Finding Your Way on the Homeschooling Journey

If you decide to create and support an educational path for your kid that is different from the usual one, take a deep breath, believe in what you're doing, and persevere. Unless you have, based on a lot of experience, an enormous amount of confidence in someone who might advise you, do not let any individual make all your plans or answer all your questions for you. Many people, especially those who have a personal investment in traditional public schools, don't know much about alternative routes through school, and many of them do not favor such routes anyway. They will provide you with false information because they believe they know what is best for you, and because their allegiance is to their ideology, not to you. And there will be honest differences of opinion-about how to get an education, about how to become, say, a graphic artist, about how to live life.

If you ask for people's advice, ask several people, and expect different answers in many cases. If the issue is a purely subjective one, listen to everything, and then take the advice that fits your child. If the issue revolves around getting correct information, you've got to seek out the necessary facts, get them from as close to the source as possible, ask focused questions, get at what you're seeking in several ways, and check and double-check it. Don't, however, get paranoid and paralyzed. Life goes on, and it is never possible to know absolutely everything before acting.

One young woman asked four different people at UC Irvine whether, at 16 and with a Certificate of Proficiency, she could attend summer session there. They all said no. She filled out an application anyway, was accepted, and had a wonderful experience attending classes at the school from which she would later earn a degree.

Your child is the best source of the most necessary kind of information. Careful listening will yield what you need; caring support and determination will create the path.