world from entering my children’s brains.

But when we are exposed to germs, our bodies build up an immunity to them. We may get a vaccine, and antibodies are created to remember the virus so that when it appears again, an army is ready to attack and kill the invading virus before it makes us sick. By filtering out the filth from my children’s life experiences, they didn’t develop a natural sense of recognizing good and evil. Almost all of our friends were Christians. We lived in our own little Hallelujah bubble. All they knew was good.

Hallelujah bubbles are beautiful places, but eventually my kids needed to leave the uncontaminated places and enter the real world. It’s a big, bad, and ugly world. They quickly learned all the four-letter words. They learned that most people have sex with whoever they want, whenever they want, and you don’t have to be married to have sex. They learned that it’s hard to reconcile the truths of Roman 1:18-32 when your boss is a homosexual, and your coworkers are trans, and the college roommate you randomly got placed with is also gay. It’s much easier to rest in the truth of God’s Word from your mom and dad’s couch than when you are face-to-face with reality.

One of my kids ended up expelled from my homeschool. What do you have to do to get expelled? Nothing. If you do absolutely nothing, you will get expelled. It was a difficult reconciliation for me. At that point, I had been homeschooling for about 20 years, and my identity and pride had become wrapped up in homeschooling. The older two were away at college, and defiance had sneaked into our home. I could no longer get my teenager to do any schoolwork. It turned into a fight that has hindered our relationship even to this day. The last three years were spent at a private Christian school where the educational standards were laughable compared to the quality of a homeschool education, but it preserved what is left of my sanity.

My kids hands-down got a superior education from anything they could have gotten in a public or private school, and for that I am thankful. Every child needs and deserves an individualized educational plan, not just kids with special needs. An individualized educational plan allows you the ability to stop and repeat long division for an extra month if needed, and then whiz through decimals because they come easily. Homeschooling allows you to go at your own pace, which is either slow or fast, depending on the child. My son ended up with a National Merit Scholarship. Why? Because he had already completed and aced Calculus at the age of 16. He moved at his own pace, which happened to be fast. My kids are all hard-working because they grew up working at a young age. A strong work ethic combined with a good education has helped them succeed in their current positions as adults.

But as I state all of this, I still see and feel glimmers of pride, that capital ‘P’ sin, seeping out of my pores. It is part of what motivated me to keep going over the years. My kids are smart. Part of what made them smart is their education. Their teacher was me. Do you see the dangerous spiral? Was homeschooling them about glorifying God? Was homeschooling about giving my kids a good education? Or was homeschooling about me? I truly believe my motives started pure, but over time they morphed into something ugly.

Should you homeschool your children? Yes, if God calls you to homeschool your children, then do it. It is an act of obedience and submission. It will pull you and push you and stretch you in ways you never knew were possible. It will leave you sobbing in the fetal position on your bed with the door locked for just a few moments of stolen silence. It will fly you to new heights you’ve never soared to. It’s a beautiful thing.

But if I could do it over again, I would read books with my kids that were maybe a little bit ugly. We could have read the ugliness together and talked about it. We could have watched some movies without watching the “Plugged-in” review first, and then stopped the movie at times to discuss what was going on. I could have taught them the four-letter words, what they meant, and why we don’t use them. I could have allowed a cartilage piercing so it wouldn’t have needed to be filled with shame and done behind my back. I could have expected sin from them instead of only righteousness because they are, after all, sinners - just like their mom. I could have been on the alert for the contamination of pride in my life.

But I can’t go back.

But if you are considering homeschooling, you still have the future.

Go where He leads in this important decision.

But you might end up a bit weird, like me.

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