To the Homeschool Mom Who Doesn't Fit In... (Here's 3 Truths)

You chose homeschooling for good reason, but let's be honest, it's hard to take the road less traveled. It's hard to live outside the mainstream. It's not just the daily work of homeschooling. It's always being the different one. Are you the different one? Maybe in your neighborhood, in your family, in your church, at your co-op. Sometimes you think, like I have in the past, it would be so much easier to just do what everyone else is doing. Today I'm sharing three truths that every homeschool mom needs to hear when she feels like the odd one out. If you're new here, hi, my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids, married to my high school sweetheart Nelson. We've been married for 25 years and I love encouraging other moms here on my YouTube channel and on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com. You can also find me on Made to Homeschool, which is a community for Christian homeschooling families. I'm specifically going to be doing a live workshop on Monday, March 9th, about homeschooling bigs and littles at the same time. So I'd love for you to join me. I'll leave the link for that below. When we started homeschooling many years ago, this was well before COVID. After COVID there was quite an explosion of homeschooling. We started back in 2010 and it was very new. We only knew just a couple, a handful of people that were doing it and they didn't live near us. They weren't in our church. I found a few friends whose kids were also just starting kindergarten. They were thinking about homeschooling too. We ended up getting together and talking often and decided to just jump in and try homeschooling together. What could it hurt for kindergarten? How much damage could we do? So we all started together, but back at that time there was not nearly as much support as there is for homeschooling today. There weren't YouTube channels, podcasts. There were a couple blogs, but it was hard to find anything. Homeschooling can be isolating enough even when you have the support, but without it, it can be very lonely. Maybe you can relate to this. People are homeschooling in all different parts of the world. Some people have tons of support. Some people are living where they're much like I was back in 2010 and they have very little support. We were the first in our family to start homeschooling. For many years, we were the only ones in our church homeschooling. So while we had support of some friends, we found these other families that were starting with us. We were always at the very top or beginning of the movement. Our kids were always the oldest in our co-op. In our neighborhood, we didn't know any other homeschoolers at that time. Although our family was pretty supportive, there are always questions whenever someone steps outside the boundaries and does something completely new. It's the same way in our neighborhood. We would meet people and they found out we were homeschooling and they just look at you differently and just wonder about it. It just would be so much easier to do what everyone else is doing. We had a 90-year-old neighbor who was the sweetest lady. She would bring our kids candy for Christmas and Easter and she always struck up conversations. She thought our kids were adorable and she loved our family. But whenever homeschooling came up, she just could not get it. She did not understand what we were doing. She thought this was a big mistake and she kind of held her tongue several times. But there was one time where we were having a conversation and suddenly homeschooling came up. She got right in my face and just said, what I want to know is when are you going to put those kids in school finally? I just realized there was really nothing I could say to change her mind. She came from a completely different generation and she just didn't get it. There will always be people like that that just don't get it. Maybe you are in your co-op and you are just different than some of the other moms there and you can even feel isolated in the midst of support. Maybe you have a child that has special needs and you don't know anyone else that's having the same kind of struggles at home that you're having on a daily basis. When you step off the beaten path to do something different, you're going to face more challenges than the mainstream. Especially when you start something new, you don't know how it's going to turn out. For us, homeschooling was a huge step of faith. We knew this was the direction that God was calling us to go in for our family. We were confident about that but we just didn't know how it was going to turn out. Are our kids going to have friends? Are they going to be able to read and communicate and get jobs and function in the adult world? How does this look as kids get older? These were all the questions that were in my mind when we started out. It's easy now as a mom who's been homeschooling for 16 years. We have one graduate, a second child's graduating this year. Our kids are older and I've been able to see the fruit of it. I love who our kids are becoming. I love the childhood we've been able to give them. Our kids are more well-read than I ever was. They know more about history than I did as a college graduate. They have great friends. They have busy social lives. God has been so good to us. They have great jobs. The first time our second son went to get a job, he went for his application and his interview. He was sitting there in the interview and after the employer found out that he was homeschooled, he looked at him and said, I'm going to do something for you that I've never done and I'm going to hire you on the spot. These are things I never saw coming. We didn't see ahead to how this is going to turn out in the end. And so when you've been homeschooling for a while, you can kind of see some of those things. But at the beginning, when it's all new, when you're just starting and these challenges are all uncertainties, you don't know how it's going to be. And it's hard to move forward in faith. It's hard to be different. The first truth I want you to know is that homeschooling is a global movement. So no matter how isolated you may feel in your personal circumstances, you're part of something that is growing. It's the fastest growing educational movement in the world. More and more parents are realizing that their kids can get an excellent education in much less time, that the long hours in the system is amounting to no less than free babysitting. There are more people homeschooling than you realize. Now that we're in the age of information, you can learn about anything you want to. It's within the reach of your fingertips. You don't need to spend eight hours a day in a building. There's so much wasted time. Kids can get their schoolwork done in much less time and they can learn more. It can be adapted to their individual needs. If you want to learn more about this kind of education that you can give your kids, I've created a course, Beyond School, The Home Education Breakthrough. It's all about how you can give your kids an excellent individualized education that fits around the needs of your family first. It's going to be launching in the next couple weeks. I'm so excited to share it with you. And until then, if you're interested, you can get on the wait list by clicking on the link below. So in your area, whether your church or your neighborhood or just your local community, there may not be a lot of homeschoolers, but you're part of something big that is growing across the United States and in the world. When we first started homeschooling, I knew my other three or four friends that we started out with and I thought that was just all there really was. But the more we were homeschooling, I found out there were so many more support groups in our area. There were tiny little groups like ours popping up everywhere and there was even a larger community that in our county provides a graduation for homeschoolers every year. It supports all the local co-ops and that was also growing. There were many businesses that were catering to homeschoolers and offering events and giving incentives for them to come out. So there was a lot available that was growing that I learned more about the more we got into homeschooling. Sometimes these things aren't well advertised, but once you get to know more people around you that are homeschooling, you just find out about so many more opportunities. The second thing you need to know if you're a mom who doesn't fit in is that homeschooling doesn't look one way. Just like every family is different, we're so diverse. Homeschooling looks different for a lot of people. There are people that love a traditional style with just textbooks. There are people who love Charlotte Mason, who love classical. There are people that don't even want to fit into any philosophical box. There are people who just love hands-on experiments and going places with their kids, exploring the world together. There are so many different ways to educate your kids. It's not a one-size-fits-all and so maybe you're in a co-op where people are all just excited about this one style and it does not fit you. That's okay. If you're different, it's good. Variety is the spice of life. Look at God's created world. There is so much beauty and variety everywhere you look. I think sometimes this can also happen when you have a child that's struggling and you think it must be because I'm not doing it the way that successful homeschool mom is doing it. One thing I've learned with our kids is that even among our kids, they're all different. In my early years, I kind of expected all of my kids to be scholars and I quickly learned that they were very different. We have the whole gamut. We have kids that are major book readers. They've read like every book in our house. They're always wanting to go to the library. Then we have kids that are hands-on, don't like books. Maybe we'll listen to audiobooks, but they're constantly taking things apart. I have kids that have super neat handwriting and it's just beautiful to look at and read, and other kids that it's just hardly legible. I have worked and worked so hard with them to improve their handwriting and finally I've realized that there are things that some of my kids aren't that good at, but as they've grown older, I've seen that they have other gifts that were totally unexpected that compensate for those weaknesses. We have one child who's just very outgoing. He's gifted in relationships. He's a leader in every sphere that he's in and I can tell you as a child, some of the handwriting lessons and some of the ways that I thought he should be learning were not going so well. What I had to learn as a mom is that my kids are all different and there are different types of intelligence. So what you may see as a weakness because your child doesn't look exactly like this other mom's kids, look for your kids' strengths. They may have strengths in other areas that completely surprise you. Both of our sons are great at taking vehicles apart and putting them back together. They're great at small engines and repairs like that. They do things that I know nothing about. So remember that homeschooling doesn't look one way and your kids are also very diverse and they're all going to be good at different things. They're all going to struggle. We shouldn't make excuses for their struggles. We should be helping them, but they are all different. The third truth I want you to hear today is that there's only one opinion that really matters. As a Christian, I believe that God gave these children to my husband and I. We are responsible for raising them, not the state, not the system. These children were stewarded to us and this is our job. We're responsible before God for their upbringing and I take this very seriously. We want to give our kids a Christian education and this is not popular. We know as Christians that everything that we see, everything that can be known and understood, it's his idea. We're just seeing it for the first time. In math, we're making observations. In art, we're mimicking or copying his ideas. Everything that we see, it's all his design. This is one of the reasons that we regularly read scripture with our kids. We make a mistake when we think that education isn't neutral. It all comes from a particular worldview. Because I'm responsible before God for raising my kids, I don't care about anyone else's opinion. He sees what's going on here and that's actually even more intimidating than trying to please that one person or make that one person happy. What a high and holy calling we've been given as Christian parents to raise our kids in the Lord. We don't need to look at what anyone else is doing. I have to remind myself from time to time to just put my blinders on. The Lord's opinion is the only one that matters to me. His approval is what I'm looking for. So I need to change my direction from outward to upward. Stop trying to please your family members, your neighbors, your church. You don't have to prove yourself to anyone. These children have been given to you by God and He sees the work you're doing and that's what really matters. If this has encouraged you, would you please like and subscribe? I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.