Homeschooling through a Divorce

When your marriage ends, homeschooling probably isn’t the first thing on your mind — but navigating a divorce while homeschooling can bring up unexpected issues.

BY HEIDI KESSLER

DIVORCE ISN’T exactly uncommon these days — roughly half of all marriages end in divorce — but it still felt like a failure when my husband and I had to accept that our marriage was one of 50-percent that wouldn’t make it. There were obviously a lot of things to navigate in separating our lives from each other and figuring out the best way to parent our kids together even if we weren’t together, but homeschooling turned out to be a particularly tricky piece of the puzzle.

We’d been homeschooling for five years when our divorce was being finalized; Cady was in 6th grade, and Jon was a 4th grader. I’d gone to a homeschool conference with a curious friend when Cady was in 1st grade — I was supposed to just be there to keep her company, but I ended up totally inspired. I pulled Cady out of school a couple of weeks later, and we became a homeschool family. Soon, I had strong opinions about math curriculums, my educator’s discount at the bookstore, and a regular homeschool park day. I’d been planning to slowly switch back from part-time to full-time work when Jon started kindergarten the next year; instead, I cut my hours back even more.

My husband Dan was reluctantly on board with homeschooling. He worried a lot about the kids being “on grade level” and “learning how to cope in the real world,” but he saw their primary school education as mostly my business — if I wanted to homeschool them for their elementary years, he didn’t have a problem with that as long as I also signed them up for activities with other kids.

When we decided to get divorced, though, he made it clear that he didn’t want our kids to homeschool indefinitely. Some of his reasons seemed silly — he was worried about socialization, the way so many people who don’t actually homeschool are, and about the kids getting into college, which was still pretty far down the road. But some of his reasons were more valid: He wanted to be able to split time during the week, which was easier if the kids were enrolled in school, and financially, he didn’t want to pay for me to stay home so I could homeschool the kids. We had talked about 401(k) plans and summer vacations and even how we would change our wills, but neither of us thought about homeschooling until we were sitting down at the conference table with our lawyers. Every other part of our divorce had been fairly amicable, but we were deeply divided about homeschooling our kids. It became obvious that we weren’t going to agree.

I am lucky to have an ex-husband who cares passionately about being a good parent to our kids. I had to remind myself about this many times as we argued about whether I would get to continue homeschooling our kids. Apparently, Dan had never really been a fan of our homeschool life. He was worried that our kids weren’t learning the same things their public school peers were learning. He was worried that I wasn’t qualified to teach them what they needed to know. (That one hurt a little.) He was worried that if I was spending all day, every day with the kids, his relationship with them would suffer. (I put myself in his shoes for this one and could see his point.)

We hired a mediator to walk us through this decision. The mediator suggested that we give the kids a standardized test to see where they actually were academically. Neither of them had ever taken a standardized test before, so they were a little anxious about it, and the results didn’t seem to point in any clear direction. The kids were on level in some areas, a little ahead in others, a little behind in some. The kids liked homeschooling and said so, but when Dan talked about school clubs and sports, they were excited about those, too. Homeschooling felt like the clear Right Answer for me, but it was obviously not the clear right answer for our family. In the end we compromised. We agreed that we wouldn’t change anything about what we were doing academically until the end of the school year, so I’d keep homeschooling Cady and Jon — but the next year, Cady would go to our local middle school. Dan agreed to me homeschooling Jon until he finished fifth grade, and then he’d go to the local middle school, too. Jon would take a test every year to screen for major learning gaps, and if any appeared, we’d reevaluate our plan. Meanwhile, I would have a few years to figure out a plan for going back to work full-time. Dan was willing to keep paying the mortgage on our family home until Jon started middle school; after that, I’d need to go back to work to afford a place of my own.

I can’t lie: I was really disappointed. I’d imagined homeschooling all the way through high school. I loved it so much. But the kids were OK with the plan, and I had to remind myself that was the most important thing. Neither Dan nor I got exactly what we wanted, but we were able to work together to make a plan that we both felt OK about.

Divorce is hard. Our homeschool changed a lot because of it. But there are definitely a few things I wish I had known going into the process:

Get mental health support ASAP. Of course you want to make this transition as smooth as you can for your children, but don’t neglect yourself in the process. “Divorce can be an emotionally charged experience, even if you part on good terms, and parents need space to deal with the end of a relationship,” says counselor and mediator David Kuroda. If you ignore your own feelings, they’re likely to come out in ways that ultimately make a divorce harder for everyone. I couldn’t process everything with Dan, and I didn’t want to dump on the kids. My therapist was an essential outlet. I needed a place where I could be sad, irrational, and over the top, and therapy was that place for me.

Get on the same page. If one parent wants to homeschool but the other one has strong feelings about other education options, things can get complicated. “When we’re married, we work hard to minimize our differences — we’re more willing to negotiate and compromise on questions of family and child rearing,” says M. Gary Neuman, author of Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way. Ideally, kids will stick with the same academic routine they had pre-divorce, says Kuroda, so this isn’t a great time to make the transition back to school or to pull them out to start homeschooling. If homeschooling is a point of contention, it may help to bring in a mediator who can help you pin down objective metrics for your homeschool. I didn’t love the idea of annual testing, but it turned out to be a low-hassle way to get Dan’s support for homeschooling through elementary school. Ultimately, we both wanted our kids to have a good educational experience, so focusing on that helped us find a few compromises.

Keep kids out of the middle. This can be tough if you and your ex are disagreeing about details, but it’s important that your kids don’t feel like they have to choose sides. A parenting plan can really help with this, spelling out how your kids will spend time, what your financial obligations to each other are (including college), and establishing a new family routine. It can be especially hard on kids if one parent doesn’t follow through on planned time together or commitments, so make your own follow-through a priority and try to minimize the impact of let-downs if your partner is the one missing commitments. Dan and I disagreed about plenty of things, but when we talked to the kids, we made sure to present a united front. The last thing we wanted was for them to feel like they had to take sides. I wasn’t thrilled about making the kids take tests or sending them back to traditional middle school, but I made sure they knew it was our joint decision. Dan didn’t love the idea of homeschooling until middle school, but he never second-guessed it around the kids after we made the decision.

Take your time. Once you decide to get divorced, most people just want to get everything done as quickly as possible, but rushing the process means you’re more likely to make emotional decisions instead of logical ones, says Constance Ahrons, psychologist and author of the book We’re Still Family: What Grown Children Have to Say About Their Parents’ Divorce. Slow down, take a deep breath, and give yourself the space you need to educate yourself instead of rushing for the finish line. Once a divorce decision is finalized, it can be challenging (and sometimes expensive) to change it, so take the time to make a plan that you know you can live with. Dan and I took almost a year to work through all the details, but that plan has carried our kids into high school now, healthy and happy.

Heidi Kessler is a former homeschool mom. She lives in Florida with her kids and two cats.

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