In my last post, I looked back on some of the fears and worries I experienced when home educating my teenage son. Deciding to home educate is a momentous thing. One has one’s own concerns, but other people have theirs, too, and are often happy to share them. Here are some of the things I didn’t worry about, even if others thought I should.
Social Life
One of the most common questions addressed to home educating parents is ‘but what about their social life?’ To be quite honest, anyone making the decision to home educate out of desperation, as opposed to a lifestyle choice, is likely to have more pressing concerns than this. I never worried about my son’s social life and I never had cause to. We were lucky to be living in a large village, and many of the children he had been to school with lived nearby. I came to expect teenagers banging on our front door at 4pm, straight off the school bus, to see if he was free.
In a school setting, students are surrounded by others the same age, so they become used to socialising with those children. I found that, outside school, things became more organic. Friends had older or younger siblings. Like-minded people might be slightly older or younger. My son was able to choose the people he wanted to spend time with, and while they were roughly the same age, they were a more varied group than a class full of children all the same age.
Young people also need to mix with adults. In my current job, I sometimes worry that young people now miss out on adult conversation, maybe because entertainment is always available via various devices. Before the digital age, young people spent hours and hours being bored, picking up bits and pieces of adult conversation without even meaning to, and family conversations were more frequent and common. My son accompanied me to all sorts of places and we spoke to lots of different people. We had conversations in museums and galleries; we met Benjamin Zephaniah; we talked together incessantly. I feel that these encounters and conversations with adults were a vital part of his intellectual development.
The answer is, no, I didn’t worry about his social life and I didn’t need to.
My Career
When we started home educating, I had only been qualified as a solicitor for a few years. I was able to work as a locum going to courts and police stations, so that I had plenty of time at home during the day and a lot more flexibility than an office job would have allowed me. Of course this affected my legal career. I was lucky to be able to work in this flexible way, but it was exhausting at times and very unpredictable and insecure. I effectively opted out of having any career progression. I don’t regret that in the slightest; I would do it again. Of course I would always put my child’s wellbeing before my career.
This also meant that we didn’t have money to do lots of expensive things. We managed a few trips and holidays, including the Lake District, Scotland, Rome, Florence, a festival of history, but always on a shoestring. Most museums are free, and I joined English Heritage so we could visit castles and other historic sites. It would be nice to have been able to afford more exciting outings and holidays, but we managed very well on what we were able to do.
What Other People Thought
If you home educate, people will tell you what they think, and often those opinions will differ from your own. It’s understandable that home education is viewed with a measure of suspicion: rarely, but significantly, children can be taken out of school for reasons that are not in their best interests. Home education is an enormous responsibility and not a decision to be taken lightly. I would never have embarked on this journey as a lifestyle choice; as I’ve said before, it was the right decision for us because it seemed like the last resort.
I don’t really think of myself as thick-skinned (although possibly working in criminal defence is a good way to develop a thicker skin!); however, I really didn’t worry about what others thought. This was our journey and our decision, and, ultimately, my responsibility. Luckily, it turned out to be the best road, despite being the one less travelled.
