Do We Regret Homeschooling Our Kids? Homeschool Regrets

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We chose to homeschool almost a decade ago. Today I have teens. One child would be sitting his GCSEs this year and is technically old enough to leave school. Covid seems to have cancelled his exams, but no worry, he can sit them next year, or not at all. The younger child would be in year 10 in regular school. One attended school to just before his seventh birthday, the other has never been inside a classroom. Their childhood involved a lot of travel, this is what people call “worldschooling“. There was some homeschooling, some unschooling, and, mostly no school at all that anyone would recognise. Today, the outcome, do we regret taking the homeschooling path?

regret homeschooling kid

The Choice to Homeschool Isn’t an Easy One

Homeschooling is not an easy path to take. If you’ve home educated even for a short time you’ll know the levels of objection and hostility you can face from some of society.

Homeschooling challenges people’s beliefs in the system the way it is, and a lot of people hold very strong anti-homeschool beliefs based on no knowledge whatsoever.

A lot of people feel the need to voice those opinions, particularly when they’re hiding behind a computer screen.

We’ve seen it, heard it, and felt it. You only have to look at some of the comments on this website to see how much homeschooling can rile people.

We homeschoolers encounter hostility from friends, family, acquaintances, and random people at the supermarket. We learn to deal with it.

We coped by cutting aggressors out of our lives. They weren’t welcome around us. That was easy. It’s not so easy for every homeschooling family.

We mostly find new friends with beliefs more in line with our own. Our family is blessed with a wonderful international support system today.

Why We Chose to Homeschool

We chose homeschooling because we thought it was the best choice for our kids. That’s the short and honest answer.

There were many factors that led to that decision, we weren’t happy with the local school, we didn’t want our kids raised in the system, we wanted them to be as happy and well-educated as possible, and we wanted to spend time with them.

The travel was a product of the homeschooling, not the other way round.

You may think your local school or whatever private school you can afford is the best option for your kids for all the same reasons. That’s fine, but for us, it wasn’t the best option.

Outcomes of Homeschooling

Never being inside a classroom, and only a year or so as a very young child in school, seems to have held them back not-at-all.

Today they are happy, accomplished, and I have no doubt they’ll pass a whole bunch of exams if they choose that route. (they did)

We never intended for them to sit exams. That wasn’t part of the plan. But then Covid came and changed our world.

How Covid Stopped Our Homeschooling

When the virus came in 2020 we were forced to change our lifestyle. We were stranded, and the full-time travel that saw us free to come and go as we pleased was finished.

For various reasons, primarily strict homeschooling regulations and house-bound boredom, we put our kids in an online school.

This is not homeschooling. In homeschooling the parents take on the responsibility of their child’s education. I signed that over to a school and teachers, I was no longer a homeschool mum.

The kids slotted into their classes straight away with no knowledge gap at all. They chose sciences, history, literature, a good cross-section of topics to suit their interests.

I am, or was, a scientist, I knew their science knowledge was good, the other subjects I was more anxious about, particularly maths.

I needn’t have worried. They were fine, no different to the other kids at all, in fact, often, they performed strongly, scoring some seriously high grades.

My older teen has just sat his mocks. He did great. The first exams he has ever sat other than his scuba qualification, which, if you didn’t know, is mostly physics.

He had never written an essay before in his life, but he had written blog posts, a very different skill.

Academically, if you choose to score a childhood based on exam passes, it’s all worked out just fine. You could argue that he would have passed more exams and better, had he been in school. Possibly, but it doesn’t matter.

He will pass enough and my feeling is that he would have done less well academically in school. Obviously, the outcomes are bigger than that.

I’ve been privileged to spend every day of the last nine years with my kids. Every day, and night, we have been together, never separated at all. That has been wonderful.

We get on, we have no “teen” issues, I know where they are and what they’re doing and who with. I know them inside out, I like them, I’m proud of them, they’re pretty cool kids.

I’m happy, they’re happy.

They’ve had time to follow their interests through not having to spend their lives in school. One is a very determined young YouTuber, the other loves his conservation volunteering.

They couldn’t have done either with a regular school timetable. Their young remembrance is full of days spent skiing, scuba diving, and climbing mountains alongside planes, buses, and trains.

They have no memories containing bullying or other school injustices. No ridicule, peer pressure, or the school-days shame of unpopularity.

Of course, we’ve taken them to fifty or so countries,. That has been incredible for them. I can see how it’s added to their self-esteem and self-belief. They are full of knowledge and experience that few other kids will have and it’s good. Very good for them.

Any Negatives of Homeschooling? Any Regrets?

None of us has a strong social circle in our present location. We are not meshed into the community as most people are by their school years. We don’t have many friends here. Is that a negative?

We haven’t been here, we’ve been all over the world these last nine years, this isn’t our home, not our community. The longer we stay the more embedded we’re becoming, but this isn’t permanent. As soon as we can we’ll be gone.

To us, these things aren’t negatives. We have trusted friends all over the world and soon we’ll be able to see them again, we hope. Many of these friends have influenced my boys growing up, diverse people of different nationalities and walks of life.

With homeschoolers you’ll often find that they get along with adults better than the school kids do. It was something I became aware of at our first ever homeschool camp.

The homeschooled teens were different from other teens. There’s never any us and them, no otherly “Sir” or “Miss”. Just more human beings to interact with, or not.

The biggest negative of our digital nomad lifestyle, I think, is in having too many choices. No one place is obviously “home” to us and I struggle with decisions on where to be.

I had this affliction before the kids were born. I married somebody from another country and culture, it was inevitable.

They are mixed nationality, although they identify most strongly as British. This could affect the kids negatively in future, we have no way of knowing. But I do know they could live happily in Vietnam, Romania, London, Wales, in many places, and they have the skills to make that happen if it’s what they choose.

Through this journey we’ve met other homeschooled, worldschooled, and unschooled kids, of course. You’ll usually find my kids chatting to them online. I can hear them both chatting away right now. They are their peers, I guess. The kids with the shared experiences.

I’m not self-justifying here, I just think it’s time to share that it worked. Everything came together just fine. Yes, I worried, stressed, and doubted at times. We all do.

There were sleepless nights and lack of maternal certainty. But now, it’s all good. They’ll be fine. And that’s what every parent desires.

I’ve been a homeschool advocate for nine years. I’ve been interviewed by magazines, newspapers, even Lonely Planet on this, my favourite topic. Giving kids freedom from school and simultaneously, an epic education. It’s nice to be able to lay it to rest now. It worked. I’d like to open the comments section to you, is there anything you’d like to ask on homeschooling, the travel, or the lifestyle?

You’ll find more information in the related posts and tags below. No regrets about homeschooling, no way. If we had these years over the only change I’d make would be to never send my elder son to school at all. The biggest regret today is that I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the strength to walk this path for him back then.

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About the author
Alyson Long
Alyson Long is a British medical scientist who jumped ship to chase dreams. A former Chief Biomedical Scientist at London's West Middlesex Hospital she started in website creation and travel writing in 2011. Alyson is a full-time blogger and travel writer, a published author, and owns several websites. World Travel Family is the biggest. A lifetime of wanderlust and over 6 years of full-time travel, plus a separate 12 month gap year, has given Alyson and the family some travel expert smarts to share with you on this world travel site. Today Alyson still travels extensively to update this site and continue her mission to visit every country, but she's often at home on her farm in Australia.

15 thoughts on “Do We Regret Homeschooling Our Kids? Homeschool Regrets”

  1. Thank you for writing this article, it’s great. As someone who had never considered homeschooling myself, your article is making me reconsider! If only my children weren’t so entrenched in their school community. I love and admire what you have done for your children and while I can’t see us homeschooling, it certainly encourages me to put more emphasis on family travel and time as a family.

    Reply
  2. Oh wow. This post is so reassuring and inspirational. We hs our kids for close to 4 years now, they’re both 12 and 14 years old.

    I concur to most of the points you emphasised in the post. They certainly are more empathetic and can easily relate to people around, contrary to belief that hs kids will shy away from socialising with people.

    Thanks for post. It certainly has given us a boost of confidence.

    Reply
  3. Homeschooling was a life changer for us. I started in 2009 and my youngest just graduated in December, 6 months ahead of his peers. I don’t regret it a bit. It’s been great, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. My daughter wants me to homeschool her children when they come…yay! Congrats to you. I love your blog and salute you for everything you’ve accomplished. Take care and God Bless.

    Reply
  4. We’re the same way – my daughter never wrote an essay until she went for college placement exams… and she got the highest score attainable. She was dean’s list (4.0 – highest GPA) her two semesters of college. But she wasn’t interested in a degree. Just a certification in Sign Language.

    From there, she went on to do a certification in computers, although at the moment she’s taking a break (CLVID-19), and just working/learning with us, again.

    I have four more (boys) still homeschooling. Have been at it 16 years, have another eight to go. But while we live a little cut off from others (and the kids feel it), they wouldn’t change it for the world – especially now that they’re starting to get part-time jobs and see how other public-schooled kids think/act.

    Travel is impossible for us, at the moment. Even at that, we’re doing the North Country Trail and eight different biking systems in our state (when the weather isn’t so treacherous). And we did the American side of the Lake Superior Scenic Trail even during pandemic, so… while National Parks and historical exploration are out, there are still options.

    Reply
    • @aNNa, thanks for this post. I was curious about placement exams. I have two young girls and we’re seriously exploring worldschooling. I was curious as to what happens when/if they want to go to college, would they be missing the prerequisite courses or credits because I didn’t follow the educational systems process.
      We’re in Canada so may be slightly different than in US but it sounds like I’ll need to do more research.

      Reply
      • There are loads of ways to sit exams as an independent candidate. With plenty of international options. Also many can be sat at any age. But paper passes aren’t necessarily required for university admittance. It’s a huge topic, I can’t go into it now. But the “normal” way, is not by any means the only way. I’m still hoping my two will set up their own businesses as I have, it’s very easy when you have the know-how, I which case they’ll never need to pass an exam in their lives, but… their call. They’re not old enough to decide yet so all options remain open.

        Reply
  5. Ok but what I really want to know … being raised by a Brit mom and Aussie Dad … is their accent more like mom’s or dad’s? Or maybe something totally different. My 7 year old can pull off a perfect Aussie accent thanks to youtube … he’s never spoken to an Aussie in real life. Lots of kiwis, and lots of people from other cultures, but nothing has stuck with him like that Aussie accent!

    Reply
    • They both sound exactly like me. Neutral, maybe a barely detectable Welshism now and again. Most people, wrongly, say we sound English. We do not have any sort of English accent. RP, received pronunciation, that’s the (almost) total lack of any accent. You learn stuff like that being married to an actor. D also knows a fair bit of Welsh, he studied it for a while for fun.

      Reply
  6. Wonderful! We were just starting to world school when the pandemic hit, and are looking forward to resuming…one of these days. By then, our oldest may be off on his own, but I hope he’ll come with us sometimes.

    Reply

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