May 17 • General discussion
When the People You Love Don't Get It
Can I be honest with you about something?
Some of my hardest days as an unschooling parent have had nothing to do with my kids.
They have had everything to do with the look on someone's face when I explain what our days look like. The quiet pause before a family member asks "but what about socialization?" The offhand comment from a stranger that lands harder than it should. The creeping worry that the people who love us think we are getting this wrong.
I don't think I'm alone in this. And I don't think it's weakness. I think it's what happens when you are doing something that genuinely goes against the grain, while caring deeply about getting it right.
So let's talk about it, because the research here is actually really interesting, and also because I think we all just need to hear that this part is hard for everyone.
Why Judgment Hits So Hard
Human beings are wired for belonging. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, author of Social, argues that our need for social connection is as fundamental as our need for food and shelter, and that social pain, including the pain of being judged or excluded, activates the same neural pathways as physical pain (Lieberman, 2013).
In other words, when a family member questions your choices or a stranger raises an eyebrow, the discomfort you feel is not oversensitivity. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
What makes this particularly complicated for homeschooling families is that the judgment often comes from people who love us and are genuinely worried. Not from malice, but from a framework that most of us were raised inside and never had reason to question. School is so deeply embedded in our cultural understanding of childhood that choosing something different can read, to people on the outside, as risk. As neglect, even.
It is worth remembering that their worry usually comes from the same place ours does. Love.
The Confidence Gap Is Real, And Normal
Research on minority stress, originally developed to understand the experience of marginalized groups navigating dominant culture, offers a surprisingly useful lens here. Psychologist Ilan Meyer found that people whose lives differ significantly from the cultural mainstream carry a particular kind of chronic low-grade stress, not from anything going wrong in their own lives, but simply from the ongoing experience of being different in a world that keeps reminding them of it (Meyer, 2003).
Homeschooling families, particularly those practicing unschooling or other alternative approaches, live this experience in small ways every day. Every form that asks for your child's school name. Every well-meaning question about grade levels. Every conversation where you have to decide how much to explain and how much to deflect.
That accumulates. And when it collides with our own moments of self-doubt (which every thoughtful parent has, regardless of how their children are educated) it can genuinely shake our confidence in ways that have nothing to do with whether we are actually doing a good job.
What Actually Predicts Good Outcomes
Here is where the research becomes quietly reassuring.
Studies consistently show that the factors most strongly associated with positive outcomes for children, academically, emotionally, and socially, are not curriculum choices, school attendance, or standardized test performance. They are the quality of the parent-child relationship, the warmth and responsiveness of the home environment, and the degree to which children feel safe, seen, and trusted (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Neufeld & Maté, 2004).
Peter Gray and Gina Riley's surveys of adults who were unschooled found that the vast majority reported being well-prepared for adult life, having pursued meaningful education and careers, and perhaps most significantly, retaining a genuine love of learning into adulthood (Gray & Riley, 2015).
None of that shows up on a checklist. None of it is visible to the person at the school gate or the relative at Christmas dinner. But it is real, and it is exactly what we are building.
What I've Come to Sit With
I want to be careful not to wrap this up too neatly, because honestly I am still learning to navigate this myself. There are days I feel completely solid in what we are doing, and days where one comment from the wrong person at the wrong moment is enough to send me spiraling.
What helps me most is coming back to what I can actually see. Not what I imagine other people see, but what is right in front of me. A child who is curious. A child who is creating. A child who feels safe enough to be fully themselves at home.
That is the evidence. It lives in my house, not in other people's opinions.
I also try to remember that confidence in our choices does not require everyone else to understand them. We are allowed to know something is right for our family without being able to convince every skeptical person in our lives. That is not arrogance. That is just knowing our own children.
And on the days when even that is not enough, well, that is part of why I'm trying to build this community.
Because sometimes you just need to be around people who already get it.
References
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
Gray, P., & Riley, G. (2015). Grown unschoolers' evaluations of their unschooling experience: Report I on a survey of 75 unschooled adults. Other Education, 4(2), 8–32.
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown Publishers.
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.
Neufeld, G., & Maté, G. (2004). Hold on to your kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers. Knopf Canada.
Roots Before Wings is a free community for families raising curious, creative, connected kids. If this resonated with you, you are exactly who this space was built for.
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When the People You Love Don't Get It
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