Navigating Homeschool Anxiety

I recently had an attack of Homeschool Anxiety. I think all homeschoolers get this from time to time.

Symptoms

• A bad mood which mystifies your family

• Mounting panic

• An uncontrollable urge to make your children Sit Down and Do Some Work (your mood will predictably get worse when they equally predictably resist)

• An even stronger urge to throw money at the problem

Common causes

• Spending too much time online reading about other people’s perfect children and their perfect education

• Meeting a child who excels at a particular subject and puts your own children (and you) to shame

• Reading about how to create the perfect homeschool, which starts off inspiring and ends up leaving you with your head in your hands, which is difficult when you’re also clutching a glass of wine and a ‘sharing’ bag of chocolate.

If you’ve never had it, it’s a horrible, guilt-ridden, anxiety-filled mess of feeling like your children don’t know anything, are hopelessly behind, you’ve failed them, they’ll never catch up, and so on and so on and so on. It doesn’t really have anything to do with reality, but of course when you’re in the middle of it you don’t see that. In my case it was sparked by doing some reading about home education, and education in general.

Thank you, Susan Wise-Bauer

I re-read The Well-Trained Mind, which is equal parts daunting and inspiring. A twelve-year plan to teach your child everything they ought to know. For many home educators it’s something of a bible. It makes me hang my head in shame because my five and seven year olds have never even heard of Confucius.

Then I read

Daisy Christodoulou

’s book Seven Myths About Education, which I highly recommend. You may take issue with some of what she says, but I found it hard to argue against her essential premise: we need to fill our children with as much knowledge as possible. Christodoulou shows why we can’t just ‘look it up’, even in the age of Google and smartphones and Chat GPT, and why facts do not have to be in opposition to true understanding. She shows, with beautiful clarity and concision, that reading is easier when you know lots of stuff. You can know all your sounds and your letters but if you have never come across a particular concept then reading about it is unlikely to mean much to you. Much of our reading comprehension comes from context, and if you don’t have much context, you’ll struggle with reading. And the more things you know, the more you can make connections between those things. She quotes JR Anderson:

All that there is to intelligence is the simple accrual and tuning of many small units of knowledge that in total produce complex cognition. The whole is no more than the sum of its parts, but it has a lot of parts.

Core Knowledge, and why can’t my children locate the Euphrates?

Christodoulou talks about the Core Knowledge curriculum, used with incredible success in Massachusetts and elsewhere around the US. The Core Knowledge curriculum focuses on teaching children a lot of stuff (revolutionary!) and is, wonderfully, available for free online. I went to have a look.

Goodness, I felt a failure. There’s so much here, all logically laid-out. I know every curriculum has gaps, but it’s hard to spot them in Core Knowledge. Not only could my children not locate the Tigris and Euphrates on a map (1st grade/Year 2 work), I’m pretty sure they’ve never even heard of them.

The Core Knowledge curriculum is designed for classrooms. Unless you are replicating school at home I don’t see how it would work in a homeschool environment. Certainly my own children wouldn’t sit through anything resembling a lesson. But it’s certainly inspiring and you could use it as a starting point even if you don’t want to implement it page by page.

---

If you know a homeschooler who’d appreciate this post, please feel free to share.

---

Theoretically, come September we move on to the second grade section of The Well-Trained Mind. We don’t in any way follow it strictly, but I like the breakdown of history into four periods, which you study for four years before returning to the first period in more detail, and so on. So you study ancient civilisations in 1st, 5th, and 9th grades, for example. Our next stop is the Medieval world. I found myself thinking that if I read a double page of our history encyclopedia to the children most days, starting now, we could cover the ancient world chronologically before we move onto the Middle Ages in September. Then I thought:

If I read aloud a double page about Life on Crete, or The People of Canaan, just once, and then move on, how much will the children retain? And more importantly, how willing will they be to sit and listen to this whistlestop tour through 10,000 years of history? And if history and the encyclopedia become a chore to be got through, will they ever want to sit down and leaf through it again, just for fun? Will our museum trips become a duty rather than a delight?

Here’s what helps

Via Unsplash

1. Get specific

It probably isn’t true that your children know nothing and never will. What exactly are you worried about, right now? For me it was history, and specifically the fact that I had missed out on teaching them about the earliest civilisations before I taught them about Egypt, Greece, and Rome. My whole big panic basically came down to Sumer.

2. Does it matter?

Once you’ve named the bogeyman, ask yourself: Is it actually a problem that my child doesn’t know this, right now? In my case, it obviously doesn’t really matter if my children don’t encounter ancient Sumer until they’re 8, 10, or even 18. I’m not saying it’s not important, but it’s not crucial, right now. If your ten year old is still struggling with number bonds, then sure, it can be important right now. By naming it you can work out how to fix it.

3. How can you fix this problem without buying something?

For me, a knee jerk reaction to Homeschool Anxiety is to spend money. The dopamine hit of ‘Buy It Now’ is so soothing, I almost feel like I’ve solved the problem by buying the product. But then, the item arrives. I have to find somewhere to put it, in our small flat that’s already overflowing with stuff (stress). I have to actually use it, and discover if the children like it (more stress.) I have to live with the money I spent no longer being in my bank account (even more stress!). In this instance, I was really, deeply tempted to buy either History Quest or Curiosity Chronicles, both of which offer a chronological history study and would make up for the bits I had missed. I listened to samples of the audiobooks, I read pages of the real thing. My hand twitched to reach for my bank card.

I resisted.

I realised that we already have the Encyclopedia of World History, which has pages on the ancient Sumerians. Not an exhaustive study, of course, but enough to introduce the topic. We have a world map, so we could find the Tigris and Euphrates. And one day I took the encyclopedia on the train (make the most of a captive audience), and I read aloud to the children about Sumer and these two great rivers. We talked about the Thames, the Nile, and the Tiber, which were the beginnings of other great cities and civilisations. We talked about the beginnings of writing. A couple of times since I’ve brought Sumer up in conversation to help them retain the information.

And that, really, is all I needed to do. Over the next few weeks as we transition from the ancient world to the medieval one, I will try to be a little more intentional about our study so that we cover things more chronologically. But I also know that that’s not really how my family works. The children dive into things and jump around from topic to topic, and they have a tendency to ignore whatever I’ve decided is the must-cover subject of the day/week/month. So we probably won’t work through from 400AD to 1600AD in quite the order I’d like. I probably definitely will have another panic, this time about Tycho Brahe, or Ferdinand Magellan.

With luck, I will remember my three steps before I reach the bottom of the sharing bag of chocolate:

1. Get specific.

2. Does it matter, right now?

3. How can you fix it without buying something?

I hope this helps you when your own moment of Homeschool Anxiety sets in. I haven’t found a way to avoid it entirely, but this certainly seems to keep the condition at a manageable level.

---

How do you handle homeschool anxiety? Please share in the comments. And if you’re not already subscribed, sign up now and never miss a post. It’s free!