When home education doesn’t flow

Sometimes it’s hard to write about home education in glowing terms because it feels like I’m not being entirely honest. Not dishonest, just not sharing the difficult bits. Because I’m trying to be an advocate, trying to lift people up, and I can’t imagine that people want to read about sometimes, I’m the one who needs lifting.

But that’s not very authentic, and lying by omission is still lying. So today, I’m going to talk about what you do when home education feels really really hard. Or even when it’s parenting and life that feel hard, because that happens too.

It will particularly happen when you’re a neurodivergent family. (I’m not using neurodivergent You don’t fit into the world’s expectations or systems, and your children don’t either. You’ve done your best to squish yourself into other people’s boxes, but the experience has left you feeling bruised and battered and even less capable than before.

You are not the problem. Your child is not the problem. A world that expects people to fit into neat boxes is the problem. So what do you do?

Throw the boxes out. If what you were doing in home education (or parenting, or life) isn’t working any more, it’s time to start over.

Sometimes this will happen because things change externally. Sometimes it’ll happen because your child or your needs change. Maybe you get ill for a while. Perhaps your landlord tries to evict you. Or you lose your job or whatever.

There’s nothing wrong in resting. Education doesn’t have to look like school – and while home education is expected to be full time and continuous, holidays are acceptable. (School is 39 weeks a year. Sometimes when we’re home educating we try to just keep it up all the time, because “there’s learning in everything” and sometimes we forget that it’s fine to take a break.)

Do something different. Take up a new hobby. Make that new hobby be sleeping if necessary! Hobbies don’t have to be productive, or educational, or anything other than fun. All of this applies to your children as well.

Perhaps you, or your child, have issues with PDA (pathological demand avoidance or persistent drive for autonomy) and education has become a demand too far. (Sometimes existing feels like a demand too far.) I’m going to offer you a choice here – would you prefer to rest now or later? Because if you try to push through this one, you will burn out. and your body will impost rest. So once we’ve recognised that rest is important, then it’s about how we meet the demands of the legal system around home education, and that can be by building activities around interests *without* telling the child that this is education, and then you go back later and work out what the education was that was provided.

That can sound like a complete cop out. But that’s because of how we’ve built the education system, and home education is still judged by the standards of that system. Education for children is often only valued when it can be measured and quantified, even though there’s lots of other things we learn day to day in and out of school. Once you recognise that, it becomes a lot easier to tick their incredibly artificial boxes, and go on providing an education that’s actually suitable to age, ability and aptitude, and designed to support your child to build the life that they want for themselves.

Take care of you.