I Loved Being Homeschooled, But I’ll Never Do It For My Kid

It snowed on my first day of home education. I was 10, it was 1994. I caught a snowflake on my sleeve, perfectly hexagonal, with all the points intact. We got out a microscope, and Mum taught me about the Fibonacci sequence and fractals, and how Johannes Kepler caught a snowflake on his sleeve in the 1600s and analyzed its shape, wondering why it had six sides, like a honeycomb. Via this snowflake, we could study history, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. A snowflake is shaped by its experiences, its journey, and no two are alike. No two children are alike either, my mum said, so why put them all into one education system?

For our next assignment, she had me look in the mirror and say, “I love you,” but I couldn’t do it, I cried. I had begun to hate myself, to barely believe I existed. Schools had impacted my mum’s confidence, too. In fact, before deciding to home educate, she had to leave her teaching job in a school due to stress. But at home we weren’t defined by how the other kids and teachers saw us, and we didn’t have to fit into other people’s ideas of how a day should be structured.

We didn’t study much geography, or biology, or learn about British imperialism and colonization and antiracism — my mum’s gaps became mine. Sexuality and gender never came up, but we did at least learn about (white, middle-class) feminism. To be fair, the school system was worse on many fronts. People always asked if I was lonely and I’d respond that I didn’t know what loneliness was because I’d never known what it is to have friends. (Yes, I was a dramatic child.)

Children in schools don’t spend much time learning the best ways in which they think, but at home we could. We experimented with working short hours, learning through reading, practicing languages on a walk, writing poems outside. Without a TV and before social media, there wasn’t much chance for escape, but we created an environment and rhythm that my mum and I both felt safe in, that had quiet spaces and soothing activities built into them. We had no language for neurodivergence or for understanding sensory overwhelm, but I called the days when I couldn’t handle anything “whoops days.”

After a few years, I tried another school, and in some ways it was good — I made friends, for one — but I left after a year. My parents would say it was because I wasn’t learning much, but for me it was the atmosphere, the number of people, and the subjects I didn’t care about. I called it “brain-devouring school” (still dramatic). And so my mum and I became everything to each other. She was my teacher and my best friend as well as my mother. She confided in me, said I was the only one she could talk to. I became calm, detached, I listened and advised, I felt mature. I didn’t tell her how desperate and lonely I was feeling, because I didn’t want to upset her.

The main reason why I wouldn’t home educate my child is that I’m not willing to give him so much of my time.

I have a child of my own now, he is 5 and almost finishing his first year of school. I am not as economically privileged as my parents. As a single parent renting in London, I have to work more hours than school covers. But the main reason why I wouldn’t home educate my child is that I’m not willing to give him so much of my time. Plus, he doesn’t let me teach him anything. He likes to test my knowledge; he doesn’t like it the other way around. “How many legs do scorpions have?” he asks. I tell him I don’t know. “Eight,” my child says, “because they are arachnids.” Then he calls on Alexa to confirm. His current catchphrase is: “Mummy you’re wrong, I’m right; you know nothing, I know everything.”

I’m not able to control my child’s time to the extent my parents controlled mine, and I wouldn’t dare ban screens. That would make things too tough for both of us. He isn’t having as creative a childhood as I had. He doesn’t get bored. When we are bored, we are intensely aware of our minds and bodies, and the need to engage them. My parents held their nerve, and perhaps I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without their determination and my childhood loneliness and boredom.

It’s clear that the school system as it exists now for my son is, while lacking in creativity and play, better adapted to neurodivergence and better informed on mental health. After school yesterday, I was very stressed and upset. I couldn’t pay attention to my child, and he decided to flood the bathroom. I got angry with him. Then I realized I was being unfair and told him what had happened with my work and why I was struggling.

He said, “Mummy, maybe they didn’t understand you,” which was a good observation — he gets very upset when other people don’t understand him and what he needs. Then he said, “It’s not your fault.”

“Thank you,” I told him. “That’s helpful actually. Sorry for shouting.”

“Mummy,” he said, as I wrapped him in a towel, “I think being stressed is making you be not very good to me.”

“You’re right,” I told him. “I don’t know how to calm down.”

“You need to take three deep breaths and count to eight.” By this point he was clambering up the armchair in his bedroom, climbing to the top, naked. He demonstrated, taking his time, counting, in fact he got up to 12. “Now you do it,” he said. I took in the breath. I didn’t count out loud. “You need to count,” he said. He talked me through the three breaths. Then he said I need to do some square breathing. He drew a square for me in the air and told me to breathe in and out at the different sides of it. He was precise in his gestures. He looked down on me like a benevolent guru.

After all of this, I felt much better. I thanked him. I appreciated his help and it was sweet, but I did think back to a comment someone made to me when I was pregnant and my relationship with his other mother was ending: “Tell your baby it’s not his job to comfort Mummy when she’s upset.”

As a single parent, it’s tempting to feel like it’s my child and me against the world. People often say to me, ‘You’ll never need anyone else.’ His knowledge of snakes is impressive, yes, but I still need adult conversation.

The next time he got overwhelmed, I reminded him of square breathing and tried to talk him through it, but it didn’t help. A little while ago, he had a tantrum while his friend was visiting, and after being screamed at, I left him crying and shouting in my bedroom. The next morning he crept into my bed and told me he had decided he wasn’t going to have children himself, because it was too hard. I asked him to explain. He listed all the things that would be difficult: getting them dressed, feeding them (agreed — he’s in a particularly fussy phase), and then he added “tantrums.” I asked what he would do when his child had a tantrum.

“I wouldn’t leave them,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “would you cuddle them?”

“No, but maybe I’d give them a soft toy like Rattle to cuddle.” (Rattle is giant soft toy snake). He continued with detailed instructions on what he would do, but concluded that it was very difficult. I told him it is difficult sometimes, but that parents don’t have to get it right all the time; for instance, I didn’t get it right when he had that tantrum, and I was sorry about that, but next time I’ll know what to do.

My mum was my everything to me — I comforted her when she was upset. By making learning part of living, part of home life, I have never distinguished between the different spaces, and I associate learning with love. I can now see the ways I’ve been drawn to partners who can also teach me and schedule our lives, until we become everything to each other, with no need for anyone else.

As a single parent, it’s tempting to feel like it’s my child and me against the world. People often say to me, “You’ll never need anyone else.” His knowledge of snakes is impressive, yes, but I still need adult conversation. I need friends and lovers, and I need time on my own. I have more friends at 40 than I ever did growing up. Did my mother need this, too?

In fact, I’ve found that as a single parent one of the first things I had to learn was to hand my child over to the other people in his life who love him. He needs his friends, his relationship with his other mum, her wife, family, and everyone else who takes care of him. I want him to count on me to be his parent, not his teacher. I don’t ever want to be best friends with my child.

Schools are not ideal, and neither is home education. The school system didn’t suit me, and neither did home education, or the conventional workplace, or the heteronormative nuclear family, or monogamy, or polyamory. It’s still worth imagining alternatives. That’s what home education taught me — that we can imagine alternatives.

Hannah Silva is the author of My Child, the Algorithm: An Alternatively Intelligent Book of Love. Out now with Soft Skull Press.