Embracing Deschooling: A Summer Transition to Homeschooling

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If you’ve decided to homeschool starting this fall, I want to talk you out of something. Not homeschooling. The plan you’re about to make for June.

Most families who pull their children out of school do it with a pile of good intentions and a cart full of curriculum, and they start “getting ahead” the week after school lets out. I understand the instinct. I’m asking you to resist it, because there’s a step that comes first, and summer is the easiest time in the whole year to take it.

What deschooling is

Deschooling is the stretch of time between leaving school and starting to homeschool when your family does neither. It isn’t a vacation, exactly, though it looks like one from the outside. It’s the period when everyone in the house, the children and the parents, sets down the habits that school built and finds out what learning feels like without a bell.

Children come home from a classroom with a certain shape to them. They wait to be told what to do. They ask if this is for a grade. They’ve learned that curiosity is what you do at recess, and that “learning” means sitting still while someone talks. None of that is their fault, and none of it goes away by handing them a new workbook on a new table.

Parents come home with a shape too. We panic about hours and gaps. We measure the day against a school day. We reach for the schedule because a schedule feels like safety. Deschooling is for us at least as much as for them.

Why summer is the perfect time

A girl laughing as confetti falls around her

Summer is a break the whole world already agrees on. Nobody expects anything academic of anyone in July, which means you get to deschool without the guilt that would show up in October.

Use it three ways. Let them follow an interest that never fit into a school year: the bird book, the sewing machine, the whole series of novels in one go. Loosen the routine on purpose, and watch what your family’s natural rhythm is when nobody is setting it. Some children are up at six and done by ten; some come alive at four in the afternoon. You want to know this before you build a school day around them. Plan late, in August, from what you learned, instead of in June from what you feared.

How our first summer actually went

Our first summer, one of my children asked me what the assignment was nearly every morning for three weeks. I said there wasn’t one. She didn’t believe me. Around week four she stopped asking and started building something in the backyard that took the rest of the month, and I understood, watching her, that the assignment habit had been the thing to unlearn, not the math.

That’s the pattern I’ve seen in every family I’ve walked through this with. First the boredom. Then the complaint. Then, if you can hold your nerve, the return of a child you may not have seen since kindergarten.

How to deschool well

Relax and enjoy first. Read aloud, get outside, cook, go somewhere. If it feels like school, put it down. This is the part parents skip, and it’s the part that matters.
Add structure slowly, from their interests. When the questions start coming again, that’s your signal. Follow them. A child who wants to know about the ocean will do more reading in a week than a worksheet gets in a month.
Find your people before you need them. Summer is when the park days and learning centers plan for fall. Go meet them. If you’re not sure where to start, I wrote a beginner’s guide to finding your homeschool community.
Deschool yourself. Read about how children actually learn. Sit with the panic about “behind” until it passes; this post is where I’d start. Notice that your child learned to walk and talk without a curriculum.

When you’re ready to plan

Somewhere in August, you’ll feel it: the family has found its own pace, the children are curious again, and you finally know what you’re building. That’s when you plan, and the eight steps we took as a family are waiting for you.

Deschooling is the step everyone skips and the one I’d never skip again. Give your family the summer. The school year will still be there in September, and you’ll walk into it rested, clear, and together.

Give your family the summer.

If you want the story of why a principal came home in the first place, it’s in A Matter of Principal. And the Homebuilt Community is free to join, with moms who deschooled last summer and can tell you how it went.

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