A note for the homeschool mom who wonders if she is doing enough
I want to talk about a lie that follows homeschool moms around — quiet enough that you might not notice it, loud enough that it shapes how you feel at the end of every day.
I have felt it too. In the comments, in the conversations, in the well-meaning voices that keep telling me I need to let go of the apron strings. That I am too involved. That my children need more space from me, more independence from me, more of everything except me. And for a long time I let those voices make me question something I felt deeply in my heart.
So today I am swimming upstream a little, because I think some of us need to hear the other side.
The lie sounds like this: if you give your children too much of yourself — too much attention, too much presence, too much grace — you will raise children who can’t cope without you. Needy children. Spoiled children.
Friend, that is not true.
No child was ever ruined by being made to feel like they mattered. What quietly undoes them — in ways that don’t surface until they are grown and trying to love someone and wondering why they keep bracing for the conditions — is learning too young that love has to be earned. That they have to be easier. Quieter. More impressive. More manageable. More something, before they deserve the full version of you.
You chose to homeschool, which means you already said yes to more than most people are willing to give.
More togetherness. More of your time, your patience, your ordinary days poured into these children. The world thought it was too much, and you did it anyway — because something in you knew that children aren’t projects to be optimized. They are people to be known.
And I know what it feels like to make that choice and then have people treat it like a problem to be corrected. Like your closeness is something your children will one day need to recover from. I have sat with that accusation and I have had to decide, again and again, what I actually believe.
But even inside that conviction, the pressure creeps in. It finds you in the co-op when someone mentions their child is ahead. It finds you in the curriculum catalogs, in the enrichment decisions, in the hard days when the lesson falls apart and the baby is crying and you wonder if maybe they were right about you.
And slowly, without meaning to, you start measuring yourself by output. By performance. By what your children can produce — as if that is the thing that will finally prove you made the right call.
And your children feel that shift. They always do.
Here is what I want you to know about a child who grows up never having to compete for your attention:
They don’t become demanding. They become secure.
They stop performing for love because they were never taught that love required a performance. They move through the world with a quiet steadiness that no curriculum can manufacture — because it was built slowly, in the ordinary moments, in a home where they knew they were never an interruption.
That is what you are really building when you homeschool. Not just an education. A foundation. A child who knows, without having to be told, what it feels like to be loved without conditions attached.
The voices that told you to let go of the apron strings — they were not wrong that children need to grow. But they were wrong about what grows them. It is not distance. It is not independence manufactured before its time. It is the deep, unhurried security of knowing they were chosen. Fully. Without conditions. Again and again.
So on the days when you wonder if you are doing enough — and I know those days come, especially when you are swimming against the current — here is what I want you to hold onto:
The thing that will matter most is not whether you covered every subject or kept pace with the scope and sequence. It is whether they felt it when you walked into the room.
Whether your presence lit something up in them. Whether they knew — not because you said it, but because you showed it, day after ordinary day — that to you, they were never a project to finish.
They were the whole point.
You cannot spoil a child with that kind of love. You can only build them.
Honestly, I almost didn’t write this. Because writing it means admitting that the voices got to me. That there were days I pulled back from my own children because someone made me feel like my closeness was the problem. Like I was the thing standing in the way of who they were supposed to become.
That is a hard thing to sit with.
But this has been so loud on my heart lately that I couldn’t stay quiet. Not because I have it figured out — I really don’t. But because I know what it feels like to love your children with everything you have and still walk away from a conversation wondering if you love them wrong.
Friend, you don’t. And neither do I.
If you are out there today, tired and second-guessing, swimming against everyone who seems so certain you are holding on too tight — I see you. I am right there with you. And I keep coming back to this: showing up fully for the people you love is never the wrong thing.
-Dana
“It is the deep, unhurried security of knowing they were chosen. Fully. Without conditions. Again and again.” This stood out to me. Weirdly, Ive been reacting to the same feeling, or maybe feeling that my children are somehow in my way of doing life. I needed this reminder that they need to feel chosen, day after day. We all do. We are chosen by Christ each day, and now we get to show His love to our children by choosing them.
This touched my heart.