Being a homeschooling family on the mainstreams of formal schooling is never as easy as it seems. It takes huge courage to nurture our own spirit and also the rest of the family, especially the kids, knowing there’ll always be someone who will be questioning every single details about our homeschooling lives. That someone can be our own relatives, our next neighbours, our friends, and even someone who we just met.

sometime I wish I can just record every answers of their questions and just play it back whenever I needed to. Because their questions are typically the same, although these questions can make me flipped out when it hit me on my darkest hours. And these spells is the only one that works for me:

Comparison is poison!

At first it was very hard to accept that Max will not be able to have more peers as other formal schooling kids do. It was also hard to imagine how Max will be different from other kids in terms of reading, counting and writing skills, other kids on his age might be able to read, write and count fluently, while Max is still less care about it.

Max will also not be able to experience many formal school activities, some slang languages and many silly games which I found it super fun when I was on my school age last time.
But then after deep thoughts and some courageous chat with another homeschooling family (again and again and again), I always managed to pull myself back in (again and again and again) and told myself to stop comparing.

Of course every kids are unique, this we all know even since they were still inside the womb. It even more obviously true when we’re on homeschooling. So it is not fair at all to compare Max with other kids, not even to other kids whose also homeschooling.

We just have to learn (every time) to let it go. Never expect too high from such a young creature. Let him explore more and decide which one he loves to do. We have to accept the fact that he’ll be not just different, but also unique. And that’s the essence of homeschooling for us.