How to get family on board with homeschooling

When you decide to homeschool you’ll probably have some sort of resistance, whether it’s your parents, grandparents, in-laws, or that weird cousin. They’ll question everything. I had a couple years where I was frustrated with all the pushback. If you’re new here my oldest is 10 and has always been homeschooled, and my youngest are still just babies. So I’ve been at this for quite a long time.

When you’re going through it the only thing you can do is ignore it or defend it. One of the big factors everyone worries about is socialization. “She needs friends.” So what did I do? I put my oldest daughter in every single sport, Girl Scouts, Sunday School, and even dance classes so I could say she had enough friends. This poor kid is not athletic, I did her a disservice. Something totally confirmed when she sat in the middle of the soccer field while the team was playing a game. Sorry kiddo.

The ironic part? Her only real friends she had were still my best friends’ kids. Even after all of that, I would have been better off just spending all those registration fees on coffee play dates with my bestie.

So what did I do to actually get my family on board?

I just homeschooled.

Eventually it wasn’t something anyone even thought was out of the norm. The results basically speak for themselves, my oldest is a total smarty pants and wildly creative, plus she’s only sometimes socially awkward and I’m pretty sure that’s just her personality type and doesn’t directly correlate with homeschool. Homeschooling hasn’t hurt her in anyway, if anything it has brought her a lot more opportunities.

You’ll always have pushback on something with parenting. Homeschooling will always be an easy target. You’ll be ok, just homeschool and be yourself. As they say, the proof is in the pudding and your homeschooler probably knows how to make pudding from scratch, right? Cooking pudding totally counts as home economics and math, by the way.