How I Learned to Stop Comparing My Homeschool to Public School
By Lindsey, certified special-ed educator & co-founder, Schoolio
When I think back on our homeschool journey, there’s one chapter I almost didn’t want to admit. It was the year Grace still couldn’t read.
She was nine. Nine years old, and reading hadn’t clicked. Every night, after she went to bed, I would lie awake spiraling. I thought I had ruined her or that I was the problem. Reading the benchmarks only made it worse. Public school laid out exactly what was expected by first grade. Yet there I was, years later, feeling like I had broken something in her by trying to do it all differently.
I tried everything. From phonics programs to full curriculum bundles, I spent money we didn’t really have on tools that promised results. Our printer groaned under the weight of all the worksheets. There were days I begged, bribed, and cried. And she hated all of it.
One day, after another tense battle over a workbook, Grace looked at me and said, “I hate reading. I hate books.”
It broke me.
I gave up. I stopped pushing. Honestly, I stopped trying. I said to myself, fine. She’ll be illiterate. We’ll figure it out later. But I couldn’t keep doing that to either of us.
A few months later, something unexpected happened. We downloaded a video game called Stardew Valley. It’s slow-paced, gentle, and deeply story-driven — but it has no spoken dialogue. Everything is written in captions. At first, she’d call me from the other room every few minutes to read something. I’d drop what I was doing and go help. Over and over.
Then, one day, the requests stopped. I realized she wasn’t calling anymore — she was reading it herself.
Within three weeks of playing that game daily, something had clicked. I watched my daughter — the one I thought I had failed — read fluently, joyfully, independently. And I cried again, but this time for a different reason.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t learn. It was that she didn’t learn the way I was taught to expect. She needed time, space, and motivation that was meaningful to her. She needed me to stop comparing her to arbitrary timelines built for someone else’s classroom.
Homeschooling gave her that chance.
Now, when I hear a parent panic because their kid isn’t “on grade level,” I get it. I really do. But I also want to gently offer: maybe the problem isn’t your child or your teaching. Maybe it’s the invisible comparison you’ve been carrying — the one that says there’s only one right way to learn, and it happens in a public school classroom, on someone else’s clock.
Grace taught me that’s not true. Learning is not linear. It’s not uniform. It’s not a race. Sometimes, letting go is the most loving, brave thing you can do — for both of you.
certified special-ed educator & co-founder, Schoolio