Do We Regret Homeschooling Our Kids? Homeschool Regrets

We chose to homeschool over a decade ago. Today (2025) I have young adult kids. One attended school to just before his seventh birthday, the other has never been inside a classroom. They finished up their education in a fully accredited online international school during the lockdown years. They did well. Their childhood involved a lot of travel, this is what people call “worldschooling”. There was some homeschooling, some unschooling, and, mostly no school at all that anyone would recognise. Today, the outcome: do we regret taking the homeschooling path?

Homeschooling Regrets

The Choice to Homeschool Isn’t an Easy One

Homeschooling is not an easy path to take. If you’ve home educated even for a short time, you’ll know the levels of objection and hostility you can face from some of society. The good news is, today, homeschooling is way more mainstream than it was when we started. It’s seen as desirable today.

Homeschool Regrets

Do we have any regrets about homeschooling? No, none. But I do wonder about what might have been.

Homeschooling challenges people’s beliefs in the system the way it is, and some people hold very strong anti-homeschool beliefs based on no knowledge whatsoever.

People feel the need to voice those opinions, particularly when they’re hiding behind a computer screen.

We’ve seen it, heard it, and felt it. You only have to look at some of the comments on this website to see how much homeschooling can rile people.

We homeschoolers encounter hostility from friends, family, acquaintances, and random people at the supermarket. We learn to deal with it.

We coped by cutting aggressors out of our lives. They weren’t welcome around us. That was easy. It’s not so easy for every homeschooling family.

We mostly find new friends with beliefs more in line with our own. Our family is blessed with a wonderful international support system today.

Why We Chose to Homeschool

We chose homeschooling because we thought it was the best choice for our kids. That’s the short and honest answer.

There were many factors that led to that decision. We weren’t happy with the local school, we didn’t want our kids raised in the system, we wanted them to be as happy and well-educated as possible, and we wanted to spend time with them.

Today we are very, very glad that they did not attend that local school.

The travel was a product of the homeschooling, not the other way round.

You may think your local school or whatever private school you can afford is the best option for your kids for all the same reasons. That’s fine, but for us, it wasn’t the best option.

Outcomes of Homeschooling

Never being inside a classroom, and only a year or so as a very young child in school, seems to have held them back not-at-all.

Today they are happy, accomplished, still at home with us, still a tightly bonded family, and they were able to pass exams.

We never intended for them to sit exams. That wasn’t part of the plan. Returning to the place we left also wasn’t in the plan. But then Covid came and changed our world.

How Covid Stopped Our Homeschooling

When the virus came in 2020 we were forced to change our lifestyle. We were stranded, and the full-time travel that saw us free to come and go as we pleased was finished.

For various reasons, primarily strict homeschooling regulations and house-bound boredom, we put our kids in an online school.

This is not homeschooling. In homeschooling the parents take on the responsibility of their child’s education. I signed that over to a school and teachers, I was no longer a homeschool mum.

The kids slotted into their classes straight away with no knowledge gap at all. They chose sciences, history, literature, a good cross-section of topics to suit their interests.

I am, or was, a scientist, I knew their science knowledge was good, the other subjects I was more anxious about, particularly maths.

I needn’t have worried. They were fine, no different to the other kids at all, in fact, often, they performed strongly, scoring some seriously high grades.

The first exams he has ever sat other than his scuba qualification, which, if you didn’t know, is mostly physics, went well.

He had never written an essay before in his life, but he had written blog posts, a very different skill.

Academically, if you choose to score a childhood based on exam passes, it’s all worked out just fine. You could argue that he would have passed more exams and better, had he been in school. Possibly, but it doesn’t matter.

He passed enough, and my feeling is that he would have done less well academically in school. Obviously, the outcomes are bigger than that.

I’ve been privileged to spend every day of the last nine years with my kids. Every day, and night, we have been together, never separated at all. That has been wonderful.

We get on, we had no “teen” issues, I knew where they are and what they were doing and who with. I know them inside out, I like them, I’m proud of them, they’re pretty cool kids.

I’m happy, they’re happy.

They’ve had time to follow their interests through not having to spend their lives in school. One is a very determined young YouTuber, the other loves his conservation volunteering, and now, community work on top of his job.

They couldn’t have done these things with a regular school timetable. Their young remembrance is full of days spent skiing, scuba diving, and climbing mountains alongside planes, buses, and trains.

They have no memories containing bullying or other school injustices. No ridicule, peer pressure, or the school-days shame of unpopularity.

Of course, we’ve taken them to fifty or so countries. That has been incredible for them. I can see how it’s added to their self-esteem and self-belief. They are full of knowledge and experience that few other kids will have and it’s good. Very good for them.

Any Negatives of Homeschooling? Any Regrets?

None of us has a strong social circle in our present location. We are not meshed into the community as most people are by their school years. We don’t have many friends here. Is that a negative?

We haven’t been here, we’ve been all over the world these last nine years, this isn’t our home, not our community. The longer we stay the more embedded we’re becoming and it is starting to feel like home. We never intended to come back here, we hoped we’d be left for good, but COVID trapped us. We had to work with what we had.

To us, these things aren’t negatives. We have trusted friends all over the world, and we’ll be able to see them again from time to time. Many of these friends have influenced my boys growing up, diverse people of different nationalities and walks of life. Now they’re getting a taste of humans in Australia and that’s good too, they can compare and contrast.

With homeschoolers you’ll often find that they get along with adults better than the school kids do. It was something I became aware of at our first-ever homeschool camp.

The homeschooled teens were different from other teens. There’s never any us and them, no otherly “Sir” or “Miss”. Just more human beings to interact with, or not.

The biggest negative of our digital nomad lifestyle, I think, was in having too many choices. No one place is obviously “home” to us and I struggle with decisions on where to be. Still, after 4 years on the farm, I think about leaving.

I had this affliction before the kids were born. I married somebody from another country and culture, it was inevitable.

They are mixed nationality, although they identify most strongly as British. This could affect the kids negatively in future, we have no way of knowing. But I do know they could live happily in Vietnam, Romania, London, Wales, in many places, and they have the skills to make that happen if it’s what they choose.

Through this journey, we’ve met other homeschooled, worldschooled, and unschooled kids, of course. You’ll usually find my kids chatting to them online. I can hear them both chatting away right now. They are their peers, I guess. The kids with the shared experiences. Now they also have coworkers and know more of the locals than I do, as I don’t work outside the home.

I’m not self-justifying here, I just think it’s time to share that it worked. Everything came together just fine. Yes, I worried, stressed, and doubted at times. We all do.

There were sleepless nights and a lack of maternal certainty. But now, it’s all good. They’ll be fine. And that’s what every parent desires.

I’ve been a homeschool advocate for years. I’ve been interviewed by magazines, newspapers, even Lonely Planet on this, my favourite topic. I’ve contributed to several books, one for the University of Maine. I actually prefer talking about travel, I don’t like to share our personal life more than I have to.

Giving kids freedom from school and simultaneously, an epic education was great. It’s nice to be able to lay it to rest now. It worked.

Would It Have Been Different If They’d Gone To School?

Yes, it would have been very different.

We probably would have remained in this area, and the kids would know everyone locally. Mum would have been miserable, Dad would have been worked to death, he would have spent very little time with them.

I doubt they would have come out of school better educated; in fact, I believe the opposite. I doubt they would be happier, and they certainly wouldn’t have had the life experiences they’ve had.

Our family would not be as tight as it is; peer attachment would have overtaken parental attachment a long time ago. And that’s worse for families and worse for our society. This is according to Dr Gabor Mate, who wrote an excellent book on this subject, “Hold On To Your Kids”. No Amazon links here, we don’t use that company ourselves, and don’t want to send you in that direction.

I love that my kids are still at home, pushing them out the front door at 18 is very outdated today. Family units are much more prosperous and have better mental health than fragmented families.

This article (Australian) tries to put a negative spin on the fact that adult kids are staying home longer today. Most of the 50+ % of adult male kids still at home will have gone to regular school , of course. It’s not negative, it’s wholesome and positive. Of course, institutions and government want them out of the family home, with bigger and more bills to pay.

I found the statement that Mum has more housework in the article above absolutely laughable. I have 2 strong lads to help me with everything, an extra driver, an extra car to juggle, it’s great. And 1 is an excellent chef, just like mum. Did you think I was going to say Dad? Mum does all of the cooking, not Dad.

I doubt they’d still be at home if they’d gone to school. They may have had to make career choices early and stuck to them. Right now, neither knows what they really want to do with their lives, and that’s OK. I didn’t find my cause until my 40s; instead, I endured the path my school and university career keyholed me into. It sucked!

It took a lot to break free.

I think that by trying lots of different ways of living, being, and working, we find the path we were meant to walk. Without financial pressure on kids’ shoulders, they’re free to try things out and pursue various trainings and learnings.

They’re also free to save significant nest eggs that can be future home deposits. We bought land, 5 acres, so we gave them the option of putting that future home on family land. It’s an option, maybe they’ll choose it, maybe they won’t.

You’ll find more information in the related posts and tags below. No regrets about homeschooling, no way. If we had these years over the only change I’d make would be to never send my elder son to school at all. The biggest regret today is that I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the strength to walk this path for him back then.

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