Homeschool vs. Public School: What I Learned After Trying Both With My Kid
The warm smell of lavender detergent hung over our kitchen table last Tuesday, when my neighbor leaned down to my 10-year-old, Lila, who was folding socks between bites of the chocolate chip cookie she’d brought, and asked the question I hear every time someone finds out we’ve done both: “So which did you like better?”
Lila paused, wiped crumbs off her faded dinosaur sweatshirt, and I waited. I would’ve bet good money she’d say homeschool. We pulled her out of second grade after eight months of Monday morning migraines, meltdowns over 20 minutes of nightly homework, and her teacher telling me she “just wouldn’t sit still” during whole-group reading. For 18 months, we did school on our own terms: morning hikes when the weather was nice, three days a week at the community nature center, reading whatever chapter book she picked for as long as she wanted, and math that mostly happened when baking or splitting a pizza with her friends. I’d assumed she’d jump to say that was way better than seven hours a day in a classroom.
But she just shrugged and said, “Neither. They’re just different for different things.” Then she went back to sorting socks by color, like that was the most obvious answer in the world. My neighbor laughed and asked her to elaborate, so she set down a pair of striped ankle socks and said, “Public school I get to go to robotics with Mia every Wednesday, and art club after school. Nobody nags me to finish my reading log because that’s just what you do there. But when we did homeschool, I got to spend three whole days studying salamanders after we found one in the backyard, and I didn’t have to stop reading my graphic novel to go to gym class when I just wanted to finish the story. I like parts of both.”
After my neighbor left, I wiped crumbs off the table and thought about how many times I’ve been asked that same question, by other parents, by relatives, even by strangers at the grocery store. When I pulled Lila out, everyone acted like I’d made this huge permanent life choice, like we’d never be part of the regular school system again. When I enrolled her back in fourth grade this past fall, same thing: people acted like I’d admitted homeschool was a failure, like I’d wasted a year and a half of her life. No matter what, everyone wants a winner. They want one clear answer to which is better.
What no one talks about much is that you don’t have to pick one forever. I got so hung up on making the “right” choice when Lila was struggling in second grade that I almost missed the fact that choices can be temporary. That’s the biggest takeaway for other parents who are staring down this same question, whether they’re considering pulling a kid out or thinking about going back after homeschooling.
The first thing I did that made this whole thing way easier was not lock us into any long-term plan. When I pulled Lila out, I just filed the required letter of intent with our school district. I didn’t pay for a pricey multi-year curriculum or pull her out of all district programs. I kept her name on the waitlist for the district’s gifted elementary program, which had the robotics and art programs she’d been asking about for years. That meant when she said last spring that she missed doing group projects with kids her age, we didn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to enroll her back. No big drama, no messy transition.
Second, I stopped asking her the big vague question “do you like this better?” and started asking three small, specific questions every month over ice cream after school: What’s one thing you wish you had more time for? What’s one thing that feels like too much right now? If you could change one thing about your days, what would it be? When we were homeschooling, she once said “too many math worksheets, I wish I had more time to catch frogs.” So we dropped the workbook and started doing math at the nature center, counting frog eggs and measuring pond depths. Last month, she told me at our ice cream check-in that the 15 minutes of morning seat work is too boring, and she wishes she could read instead. I talked to her teacher, and she agreed to let Lila do independent reading during seat work, since she’s already finished the required work. Small changes make a big difference, and you can’t make those changes if you don’t ask the right small questions.
Third, I stopped trying to justify my choice to anyone. If someone asks which is better, I just say “it’s working for us right now” and change the subject. I don’t need to convince anyone that homeschool was good for us when we did it, or that public school is good for us now. That frees up so much mental energy that I used to spend worrying what other people thought.
I still have moments where I wonder if I’m doing it right. Last week, Lila forgot her homework folder for the third time in a month, and I sat in the pickup line worrying that the loose structure of homeschool left her with bad habits. But then her teacher sent me a note saying that Lila led her group’s project on ecosystems last week, and she’d never had a kid bring in actual pressed leaves and a jar of pond water to show the class, that it got every other kid excited to do extra work. That curiosity, that willingness to dive into what interests her, that’s the thing that came out of our homeschool days. It doesn’t disappear just because she’s in a classroom now.
Right now, this setup works. Lila gets her robotics and her daily time with friends, and we still do extra salamander hunts on the weekends. If next year she says she wants to go back to homeschool, we’ll do that. I don’t know what middle school will bring, or what she’ll need when she’s 14. The question “which did you like better” doesn’t have one answer, not for our family, anyway. The answer changes as she changes. And that’s okay.
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