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Home education is a legal alternative to school education in Australia. State governments are responsible for regulating home education.
Different states have different requirements, however homeschooling families are able to develop curriculum and learning programs
to suit the individual needs of their children.

© Beverley Paine

Years ago we would trek off to playgroup and later to homeschooling groups and I would leave feeling dispirited, low and unhappy with myself. There are lots of reasons for this, including triggering chemical sensitivities that are unavoidable in social situations, but I gradually began to identify a pattern in my thinking and wondered if this was to blame. Without meaning to, during each social outing I was comparing my parenting style and homeschooling methods and our outcomes with those of the other families. But not just any family: I wasn't compare myself to someone who was obviously struggling, or who had children who were misbehaving (in my eyes). I'd compare us to the ones that shone, you know, the almost perfect family and mother.

This mother nearly always was a lot slimmer to me, brought organic vegie snacks and home-made hommous, could talk - even quote from - just about any book and author. Her children were usually musical inclined, bright curious children who liked to talk to adults (unlike my children). Sometimes I wouldn't meet this family at gatherings, I'd read about them in the homeschooling magazines, books and newsletters. The effect was the same. It left me feeling disheartened and discouraged.

Sharing our stories - especially the down days when life and homeschooling it isn't going as we had planned or hoped - helps to bring a healthy dose of reality to our lives.

The truth is we are all ordinary families doing something wonderfully extraordinary. That's worth remembering. We're so busy comparing ourselves to others that we often forget how extraordinary homeschooling is.

I found that the longer I homeschooled the less I hung out with families that didn't homeschool. And I became more choosy about friends. Those that didn't support my style of parenting gradually fell away. Then, every so often, I'd be in the company of a family like the one I grew up in, where education only happens in schools, by experts, or trained people, where competition between siblings is encouraged and where the whole point to education is to get a well paid job and have people look up to you for the rest of your life. Or I'd find myself in a family home that had few toys, even fewer games, and even fewer books! This would really ground me. Our family and our lifestyle shone and I would feel very proud of what we had achieved and were continuing to strive for.

Homeschooling is an extraordinary practice - it can be really isolating as so few people understand why we want to do it. We're fighting two hundred years of entrenched brainwashing about education. Our parenting practices are considered suspect. It doesn't matter how you homeschool - unless you have perfect children who excel at everything that you can show off as 'successful products of homeschooling' it's hard to feel consistently reassured that what we're doing is okay...

Take heart. You are doing a wonderful and important job, one that parents did for millenia before the advent of compulsory mass schooling. Civillisation rose on the back of parental, not school, education. It does work, and it will work for your family!

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