Post 1: What I Wish I’d Known When I Started Homeschooling
Years ago, when I made the decision to pull my youngest son out of public school and homeschool him for his 10th grade year, I thought the hardest part would be the teaching. I was wrong. The teaching was the easy part. Everything else nearly broke me.
I’m writing this for the parent who’s standing where I stood about to make the decision, or maybe a few weeks in and realizing nobody told you the full story. Here’s what I wish someone had said to me.
1. The hardest part is finding the information, not delivering it.
When I started, I assumed there was one place one website, one government office, one book that would tell me exactly what to do. There isn’t. Not in my state, and not in any state I’ve looked into since. The information is scattered across state Department of Education websites, homeschool advocacy groups, court rulings nobody linked to, and forums where people contradict each other. I spent more time hunting for answers than I spent teaching my son.
If I could change one thing about my year, it would be the time I lost to questions like:
- What subjects am I legally required to cover?
- How many hours per day count as “instructional time”?
- Do I need to keep attendance records? For how long?
- Do I have to register with the state? With my district?
- What happens if I want to send my kid back to public school next year?
These questions have answers. They were just hidden everywhere except in one place.
2. The cost adds up faster than you think.
I thought homeschooling would be cheaper than the supplies and field trips I’d been paying for through the public school. It wasn’t. Curriculum companies charge anywhere from $50 to $500 per subject. Workbooks cost $20 to $40 each. The “free” Pinterest printables required a printer with ink, and ink costs more than gasoline. Even the public library, which I leaned on hard, had its limits and late fees.
The math taught me that homeschooling on a tight budget is a separate skill from homeschooling itself. You can’t just teach. You have to teach AND figure out how to do it without spending money you don’t have. Most homeschool resources online aren’t written for parents who actually have to think about money. They assume you can drop $300 on a curriculum without flinching.
If money is tight where you’re sitting, you are not alone. And you are not unqualified. The kids who succeed at homeschooling don’t succeed because their parents bought expensive curriculum. They succeed because their parents showed up.
3. You will doubt yourself constantly. Let yourself.
There were weeks where I was certain I had ruined my son’s life. I’d read an article about how homeschooled kids fall behind in math and feel my stomach drop. I’d compare him to his public school cousins and panic. I’d send a desperate text to my sister at 11 p.m. asking if I was crazy.
I wasn’t crazy. I was a mom doing one of the hardest jobs in the world without much of a manual. The doubt didn’t mean I was failing. The doubt meant I cared enough to question myself, which is more than a lot of full-time teachers do.
Here’s what I’d tell my younger self: the days you doubt yourself are the days you’re paying attention. The parents who never doubt are the ones who should worry.
4. Your kid will surprise you — both ways.
My son blew me away in subjects I thought he’d hate. He also dragged his feet for weeks on lessons I thought he’d love. The kid I thought I knew was different the moment he became the kid I was teaching. Homeschooling shows you sides of your child you don’t see when school takes them away for seven hours a day.
That’s a gift. It’s also exhausting. You can’t escape the relationship the way you can when you drop them at school and pick them up at 3. You’re in it. All of it.
5. The people who matter will show up. The ones who don’t, won’t.
Some of my family supported me. Some thought I’d lost my mind. Some told me I was setting my son up to fail. I lost a couple of friendships that year not because they were against me, but because they couldn’t understand the choice. That was hard. It still is, sometimes.
But the people who did show up — my sister, two neighbors, an old church friend who’d homeschooled her own kids they were the difference between me making it and me quitting. Find your people early. Don’t waste energy trying to convince the ones who don’t get it.
What I’d tell my younger self if I could go back
You’re not crazy. You’re not unqualified. You don’t need a perfect curriculum to teach your child. You need consistency, honesty about what you don’t know, and the humility to keep learning alongside them.
The hardest year of my life was also the year my son and I came back to each other after years of him being a teenager who didn’t want to talk to me. That alone was worth every dollar I didn’t have and every night I cried.
If you’re starting now — or thinking about starting I built Homeschool360 to be the one place that has the answers I spent that whole year hunting for. It’s free. It’s not selling you anything. It’s just here.
You can do this.
— Dee