How Do I Explain To My Parents I Want Public School Instead of Homeschool: What I Learned As A Homeschool Mom
I was kneeling on the laundry room floor last month, folding Lila’s soccer socks, the ones with the frayed toes I keep forgetting to mend, when I realized she’d been hovering in the doorway for five minutes. She was twisting the frayed end of the friendship bracelet her cousin made her at summer camp, picking at a coffee stain on the front of her gray hoodie, the one we got at the used bookstore downtown back in May. “Mom,” she said, and I looked up, “I need to talk to you about next year. I want to go to public school.”
I froze mid-fold. We’d pulled her out of public school in third grade, back when bullying got so bad she’d fake stomach aches to stay home, back when her teacher told me she was “too quiet” to need extra support. For four years, homeschool worked. We did history field trips to the old battlefields an hour away, she took weekly art classes at the community center, we did co-op PE with a dozen other homeschool kids every Wednesday. I’d even quit my part-time admin job to make it work, so my first thought was, did I waste all that time? Did she hate every minute of it? “But what about your art classes?” I said, my voice tighter than I meant it to be. “You love that we can sleep in on Mondays and go hiking when it’s nice out.”
That’s when she pulled a crumpled, folded sheet of notebook paper out of her hoodie pocket. She’d written down bullet points, in her messy cursive, and she handed it to me like she’d rehearsed this for weeks. She probably had. It read: 1. I loved homeschool these past four years. I got to do all the cool trips and art I never would have done at regular school. 2. I want to take AP Chemistry for high school, and our co-op doesn’t offer it. Mom is great at a lot of things, but chem isn’t one of them. 3. I want to be on the full competitive cheer team at the high school, not just the rec co-op team that has 8 people. 4. I want to practice working in groups on projects before college, because all my college info says group work is a big part of it. 5. I don’t hate homeschool. I just want to try something new for high school. If I hate it, I can come back.
We sat down on the laundry room floor next to the basket of towels, and I poured her a glass of my sweet iced tea, the one with the brown lemon slices that had been sitting on the counter all afternoon. I thought about all the messages I see in homeschool groups, from kids on anonymous accounts asking how to bring this up to their parents, and I realized how much easier Lila made this by how she approached it.
Most parents don’t get defensive because they don’t want you to be happy. They get defensive because homeschool takes so much work. It’s late nights lesson planning, it’s skipping vacations to fit in testing, it’s arguing with relatives who think you’re ruining your kid’s social life. When your kid says they want to leave, the first thing most parents think is that all that work was for nothing, that you messed up. Lila didn’t lead with “homeschool is boring” or “all my friends go to public school.” She led with acknowledging that what we’d done mattered, that it had been good for her, that this wasn’t a rejection of us or the last four years. That alone cut half the tension out of the room right away.
She also didn’t give vague reasons. A lot of kids say “I want more friends” and that’s valid, but it’s hard for parents to hear that, because they worry they’ve failed you socially. Lila gave specific, concrete things she couldn’t get in our current setup: AP chem, a competitive cheer team, practice with group work for college. She even brought up the fact that she’d looked up the high school’s anti-bullying policy, that she knew how to go to the guidance counselor if things got hard, that she was old enough now to handle problems she couldn’t handle when she was 8. She’d thought through my biggest worry before I even said it out loud.
The best thing she did, though, was offer a trial. She didn’t demand this be a forever change. She said we could plan for one semester. I’d keep our homeschool membership active, we’d keep her art slot at the community center, and if she hated it, if it was too much, if the drama got to be too big, we’d switch back after Christmas. That took all the pressure off me. I didn’t have to decide right now if this was the right forever choice, we just had to try it for a few months.
We went to tour the high school last week. She met her guidance counselor, we walked past the chem lab, she stayed after to watch a cheer practice and talked to the coach. I walked the empty halls by myself for a few minutes after, and I still have jitters some nights. I worry she’ll get overwhelmed with the 7 a.m. start times, I worry someone will be mean to her, I wonder if I’m making a mistake letting her go. I also know that if I’d said no, she’d always wonder what it would have been like, and that’s a different kind of mistake.
She leaves for cheer camp next week, her first day of high school is two weeks after that. We still do our Friday pizza nights, she still drags me on hiking trails on Saturday mornings when the weather’s nice. It’s not the end of our time learning together, it’s just a different phase. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Some days it feels like the right call, some days I’m still wrapping my head around it. That’s okay, I think. Growing up is just a lot of trying new things, and sometimes that means changing what works for you.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How Do I Explain To My Parents I Want Public School Instead of Homeschool: What I Learned As A Homeschool Mom