A frowny face.
A tapping foot.
And folded arms.
”Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
“What if it ruins your kids?”
She pauses to toss a strand of hair over her shoulder and shift her posture slightly.
“Hold on a sec, do you even know what you’re doing?”
And blah blah blah.
A Familiar Figure
You’ve met her. And you’ve encountered her annoying comments about your homeschooling.
Her questions get under your skin more than you’d like to admit…
But why?
Why does her scrutiny always set you on the back foot, switch you into defensive mode and leave you more than a little winded?
It’s because she echoes the fears that eat away at you sometimes. She dares to say out loud the secret fears you hold in the corners of your heart.
And quite frankly, that scares you. Of course it does.
And why wouldn’t it? Those very same questions float around in your thoughts at different times throughout the day and in the quietness of the night.
They catch you out, attacking after a conversation with family or friends. Surfacing and re-surfacing at different times when you and your family go about your daily homeschooling lives.
It’s not just her questions that rattle you.
It’s the fact that you know deep down that you don’t have the answers.
These fears shouldn’t be allowed to lurk around and play on your heart like this.
So, let’s take a deep breath and shed some light on these fears shall we?
And see what answers we can discover inshaAllah.
The Roots of Your Fears
Pretty much every obstacle you encounter on your homeschooling journey boils down to some form of you not really knowing what to do or how to do something. Let’s run through some examples, so you can see what I mean:
It’s time to buy a new English curriculum, you’ve searched online and there are just too many to choose from, so now you don’t know which is best for him.
It’s time to teach your child algebra, you struggled with this yourself at school so now you feel like you don’t know how to approach it.
It’s time to teach your child about the digestive system. You realise there’s a lot going on here, so you don’t know the best way to give your child an overall snapshot of the process.
As you can see, these different problems in your homeschool all stem from some form of not knowing what to do or how to do something.
This fear of not knowing the how or what of something can be crippling at times. Not just for homeschoolers, but for everyone.
This is a normal human emotion to have, it’s called the fear of the unknown. And for the most part it’s a completely normal part of life experience.
The fear of the unknown is at the heart of your homeschooling fears. Each of the examples above are just different manifestations of the fear of the unknown.
Going a little deeper now, we get to some of those lurking fears.
If you’re afraid about how your children are going to turn out or if you’re doing the right thing – that’s a fear of the unknown.
If you’re afraid about how you’re going to homeschool when you don’t know anyone else who’s doing it and you’ve got no idea what you’re doing – that’s a fear of the unknown too.
If you’re afraid of the social impacts on your child, that’s also a fear of the unknown.
You get the point.
Now here’s the thing.
You can’t get rid of the fear of the unknown.
Facing Your Fears
You won’t be able to dissolve all your homeschooling fears, just like that. And you cannot remove these fears from your heart.
So you shouldn’t try.
They are here to stay.
Understand that the thoughts, worries and fears will always be there. In varying degrees of intensity.
With time, you’ll come to understand that they’re a fundamental part of the homeschooling experience.
You HAVE to accept them.
And you need the courage to face them.
Have the courage to acknowledge that you’ve no idea how you’re going to teach algebra, when you’re secretly afraid of it.
And be ready to learn how to manage your own fears. Be open to an attitude that says ‘I don’t know how to do this, but I’m going to find out inshaAllah.’
Accept that you won’t know the outcome of your child’s homeschooling, until you reach that time. Just like parents of school-going children won’t know the impact of school on their child until they reach a certain time.
You won’t know how to do every thing in your homeschool. And that is okay.
You won’t have the best solution to everything, every time. But you’ll certainly do your best to look for them.
You don’t have all the answers, and most importantly: YOU DON’T NEED TO.
What you do need is to be willing to learn and be open to new experiences, challenges and understandings.
And you need to be a little bit robust and thick-skinned. You need to internalise how important homeschooling is to you and your family. And you need to be highly committed to your personal homeschooling goals.
Little by little, step by step, learning and progressing as the days go by.
You’ll grow as a homeschooler, alongside your fears. Not in spite of them.
Accept them, acknowledge them, respect them and be patient with them.
This is how you face them.
But always be determined to stay on top of your homeschooling fears.