TL;DR
The first weeks of homeschooling are not supposed to look like school.
They’re supposed to look like that face your kid makes when you hand them a pencil and nothing makes sense yet.
Deschooling is the phase nobody warns you about — and the one that makes everything else possible.
Here’s what it actually involves:
- Letting your child unlearn the rules before they can receive learning in a new way
- Releasing your own institutional programming about productivity and time
- Discovering what your child naturally gravitates toward when the pressure is off
- Building a rhythm that belongs to your family — not a system
Nothing is wasted in this phase. Not a single slow morning. Not a single pencil balanced on a lip.
It’s all part of the landing.
Post 1 — Signs You Were Made to Homeschool
Post 2 — What No One Tells You About Making the Switch
That Face
You know the one.
Arms crossed over the back of a chair. Eyes wide. Pencil doing absolutely nothing productive.
The “this is not how my teacher did it” face.
The “that’s not how we did it at school” face.
My son wore that face a lot in the beginning.
And every time he did, I’d look at him and say:
Hey. This is my school.
That was the beginning of deschooling. For both of us.
What Deschooling Actually Is
Deschooling is the decompression period between institutional learning and self-directed learning.
The term comes from educator John Holt and was expanded by Ivan Illich — the general guideline is one month of deschooling for every year a child spent in traditional school.
But more than a timeline, it’s a mindset shift.
Your child has been trained — often without anyone meaning harm — to follow steps in order, to wait for permission, to measure their value by compliance and output. They’ve learned that learning looks a certain way and sounds a certain way and happens at a certain time.
Before they can receive a new way of learning, they have to unlearn the old one.
And so do you.
My Son’s Unlearning
My son is a follow-the-steps, do-it-in-order kid.
In the beginning that showed up as resistance — that’s not how my teacher did it — which was really just his nervous system asking for the familiar container it had been trained to trust.
What he needed to unlearn first wasn’t academic.
It was that rules and steps are a blueprint, not a law.
That there’s more than one right way to get somewhere.
That the person across from him wasn’t going to penalize him for thinking differently.
That took time. Not months — but real, intentional weeks of patience and repetition and this is my school said with enough warmth that he eventually believed it.
And then something shifted.
He relaxed.
A little too much, honestly. There are still days I have to remind him: responsibilities before fun. And I learned quickly that two weeks of winter break is too long — it took him a while to find his classroom groove again when we came back.
Balance is still something he’s learning. That’s okay. So am I.
My Unlearning
Here’s what nobody tells you about deschooling:
It happens to the mother too.
I grew up first-generation Mexican in a household where rest meant lazy and work meant worth. We were raised to push through sickness, to grind for what we wanted, to prove ourselves through output. Toxic work ethic isn’t a criticism — it’s a survival pattern passed down through women who weren’t given access to education, who built everything they had through sheer force.
But I had started to question it.
And pulling my son out of school put me face to face with every belief I still carried about productivity, structure, and what a “good” day was supposed to look like.
Was I doing enough? Was he doing enough? Was every unstructured morning a waste?
I had to learn — and I am still learning — to just be.
To let the slow weeks be slow without making them mean something terrible about me as a mother or him as a student.
We were both going through a change at the same time. Him deschooling from a classroom. Me deschooling from an institutional clock I’d been following my whole life.
I had no idea what the end result was going to look like.
I still don’t, fully. And I’ve made peace with that.
What the Unstructured Weeks Actually Produced
I almost went the cute home classroom route.
You’ve seen it — the little chalkboard, the perfectly labeled bins, the aesthetic that makes homeschooling look like a Pinterest board came to life.
It wasn’t coming for me.
What came instead was an office vibe. I already had affirmation wall art. I had a full cart of supplies gathered over years of raising a busy toddler. The space evolved organically rather than being built from a template.
And in the early unstructured weeks, while I was still figuring out the space, something important happened:
The world didn’t end.
I didn’t have it all figured out. We weren’t checking every box. Some days looked more like a nature documentary than a lesson plan.
And everything was fine.
More than fine — we were learning each other. Our pace, our rhythms, our friction points, our flow. That is curriculum. It just doesn’t have a textbook.
What He Naturally Gravitated Toward
When the pressure came off, I watched carefully.
What did he move toward when nothing was required?
The Google Classroom setup, it turned out. Structure — but on his own terms. Together we built something easy to follow and now he can get himself started in the morning while I’m finishing my self-care routine.
He found coding. Code.org surprised us both — it turns out logic comes naturally to him in ways that rote memorization never did.
And he started reading with me. Real reading. We incorporated it into our time together by following losely the Under the Home curriculum and I’ll just say this: what eight-year-old is reading Shakespeare?
Mine.
The Identity Question: According to Who?
There will be a voice — maybe yours, maybe someone else’s — that says you’re falling behind.
Here’s what I say to that voice now:
According to who?
Because if anything, it’s the public school system that hasn’t caught up with the times. And that gap is only widening with the introduction of AI into every corner of how we learn and work and create.
The hours required for genuine, focused learning are far fewer than a traditional school day. So what is your child doing with the rest of those hours at school?
I let that question sit with the moms who ask me if I’m worried about falling behind.
It tends to do its own work.
The Turning Point
For my son, the deschooling phase officially felt over after Unit 2 — just before winter break.
That’s why I was fully on board with taking the full two weeks off.
For me, it felt over an evening I set up the classroom for the next day and realized it had taken me only a few minutes.
Did I miss something?
I checked.
Nope. Classroom ready.
That was the moment I knew we had landed.
What Our Mornings Look Like Now
I want to paint you this picture because it still feels like a blessing every single time.
We get up at sunrise. My son moves through his morning routine independently — bathroom, dressed, downstairs for breakfast with grandma. I get my slow morning. Self-care routine, get dressed, mat time, the whole stack.
Recently we added the gym. They just added group fitness for kids and we go together in the mornings. On off days we do a mile.
School starts after lunch now. We pushed it — and it works beautifully.
Grandma has a doctor’s appointment? No problem. Friday is our cushion day — lightest day of the week. Built-in make-up day, built-in grace.
And Monday?
We call it Moonday. 🌙
I couldn’t have designed this from the outside. It had to emerge from the inside out — from the slow weeks, the unstructured mornings, the patience I didn’t know I had until I needed it.
That’s deschooling.
Not a phase to push through.
A foundation to build on.
What I’d Tell You in Week One
Be patient.
It’s going to click sooner than you think.
Not because you’ll figure everything out — but because you’ll stop needing to.
The structure you build from your family’s rhythm will always outlast the structure borrowed from someone else’s system.
And one day you’ll set up the classroom in five minutes flat, check the list, and think —
Did I miss something?
You didn’t.
You’re right on time.
What did your deschooling phase look like — or what do you imagine it will look like?
Drop it in the comments. I’m reading.
Go Deeper
Curious about the research behind deschooling and alternative education? Follow the thread:
→ Search: “John Holt deschooling philosophy” → Search: “how many hours does learning actually take” → Search: “self-directed learning research children” → Search: “neuroplasticity and learning environments”
This is Post 3 of the Parenting the Future Series.
← Post 2 — What No One Tells You About Making the Switch
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