Hiya,

Have you ever had a really good day with your children, only to have someone ask you ‘what you’ve been doing for homeschooling today’ and have all those warm fuzzies just disappear? All of a sudden you feel like you haven’t done enough. All of a sudden you find yourself using totally different language to explain and justify things.

The baking you did was…maths. Yeah, definitely maths. Measurements and ratios and stuff. The walk was, umm, natural science. The books you read in the sun were definitely formal literacy, that’s an easy one, and the stuff spread all over the floor is...engineering? Design? It’s an absolute mess but also something useful, for sure.

Which might all be completely true. Usually is, actually. But I want to look at why we feel the need to translate things in this way before we can feel truly comfortable with the - in our own words - ‘great’ day we’ve had. Especially when it comes to speaking about it with other people.

Because it’s odd, right. Most of us choose this life because we want our children to have more time to play, more space and freedom to follow their interests, more of the slower, intentional day to day experiences together that get squeezed out when most of the week is spent at school. And then we go and have a day FULL of those things and find ourselves wondering if we’re doing enough. Wondering if we should be doing something more…educational.

A lot of this obviously comes back to how we learned to understand what education is in the first place. At school there was a subject on the timetable, a task someone gave us that related to that subject, and a piece of tangible work at the end. We knew when we'd done what was expected because…well, someone had told us what was expected. It was all very nice and neat.

Whether we understood it all or remembered much of it afterwards was another question altogether, but at least we could say we'd done the work.

When you move away from that you lose a very familiar way of knowing when you've done enough. And even if you believe deeply in what you're doing instead, you can still find yourself wanting that reassurance. So, yeah, you look back over the day and start finding the ‘subjects’ in it. And, lo-and-behold, there they are! There’s maths, reading, science, all sorts of things.

But…once you've found all that learning, do you actually feel any better? Do you sit back, smile, and feel satisfied with the education you’re ‘delivering’ for your child?

Or…do you start wondering whether it was enough maths? The right kind of maths? At the right level? Whether they read anything challenging enough, or just picked up the same book they’ve already read five times? Whether talking about a bird on your walk really counts as science, or if you should have looked it up when you got home to get into more biological detail? Whether the card they made for their sister’s birthday was enough to count as writing for the day? Actually, now that we think of it, have they written anything else at all over the past few days? Oh no. And when did you last do anything you could reasonably call history, or geography, or music? Should they be learning another language?

So, I’ll ask again. Even once you identify some ‘subjects’ in your day to day life, does it actually help you feel any better about what you’re doing?

Because if the answer is no, I think there’s a good reason for that. You’ve taken a day you were happy with and described it in a way that makes it sound like a fairly incomplete attempt at school.

Which is hardly going to help you feel confident about it.

Remember what we said earlier about doing the work? How we could finish a task at school without necessarily understanding it, or remembering much afterwards? Well, think about that the other way around.

If having a subject and a finished piece of work tied to that subject doesn’t automatically mean valuable learning happened, the absence of those things doesn’t automatically mean it didn’t.

Right?

The real answer to all of this is to get super interested in what our children are actually coming to understand. What they’re figuring out, what they can do now that they couldn’t do before, how they’re using something they learned in one situation to help them in another. Some of that you’ll see as you’re doing things together, some you’ll only recognise later. And sometimes you’ll notice something they need help with, so you’ll guide them, practise together, find someone who knows more than you do, and so on.

That’s how you find out what needs your attention. Counting how many subjects you ticked off in the day will actually tell you very little. And all you’ll end up doing is forcing the lovely things you wanted for their childhood to constantly justify themselves against all the things you chose to get away from.

If we believe education can happen differently, we have to become willing to see it differently too. Otherwise we’ll keep looking at the life we’ve deliberately designed for our children and apologising for it.

So when someone asks what you did today, tell them. Be confident in telling them. You baked together, went for a lovely walk in the sun, read books in the afternoon. You drew, and painted, and spent time in the garden. Talk about what interested your children, what you chatted about, what they made. There’s plenty there to tell someone about without trying to make it sound like something else.

Before they asked, you felt you’d had a really great day. Don’t let anyone change that.

Talk soon,
Issy.

P.S. I’ve recorded some extremely reassuring episodes on this whole concept of ‘being enough’, like this one and this one. If you’d like access to my complete library of over 80 episodes, with a new one landing every single week, you can join right here.