Its been a while since I’ve done a heart-focused Homeschool edition, but recently at the Mum Heart conference I reconnected with my heart for homeschooling. So this episode is the beginning of some more regular homeschooling encouragement – probably 1 every 4 episodes.  

At the conference, I did a breakout session on homeschooling highschool, so this episode is sharing some of the key information I shared in that session, starting with the question, ‘What is the purpose of highschool?’   

And even if you aren’t homeschooling I think you’ll find some pertinent thoughts here for parenting your teens, so maybe listen in anyways!  

When we know our purpose, we will be able to make wise decisions and stick with them even when things get hard.

Homeschooling High School Is About More Than Academics

A bigger vision for the high school years can help you make confident decisions about your teen’s education. 

If you are homeschooling and your child is coming up to the highschool years, it can appear as if the stakes are getting higher, and fear can make you abandon the convictions and freedoms that shaped your homeschool in the earlier years.

Or maybe you haven’t started homeschooling yet, but the thought of homeschooling highschool feels intense, and you worry about whether you can do it.

It is a common thing for homeschool parents to pause when it comes to highschool.

• You get anxious about the future, ask if you’ve done enough, and start worrying about passing a grade.
• Your teenagers start pushing back, they don’t see the point of the lessons you plan, and they want the same experiences as their friends who are going to school.
• You start feeling exhausted, if you’ve been homeschooling for a while, or stretched if you have younger kids to attend to as well.
• And life is just busy and your homeschooling begins to be a bit inconsistent because of all the activity that happens when a teen’s world expands.

I think it is always helpful to know WHY we do something. If you are homeschooling your highschool student, you need to know why.  A few good questions to ask would be:

• Why are we homeschooling highschool? (that’s an obvious one!)
• What is our philosophy of education (what do we believe about education), and has it changed for highschool?
• In general, what is the purpose of highschool?
• What do I consider success for when my child finishes highschool? 

Something a friend said to me many years ago, and something that shaped our parenting, our homeschooling – and even the direction of what I teach today – is – If our WHY is broken (or unclear) then so too is our HOW.

HOW we homeschool the highschool years comes out of our WHY.

No doubt if you started your homeschool journey in primary school you knew that you needed to teach your kids to read, write and do arithmetic! To some degree, at least where academics were concerned, this gave you purpose, gave you direction. You need the same as you head into the highschool years.  

When you can answer the WHY questions, you’ll be able to discuss the HOW.

The Purpose of Homeschooling Highschool 

I’m going to briefly share what my answers to those questions were.

We were homeschooling to be the influence on our kids’ belief system and values, and to give each of our children learning experiences that highlighted their strengths and interests, and worked on their weaknesses.

I believe education is about learning the knowledge and skills we need to do life well. It addresses the whole person – spiritual, moral, emotional, social, intellectual and physical — while nurturing the unique interests and abilities of each child.

And no, my philosophy or beliefs about education didn’t change for highschool.

Which brings me to the purpose of highschool.

I believe most people would say the purpose is to prepare our kids for university – or at the least a job. But that is a limited perspective on education and on our life in general.

I saw our highschool years as the years we fine-tuned the character, knowledge and skills for adult life. And since I don’t draw a line between our parenting and our homeschooling – the reality is, this is also the purpose of the teen years.  

Adult life is more than a job – or at least I believe it should be!

• Adult life includes financial responsibility, so yes, our children need to have the skills to get a job or get further training for said job. It also includes being a good steward of the resources you have – time, money, possessions etc. The teen years are a time to learn these skills.
• Adult life often includes further education so they need to have the interest to continue learning and the skills to do so independently. No longer do we see a person maintain the same job for their whole life; these days people need to upskill themselves regularly and often this is done externally as they balance a job and family. So independent study and self-management skills are important.
• Adult life includes family life where you need relationship skills – to listen, respond, forgive, be flexible, work through disagreements, serve, and consider the needs of others. Our children need to continue to grow in these skills in family, as they will take them into every other relationship they develop – both professionally and personally. 
• Adult life will include using a variety of technologies so the teen years are a good time not only to learn how to use them but to have the self-control to maintain balance in their lives. The issue of using the phone, and social media is such an important topic for parents to continually address in the teen years.
• Adult life includes working with other people either on work projects or community clubs.
• Adult life includes being a citizen of your country and a participant in your community. The teen years are a time to establish a heart for people and an understanding of your country’s governance, culture and history and develop the heart to be involved.
• Adult life is a time when you can work with your passions and develop your interests to be productive in society. Highschool is a good time to acknowledge you have such passions and develop the skills that will enable those passions to shine.

When we see those aspects of adult life it certainly broadens our purpose for highschool. It is far more than Algebra, Biology and Essays; it is far more than prep for university or a job.  It is the last years we have for influence before our children step into adulthood and take responsibility for the direction of their own lives. 

Preparing your Teen for Adult Life (when Homeschooling)

I have always maintained that the quality of our homeschool is directly related to the quality of our parenting, and the season of highschool homeschool is no different. You are still the parent of this highschool student. You still need to see his or her uniqueness and find opportunities for that to grow and flourish.

As a parent, I often saw snippets of interests and/or talents in my kids during their childhood and primary school years – the things that made them them – but it was in the teen years that they started to become aware of those things and pursue them for themselves.  

Until such passions develop, your job is to continue feeding the observations you make and expand their exposure to a variety of ideas, activities, and skills without the pressure to decide now which career path their life will take.

The more you are constrained by the way the education department does this, the less freedom your teen will have to grow in the things that will truly help them as an adult. Your knowledge of your child (of your teen) – their strengths, interests, needs, purposes, weakness (yes including their weaknesses) should help shape the direction of their highschool experience.

The whole child based scope and sequence that I followed when my kids were in primary school was still helpful in our highschool years: My priority was (in this order) Relationships, Responsibilities, Intrapersonal skills, Talents, Academics. (I’ll have a link the show notes and blog to that scope and sequence – and will do a podcast on that one day!)

This gave me a clear direction that was in keeping with what I believed about education, the purpose of highschool, and the development of my teenagers.

In schools, the highschool years are about narrowing down your subjects and focusing on the ones that are going to help you get a job.  It’s always about what you want to do. The problem is, many kids – either schooled or homeschooled – don’t know what they want to do or achieve, so choices are made under the expectations of other people or just randomly guessed.

I wanted my children to have the freedom to grow during these highschool years and be prepared to make such a decision when they were ready, without me, or society, putting an expectation on them of when they needed to know what their future was going to be like.

I know this is a little out there – and you may not actually feel that comfortable doing what I did – and that is okay.  But I hope that you can at least think through each decision that you make and make sure that you are helping your teenager, and not just conforming to what society says.  Your take on highschool has to include not only the capacity of your highschool student, but also your capacity, the capacity of your family – the environment and situations you all find yourself in.  My purpose in sharing about highschool this way isn’t to suggest that you conform, but rather to make you see there are other options – and of course, I’m here to talk to you about it if you want to know more.  

When Homeschooling Highschool gets Hard

Whatever way you decide to approach highschool, there will be days that you find yourself comparing, or your kids find themselves comparing themselves with schooled kids, and you will have to remind yourselves that you have a purpose and you are working towards it.  You will need to revisit your WHY many times.  

There was a flyer my dad came across when I was a teenager that addressed the difference between conviction and preference. And I think it is a good thing to think about when facing highschool.

Is homeschooling a preference? Or is it a conviction?

For me, while homeschooling was legal, it was more of a conviction – we pushed through hard times, we found a way forward in our struggles. Mind you, I don’t think I’d have gone to jail for it because I felt my kids would be better with me and not homeschooling than without me and not homeschooling!  Thankfully my convictions where never tested to that level!

I’m not saying we can never change our minds, circumstances change, we never know what is in the future – but we do need to be committed to the course enough to create a sense of stability and resilience for the hard times.  And I think that starts to consolidate in our heart when we know our WHY.

What Does Successful Homeschool Highschool Look Like?

The last question I asked was: What do I consider success for when my child finishes highschool? 

This is an awkward one, because when we talk about success, we open up the possibility of failure.

When your child graduates, or turns 18, they become responsible for their choices. So I don’t think we can measure our success based on their choices – which are the visual outcomes of all that we do in our parenting and in our homeschooling.

Though I wanted to define success as a relationship with me, and a relationship with God — because that was what I was aiming for — I also knew that I couldn’t control those outcomes.

So my definition of success has to be that I was true and consistent with the vision I had, that I walked 12 years of homeschooling with God and with each child’s best interests at heart. And that now, I am doing all that I can do – as much as it depends on me – to walk in relational harmony with my young adults.

For you, success may need to be measured in much the same way: not by controlling the outcomes of your child’s adult life, but by being faithful to the vision and responsibilities you have during their childhood years.

Do you Have Faith for their Future

One of the things that gave me a steady approach to homeschooling highschool and looking at the future was a prayer that I heard my parents say was their prayer when they made decisions about my schooling.

I went to a small Christian school that wasn’t registered, which meant I had no State recognition of completing studies, no ATAR (or whatever it was called back then) no recognised certificate.

Mum and Dad said to me once that they prayed that us kids would have the faith to deal with the consequences of their faith.

They had faith to put us in a Christian school and trusted that God would make a way for us and our future. But they also recognised that when the consequences of that decision eventually became a reality, us kids would need our own faith to walk through those implications. Their decision would impact our opportunities and we’d have to deal with that as adults.

That became my prayer for my kids too.

We homeschooled right through to the end for each child. They have had to walk in the consequences of our faith.

Actually, it isn’t just relevant to homeschooling, is it? We make decisions as a family that have consequences for our kids in their adult lives, that they have to pick up from.

Our kids have probably had to deal with more implications of living remote than homeschooling but my prayer remains the same: that they have the faith to walk their life, regardless of the experiences of their childhood, their schooling, and how well prepared they are.

And maybe that is a prayer worth carrying into your highschool years too – that as you make decisions based on your convictions and what you believe is best for your child, they will increasingly develop the faith, character, knowledge and skills to walk their own life.

Because ultimately, that is what these highschool years are about. You are not simply trying to get your kids through highschool. You are preparing them to step into their own adult life.

So on that note, feel free to borrow that prayer for yourself!

Links mentioned on Podcast

• Whole-Child Homeschool Scope and Sequence
• Homeschool Hub on my website

Hi there! I'm Belinda and I'm glad you are here!

I am a family life coach and help parents to raise their kids with faith, values and life skills in a way that is intentional, relational and heart-focused. Read more in my Introduction page

You can learn about heart-focused parenting through my podcast, blog and weekly email (Heart Boosters).

If you need help you can book a coach call or email me here.

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