I’ve homeschooled for ten years.
Writing that still feels a little strange.
Ten years is a long time to do anything, but especially something that touches nearly every corner of your life.
Homeschooling is in my house. It’s in my calendar. It’s in the books on my shelves and the conversations around my dinner table. It’s in the research I’ve done, the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve worried about, and, obviously, a pretty significant portion of what I talk about here.
My oldest has been homeschooled since kindergarten. My youngest has been homeschooled since she was very little.
So homeschooling isn’t some little side project we’ve been experimenting with.
It’s been our normal for a decade.
And yet, I don’t consider myself a homeschooler first.
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Homeschool is something I do
I think there’s a subtle difference between saying:
“I homeschool.”
and believing:
“I am a homeschooler.”
Obviously, technically, I am a person who homeschools.
But I’ve never wanted that to become the box that contains everything else about me.
Homeschool is a choice we made.
It’s a choice that has worked really well for our family.
It’s something I’m passionate about.
I genuinely love learning about education. I love finding interesting resources. I love seeing my kids make connections. I love the flexibility homeschooling gives us. I love that we can build an education around actual people instead of forcing our actual people into a predetermined educational structure.
But none of that means homeschooling has to be permanent.
If tomorrow homeschooling stopped serving my kids well, I would want to be able to recognize that.
And if the best educational path for one of my children eventually became public school, private school, college, an apprenticeship, something completely unconventional, or something I haven’t even thought of yet, I want to be able to follow the child rather than defend the method.
That’s why my motivation isn’t really homeschooling.
My motivation is educating my kids.
Homeschool just happens to be the way we’re doing that right now.
Ten years can make something feel like your identity
The longer you do something, the easier it is for it to become part of the way you see yourself.
And homeschooling is particularly good at this.
It isn’t just something you drop your kids off for every morning.
You are responsible for an enormous number of decisions.
What do they learn?
When do they learn it?
How do they learn it?
Are they doing enough?
Are they learning enough?
Are they socializing enough?
Are you challenging them enough?
Are you giving them enough freedom?
Are you doing too much?
Are you doing too little?
What happens next year?
What happens in high school?
What happens after high school?
And then there are the outside questions.
What about socialization?
What about college?
What about friends?
What about sports?
What about opportunities?
What about all of the things people assume children automatically get when they’re in traditional school?
It’s a lot.
And because you’re carrying both the parenting responsibility and the educational responsibility, the normal anxieties of parenting can feel magnified.
That’s where I think it’s really easy for homeschooling to start taking over.
Not just your schedule.
Your identity.
I don’t want to be “the homeschool mom”
There are a lot of stereotypes attached to homeschooling.
Some are funny.
Some are frustrating.
Some are rooted in reality for certain families.
Some aren’t.
But I’ve never wanted to make my entire life fit whatever people think a homeschool family is supposed to look like.
I’ve homeschooled for ten years.
I also have a life.
I’m a wife.
I’m a mom.
I’m a creator.
I have other businesses.
I like learning.
I like traveling.
I’m interested in theatrical styling and wig making.
I have a whole list of things I want to learn that have absolutely nothing to do with homeschooling.
And I want my kids to have that same freedom.
My daughter is an actress and a dancer and an artist and an animal lover and a Girl Scout and a person who is learning new things all the time.
My son has his own interests, personality, passions and ideas.
If someone asks them where they go to school, obviously homeschooling is going to come up.
But I don’t want “homeschooled” to be the answer to the question, Who are you?
Because it’s not.
It’s simply how they get their education.
My children are not their educational method
This one matters to me a lot.
Sometimes we get so invested in the choices we make for our children that the choice starts to become part of how we describe the child.
Homeschool kid.
Public school kid.
Gifted kid.
Athlete.
Theater kid.
Whatever the label happens to be.
And labels can be useful.
They can help us find community. They can help us explain things. They can help us find resources.
But they’re still just pieces.
My children are not their school.
They’re not their grades.
They’re not their extracurricular activities.
They’re not the curriculum I picked.
They’re not the educational philosophy I’ve spent years researching.
They’re people.
And they’re still becoming themselves.
I want to leave them room to do that.
Especially for women
This gets even more complicated for women.
Because women are so often handed identities through our relationships to other people.
Mom.
Wife.
Daughter.
Caregiver.
Homeschool mom.
And those can all be meaningful and wonderful parts of a person’s life.
But they are still parts.
I don’t want my daughter growing up believing that becoming a mother means every other part of her disappears.
I don’t want her to believe that loving her family means she can’t have ambitions.
I don’t want her to believe that caring for other people means she isn’t allowed to care about herself.
I don’t want her to think that choosing one path means she has surrendered every other possibility.
And, honestly, I don’t want to model that either.
I can love being a mother and still be Shanna.
I can love homeschooling and still have interests outside of homeschooling.
I can devote enormous amounts of time to my children and still have dreams that belong only to me.
That’s not selfish.
That’s being a whole person.
You are a thousand-piece puzzle
I kept thinking about this while I was talking about it.
We’re like jigsaw puzzles.
There are a thousand pieces of us.
Some pieces are enormous during certain seasons.
Some get smaller.
Some disappear for a while.
Some new ones show up that we didn’t expect.
Motherhood might be a huge piece.
Homeschooling might be a huge piece.
Your career might be a huge piece.
Your marriage might be a huge piece.
A hobby might suddenly become a huge piece.
A season of caregiving might take up almost the entire table for a while.
But no single piece is the whole picture.
And I think we sometimes forget that.
We start saying:
This is who I am.
When what we really mean is:
This is what I’m doing right now.
Those aren’t the same thing.
Homeschool doesn’t have to be forever
One of the most freeing things about homeschooling, for me, has been remembering that I can change my mind.
We don’t have to prove that homeschooling was the correct decision by homeschooling forever.
We don’t have to keep going because we’ve already invested ten years.
We don’t have to stay because we’ve told other people this is what our family does.
We don’t have to continue because changing our minds would somehow mean we failed.
We can reevaluate.
We’ve always reevaluated.
When we first started, we actually put those conversations on the calendar much more frequently. We wanted to make sure we weren’t simply continuing because we’d already started.
Now that we’re ten years in, those conversations happen more naturally and less frequently.
But they’re still there.
Because the point isn’t to homeschool.
The point is to educate our children well and build a life that works for our actual family.
If that requires changing something, we change it.
That’s not failure.
That’s paying attention.
And you can change, too
Maybe homeschooling has become a huge part of your identity.
Maybe motherhood has.
Maybe your career has.
Maybe you’re the person everyone depends on.
Maybe you’re the person who knows everything about a particular hobby.
Maybe you’ve spent years building a life around something you genuinely love.
That’s okay.
You don’t have to make it smaller just because it’s big.
But you also don’t have to let it become the entire picture.
You are allowed to have other interests.
You’re allowed to learn something new.
You’re allowed to change your mind.
You’re allowed to want something different.
You’re allowed to discover a part of yourself that has been sitting quietly in the background while you took care of everyone else.
And you’re allowed to pivot.
At any point.
You don’t have to wait for a new year or a new school year or a perfectly convenient moment.
You are more than the things you do.
You are more than the roles you fill.
And homeschooling—if that’s one of the things you do—is only one piece.
That’s true for me.
And I hope it’s true for you, too.
What is one piece of you that has nothing to do with motherhood, parenting, or homeschooling?
I’d genuinely love to know.
Let’s keep making everyday magic.
