What Every Homeschool Grad Needs to Know

This week I’d like to address my column to the new homeschool graduates. You are probably receiving a lot of advice right now about your future. People may be giving you counsel about where you should attend college, what dreams you should be pursuing, and how to move into the realm of adulthood. 

Today I’d like to address how to deal with your past homeschooling experience, whether good or bad. Your homeschooling background is a part of you and has helped to shape you into who you are today. However, your experience can hold you back if you do not react to it properly as an adult.

Dealing With A Good Experience

Let’s say you had a fabulous experience being homeschooled. You had great relationships with your parents and siblings. You received an excellent academic education. You participated in many unique opportunities, thanks to the freedom that homeschooling offered you. That’s terrific! 

I hope that this will give you a deep appreciation for homeschooling and that it motivates you to repeat the experience with your own future children. However, with this appreciation comes a temptation to feel complacent and to assume that because you were homeschooled, you have a complete handle on life and have an easy road ahead of you. 

This is not automatically the case. The fact that you were homeschooled does not mean you know everything you will ever need to know as an adult. Just because you were homeschooled does not mean you have attained the utmost height of maturity. Just because you were homeschooled does not mean you will have preferential treatment in college, in the workforce, or in other areas of life. In other words, homeschooling gave you a great start towards adulthood, but you’re not there yet. Be humble and don’t rely solely on your past for your future.

Homeschoolers are not immune to the big fish/small pond syndrome. The homeschooling community is relatively small and very well-connected and it is easy to find a sense of identity based on who you know or what you (or your parents) have done within that community. However, as you move into the adult world, you’ll realize that most folks are probably not going to be impressed that you—yes you—did the puppet show every year for the children’s track at the state homeschool convention. People aren’t going to care what homeschool “big wigs” you rubbed shoulders with or that your mom founded your co-op or that your dad wrote a book about homeschooling that has sold a few thousand copies. 

Further, these are temporal and fleeting things. What really counts is who we are in Christ and what Christ has done for us, not what we have done for Him in our special circle of influence. The Apostle Paul listed off his credentials too—“[C]ircumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in regard to the law a Pharisee, as for zeal, persecuting the church, as for legalistic righteousness, faultless” (Phil. 3:5-6). But he abhorred the idea of finding his eternal identity in his earthly credentials.

By all means, enjoy being part of the homeschooling community and appreciate whatever special place you have had there. I’m not advising you to turn your back or sneer at this unique part of your life. I personally cherish my homeschooled background and still strongly identify with the homeschooling community. However, we should resist the temptation to rest on the laurels of our homeschooling credentials.

Dealing With A Bad Experience

What if you feel like your homeschooling experience had strong negative elements? Perhaps you feel like you were not pushed as hard academically as you should have been. Perhaps you think that your parents did you a disservice by forbidding you to participate in certain social or extra-curricular activities that you think would have benefited you. Maybe you believe that your parents taught you to be legalistic, self-righteous, fearful, or elitist. Maybe the tension between your views and your parents’ views on life and homeschooling has fostered a bad relationship between you. What then?

First, realize that these problems are not unique to you or to homeschooling. Similar complaints can be found by graduates of government or private schools as well. These kinds of problems happen because people are human. They make mistakes. They have their own handicaps. They are sinful, just like you and me. 

You weren’t a victim of homeschooling. You were a victim of people—flawed people, who nonetheless loved you and were trying to do the best they could with what they had. Refocus your frustration by being thankful for what you did learn from your homeschooling experience—which is probably a lot more than you might think. Above all, do not let bitterness begin to overtake you. Anger and bitterness will poison your future far worse than a few missed extra-curricular opportunities will.

Second, keep the past in perspective and move on. If you’ve just graduated from high school, you statistically have at least three-fourths of your life left in front of you. The world lies before you. Your life can be what you make of it. 

Do you feel like you have gaps in your education? Besides the fact that you’re not alone—every graduate from every school has some kind of educational gap—you’re not helpless to remedy the problem. The Internet and the library are free and at your disposal. Go study and learn! 

Do you feel like you were badly prepared for the work force? Nothing like on-the-job training! Get a job—any job!—and ask all the questions you can of everyone you can think of. 

Do you feel like your interpersonal skills are inadequate? Start going to social events and practice the skills you think you lack. 

Do you feel like you were held captive mentally by legalistic trappings? Rejoice that God has shown you the light now and study the Scripture with renewed zeal to keep yourself from falling prey again.  

In other words, refuse to hold the future captive to the past. Keep in mind, if you can so much as read, you’re already much better off than many people in the world! Don’t fall prey to a victim mentality. Others have started from far less and achieved outstanding greatness. You can too.

You can either value the past or put the past behind you, depending on your experiences. But just remember: the past is in the past. You are responsible for the future.

Written by Raquelle Sheen

An Early Midlife Crisis

It’s not uncommon for young people to have a “midlife crisis” twenty years too early. Sometimes when you hit your early or mid twenties, it feels like you are still searching to find your niche, while your peers appear to have it all together and know exactly what they are doing. In some ways I think this affects homeschool graduates in a unique way because our lifestyles are often different from the norm.

My sister and I were homeschooled back in the day when homeschooling was weird and suspicious and even illegal in some states. (This gives us Ancient Veteran status and goes to our heads.) However, even though homeschooling was weird, it was okay to be weird. Our lives were at least predictable. When you finished your sophomore year, you started your junior one. When you finished your junior year, you started your senior one. Questions from others about the future were shallow and polite and didn’t weigh heavily on our radar screen.  

However, after graduation, my sister and I, like many homeschool grads, opted for non-traditional paths towards higher education. Some grads choose to postpone college for a year or more while they start a home business, which is something my sister and I did. Some people choose to take college classes part-time via distance education, which my sister and I also did. Some people work part time and attend school only part time, which I did for my master’s degree. Some choose to go right to their chosen field and skip college altogether by choosing an apprenticeship path. And some grads simply want to take a few years to experiment with their strengths and weaknesses and mature a little before making formal decisions about their future path. None of these options fit the paradigm of going to college for four years immediately after graduation and instantly getting a high-paying job in your chosen field.

In other words, your post-highschool future as a homeschool grad may seem a little freaky to others. Your life might not be tidy. It might be unconventional. It’s popular nowadays to prattle about the value of  “following your dreams,” or “listening to your heart,” or “daring to be different,” or “dancing to the beat of your own drum.” However, if you actually try any of that and go against traditional societal norms, people may think you’re a fruitcake. And while we can usually handle other people thinking we are fruitcakes, sometimes we can become discouraged by self-doubt and our own uncertainty. Are we just floundering? Should we be doing something more... “official”? More traditional? More focused? Are we just spinning our wheels and wasting our time and talents? Does everyone in the whole world have it all together except us? Before we know it, we’re smack dab in the middle of a midlife crisis.

How do we handle an early midlife crisis about our future?

First, remember the following verse: For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10) We may still be sorting out our plans for the future, but we don’t have to stress out about it. God has planned out opportunities for us before we were even born. We should seek God’s direction, but meanwhile do what is at hand to do and trust God that if He wants you to be doing a different set of good works, He’ll direct you to them. He prepared them in advance for you and if you’re bent on following Him, He’s not going to stand by and let you accidentally wander off into a bunch of useless junk that benefits no one.

Second, remember that societal norms are not somehow God’s standard for our lives. We may or may not fit societal norms. Honestly, they’re irrelevant. We may always be the odd duck. In fact, we probably will be. The majority of my life has been outside the traditional route. I used to think fondly of the time when I would finally have an “explainable” life to outsiders and have finally concluded that it will probably never come. So be it. What matters is if we are pleasing the Lord, not whether we’re fitting in with everybody else. It may be a lonely road. In fact, you can probably count on it. But it doesn’t matter. The path of obedience is frequently lonely. It can be a good sign, actually.

Third, success is ultimately not measured by the size of our bank account or the string of credentials after our name. Obedience and love are the foremost measures of success. But as Christians, even more important than our success is the fact that God loves us and we are His children. It isn’t about us, it’s about Him. He doesn’t love us because of our good deeds or because of what we can do for His kingdom. He loves us because He loves us, the end, kthxbye (translation, “Okay, thanks, bye.”) We don’t have to earn His favor or His love any more than we have to earn our parents’ love. They love us intrinsically because they’re our parents and we’re their kids, not because of what we DO.

Fourth, don’t listen to gloomy thoughts very much. If self-doubt pops up, pray earnestly for wisdom, purpose, and direction, but don’t make a habit of giving credibility to doleful feelings. They will always, categorically, world-without-endedly, make you feel more doleful. I have never yet had a hand-wringing “I’m a failure” session that made me feel less like a failure. I have had many that made me feel worse.

Lastly, while they are bad masters, sometimes feelings of discouragement and self-doubt can be used by the Lord to cause us to reevaluate what we’re doing and where we’re going. Sometimes the Lord uses periods of frustration in our lives to spur us to new heights and new adventures. But those new heights and adventures don’t have to look like other people’s heights and adventures and they probably won’t. I highly recommend reading the book Start, by John Acuff. It gives helpful guidance and encouragement on what to do next in life. Remember that God can and does steer moving trucks. He is perhaps less likely to move an impassive hunk of granite, although He just might give a hearty nudge to the granite too. I love that fact that God is bigger than our fears, passivity, and inertia.

Don’t let an early midlife crisis bring you down. It’s okay to be different. Yes really, it is!

Written by Raquelle Sheen