Homeschooled Voices

Category: Homeschool Culture

  • My Early Years: Growing up Homeschooled Part 1

    photo by the author

    Author: Grace

    Introduction

    Homeschooling is a practice mostly performed by those who have never experienced it. By parents who had a more typical childhood for their country and culture than what they provided for their own children. No matter how successful homeschooling is for a family, and no matter how the grown children eventually feel about it, one thing that will always be true is that the parents cannot understand what it is like to be homeschooled if they themselves were not homeschooled. They can understand whatever motivated them to homeschool, whether it be religious beliefs, educational philosophy, or special family circumstances such as moving frequently. They can approach homeschooling with their adult maturity, good and bad memories of traditional schooling, and vision of providing something superior for their own children. However, they will not understand what it is like to be raised outside of mainstream educational institutions, and to have the exceptional be your default assumed existence, an upbringing some homeschool graduates have likened to that of a third culture kid. See this article and this video. As someone who grew up in the United States like my parents did, I personally would not claim the third culture kid label solely for having been homeschooled. However, the fact that some homeschool graduates do demonstrates how growing up homeschooled can lead to a feeling of differentness in adulthood.

    In the following article series, I will share my homeschooling story. I will discuss what happened over the years, as well as how my emotional life and understanding of the world evolved throughout time. I will mention my parents, siblings, and people we knew, but will give no identifying details. To make a few things clear: first of all, this is not an attack piece on my parents. They had good intentions and mostly did a good job at raising us homeschooled. I still had a privileged childhood compared to many. Second, these are my personal experiences, and they do not represent all homeschoolers. For example, see Homeschoolers Anonymous for a large archive of homeschooling stories. My goal in writing this to increase awareness of what homeschooling can potentially look like from a student’s perspective. I hope you find it interesting!

    My Early Years of Being Homeschooled (ages 4-8, 2009-2013)

    Advanced Academically

    To start my homeschooling story at the very beginning, I must go all the way back to the year 2009, when I’d just turned four and my mom began doing a kindergarten curriculum with me. This was not a dramatic transition to a new place that involved teachers, classmates, and separation from my parents. The only change was that I now did a little bit of schoolwork with my mom some days. Every week I learned a new letter, and about something that started with that letter. Every school day I wrote a new number in my chart, counting toward my hundredth day of school. Mom read me the Genesis creation story, and I colored a picture for each of the seven days. I took it literally, and so did my parents. I painstakingly sounded out each word in my reading exercises. The following year, my mom did a phonics curriculum with me, and I learned all the rules, and that apparently a lot of words broke them. As I got better at reading, came to love it, and would devour all the children’s books mom gave me. Homeschooling was working well.

    When my brother and I were in kindergarten and second grade respectively, we did a curriculum on different countries and cultures, and this is probably one of my favorite memories from elementary school. I loved reading books about kids from different parts of the world, listening to music, trying new foods, and studying our atlases. Mom was surprised by how quickly my brother and I learned our geography, a pattern which repeated itself with many subjects. She has said we were like “sponges” for information. The work she put in to homeschooling us seemed to be paying off. I still consider those early elementary school years to be a special phase of learning, when you can discover so many things about the world for the first time.

    A Happy Family Life

    When I wasn’t doing schoolwork or the couple of chores I had daily, I could always find some way to entertain myself. I didn’t often feel lonely or bored. I was especially close with my next-oldest brother, and we spent hours making up weird stories about all our toy dolls and trains. My brother and I even won prizes at our homeschool co-op for being the individual boy and girl who had read the most books that year (yes, they separated it by gender instead of grade level for some reason). My family lived in Florida from when I was six until I was eight, and the beach became a favorite activity. I loved being in the water and collecting the colorful Florida seashells. I still have a whole box of them from about thirteen years ago. Back then, it felt like the world of my home and family was still plenty to explore.

    Socialized?

    Of course, I also had people in my life besides my immediate family. We went to church, park days, field trips, and homeschooling co-ops when we could. Dad was off at work a lot, but mom was at home all day with us and still wanted friends. So, she met up with other moms to talk, while we kids had a playdate. I was lucky that some of mom’s friends happened to have little girls my age! I felt happy and excited when it was time for these meetups. Back then, I considered any kid close to my age whom I saw repeatedly to be my friend- even if we didn’t actually interact very often. So, in my mind, I had enough friends, just like characters in books and movies. If I was socially behind, I wasn’t aware of it. Though looking back now, I think I was a bit behind. I was spared the stress of bullying and peer pressure in public school, but the tradeoff was less time with peers. It’s impossible to say just how much this aspect of homeschooling affected me though, because I never had anything else with which to compare it.

    All That I Knew

    What did I think about being homeschooled? Honestly, I don’t recall thinking much about it at all as a young child. It was my default state of existence. I knew what a school was, of course. My favorite characters often went, and so did my neighborhood friends. If I was being difficult, Mom would exclaim something like: “what if you were in a school?”, or “how embarrassing if you did that in a classroom!” On some level, I must have known my lifestyle was different, even if I don’t remember exactly when I first realized this. I never questioned it, never once asked my parents for school. I’m not sure if I fully comprehended that I, personally, could attend a traditional school. It felt like a fictional place to me, like in The Magic School Bus (my favorite show at age eight). In my mind, kids in our family didn’t get on that yellow school bus and go to this mysterious, possibly scary place called “public school” to sit at a desk for hours. We did schoolwork at home with mom and had lots of free time to play. We were Christians, military kids, and homeschoolers. The latter two things on that list might be circumstantial, but I still internalized all three of them as part of my identity at a young age.

    Ultimately, my life was different, but not all bad. I was a child with loving parents and a safe home. When I look back on my homeschooling experience, the early elementary years are still the ones about which I have the most positive feelings.

    Part 2 is coming soon! Click here if you want to share your own homeschooling story on this website!

  • On the Benefits and Limits of Homeschool Co-ops

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    Author: Grace

    Introduction

    Growing up, I always looked forward to co-op days. Co-op was a little slice of life outside the home. It had the possibility of friends and was a place where like-minded families came together for activities that would be hard to do alone. Thanks to my co-ops, I learned photography, played the ukelele, gave speeches, and did dissections for high school biology. I had people I looked forward to seeing, and whom I still remember fondly to this day. In many ways, the co-ops we attended provided an enriching experience for my siblings and I, one that we were undoubtedly better off for having had.

    Co-ops are a resource commonly used by homeschooling families like mine. In 2025, the Johns Hopkins Homeschool Research Lab conducted a survey of over 2,400 homeschooling parents in the U.S. In it, 88% of parents reported using outside resources to supplement their children’s learning, and 29% specifically reported using co-ops. This allows for rates of co-op attendance to be estimated at about 1 in 3 American homeschooling families. Apparently, many homeschoolers find co-ops to be a resource worth using, and I agree that they can indeed be a valuable addition to homeschool life.

    Sometimes I still wonder though: are co-ops really enough? It may seem odd that someone with good memories of co-ops would even ask this question. However, now that I have grown up and left the world of homeschooling, I can see some flaws in the homeschool lifestyle. I wish to discuss then. After all, how will future generations of homeschoolers know what to improve if alumni do not share their perspectives? So, this will be a somewhat critical article on weekly homeschooling co-ops. I will argue that if we mean “enough” in the sense of providing adequate social opportunities and academic enrichment for homeschooled students, then no, co-ops are not enough by themselves. They are limited in what they can provide as they are constrained by time and the pressures of family life. They are a starting point to enrichment, not an end in themselves.

    Social Limitations

    The largest social constraint I have noticed in homeschool co-ops is a simple lack of time for interaction. Because they are intended to be supplemental and not a child’s primary source of education, co-ops spend much less time in session than traditional schools. They commonly meet once per week, possibly less, with years that may be shorter than a traditional school year. While children in school will be around the same group of people five days a week as part of their normal routine, homeschooled children may only get one day a week with a specific set of people. Furthermore, that one day is for an activity that is not essential to their family’s functioning, and in fact just creates more work for the parents. Co-op is easy to miss due to sickness, scheduling conflicts, or parental burnout. I personally missed multiple times as a teen due to younger siblings being ill. And if a family skips a week, they will likely have at least another one to wait before seeing their co-op friends again. All of this means that a child in a co-op may end up feeling that their time to form friendships is limited, and that access to their social outlet is inconsistent and precarious.

    Another social limitation of co-ops is that they can lack diversity. By their very nature, they only include homeschoolers who voluntarily join and are not a representative sample of the local community at large. Often co-op leaders are even selective about which type of homeschooler is admitted and end up creating a little social bubble full of families with similar religious and political beliefs. I have seen this process unfold firsthand. Several years ago, my large family had just moved to a new state, where we were lucky to find a little co-op that welcomed us in the middle of the semester. Within the next few years that co-op grew in size, space became limited, and the leadership established a stricter vetting process for new members. This included a mandatory statement of faith and a lengthy review by the board members. They found social media posts they didn’t like? Rejected. There was a rumor about one of the children in a family? Rejected. A parent couldn’t commit to leading a class due to medical problems? Rejected. The judgement and exclusivity of some homeschool moms went far beyond practical considerations for co-op membership. And the result was a co-op that was very conservative, evangelical and very white as a natural result of selecting for the first two things. It did not allow kids to interact with people from a variety of backgrounds, nor did it allow them to explore outside ideas. As a teen who was beginning to internally question some conservative ideas, I felt I could not say all my thoughts out loud. And I recognize that my family was welcomed into many of our co-ops because we were conservative Christians. I know of other homeschoolers who struggled to find a homeschool group because of strict membership requirements. The lack of diversity within some co-ops means that some kids are not learning to interact with people different than them, and others are shut out.

    Academic Limitations

    Lack of consistency and time can also affect the academic offerings at co-ops. I don’t deny that they can provide excellent academic enrichment when the circumstances are right. When I was in ninth grade, I was enrolled in a co-op that had several other students my age, and parents willing to teach high school biology. We did our textbook readings as homework, then came to co-op for the labs and class discussions that we couldn’t do at home. It worked well for everyone. Well, except for the co-op’s sole older high schooler who’d already done biology. And it was a wonderful opportunity- for the year it lasted. I had no co-op chemistry class the next year, nor physics the year after. The rest of high school science was reading a textbook alone in my room. Co-op membership shifts, teachers come and go, and the class offerings of a co-op vary from year to year. This is perfectly fine if you’re looking for fun extracurricular classes like painting or robotics but makes the co-op an unreliable source for core academic subjects like algebra or high school chemistry.

    Parents vs. Children

    Although a co-op exists to provide activities for homeschooled children, it is ultimately an organization run by and dependent upon homeschooling parents. Not that this is inherently bad- it is unavoidable that much of what a child does will need to be facilitated by adults anyways. Still, it is important to recognize that parents and children play distinct roles in a homeschool co-op. If co-op leaders treat the experiences of themselves and their children as one and the same, they risk their co-op becoming more accommodating to the social needs of the adults than those of the children.

    A homeschool mom who joins a co-op is the one with autonomy, the one with transportation, the one with control over how her family socializes. She can seek out a community with like-minded adults in a similar stage of life. She has free access to electronic communication with her friends and full control over arranging get-togethers outside of co-op. Yes, it’s still possible she could struggle to make friends, but as an adult, she has a level of control over her social situation that her children do not have over theirs.

    I think that co-op parents can even get more social time than their children. One co-op I attended had a free period for moms to hang out in the break room and drink coffee together. Meanwhile the kids were in class, where much like in a school, we were expected to pay attention and not just talk the whole time. I loved class, and that was a very reasonable expectation, but it still led to slightly less social time for us kids. In another co-op my mom joined the board, which held meetings where parents got together, dealt with administrative tasks, and spent a lot of time talking. Of course, I understand that the board meetings were necessary for the co-op to function. It’s just somewhat ironic to think of all the moms laughing and chatting while the teens of the co-op were apart. All of those hours were spent planning classes that would only meet about ten times, so that the students could have their mornings together a couple times a month.

    It’s no wonder that the social landscape of a co-op can be a bit challenging for a student. The other kids enrolled in a co-op have a wide range of ages and personalities without the common identity of something like “Christian Homeschool Parent” to bind them together. A 40-year-old mother may easily befriend a 45-year-old mother, while their daughters aged 10 and 15 struggle to relate to each other on the same level. And a homeschooled kid had better hope that the peers they connect with at co-op happen to also be the kids of mom’s friends. When my family met up with other families, sometimes one sibling’s friend would be there, sometimes another’s, while the other kids would all sit around awkwardly. We were always seeing one of mom’s friends though. Overall, it is possible for the children in a co-op to have less opportunity to feel connected with people of a similar developmental stage than their parents do.

    Conclusion: How to Properly Use Co-ops

    Co-ops are a starting point to social and academic enrichment, not an end. They should be supplemented with other activities and resources. Something that can help mitigate the shortcomings of the weekly activity model is being involved in multiple activities at once, with overlapping families if possible. Parents should also arrange frequent get-togethers outside of activities that center on their children’s friendships. If they’re searching for additional academic support, they can look into everything from online classes, to tutors, to community college for teens. Most importantly, parents can simply ask their kids to share their perspective. Are they happy, are they bored, is there anything else they want to learn, do they feel they have true friends? Is there something going wrong in their life? Just ask! Make sure they feel understood and connected with other people.

    None of this is said to discourage participation in co-ops. I still maintain that they can be a wonderful addition to homeschool life, and that raising awareness of the potential pitfalls associated with them is for the good of homeschooling and homeschooled children alike.

  • Holding Back by Frances Prentice: Homeschooling in Rural Australia

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    Holding Back is a YA novella by Frances Prentice that was published by the Australian publisher Rhiza Press. It is available on Kindle (how I got it) and also can be purchased in paperback or audiobook form. I discovered it randomly through online browsing, and when I saw it had a homeschooled character, I thought it would be worth considering for the award.

    This is a very short and simply written book, but the author still manages to tell a sweet story with actually decent homeschooling representation. It follows fifteen-year-old Nick, who lives on a farm in the outback, and whose main purpose in life is campdrafting. As I learned from the book, this is a sport that involves contestants on horseback herding steers through a course. Unlike his sister Kathy, Nick is quiet and awkward. He doesn’t have close friends- until he joins the local swim team. There, he discovers a new passion and forms bonds with his teammates.

    While many of the books this year focus on exceptional circumstances such as boat schooling or agoraphobia, this is realistic fiction about a somewhat more “normal” homeschooler. It is also an example of a non-American homeschooler, and a teen boy main character, both of which are uncommon in fictional portrayals of homeschooling. Nick has a list of assignments from his mom that he works through independently. This seems true to how many homeschooled high schoolers are educated, and similar to my own teenage years. The story touches upon the struggles with finding friends if you have limited access to and time to talk with kids your age, which is very believable in a rural area. However, it also shows how friendships are still possible if you are able to be involved in activities. I think that seeing a character overcome realistic challenges as a homeschooler will be better for real homeschooled kids than the common trope of a completely isolated homeschooler going to school and immediately making best friends.