I first became interested in home education not long after my first child was born. It seemed the natural follow-on from the style of parenting I’d come to embrace (at the time known as ‘attachment parenting’). Typically for an autistic person (although at the time I had no clue I was autistic) I did what I always did; researched. I read absolutely everything I could find about home education; mainly books, and in particular the classics; John Holt, Ivan Illich, John Taylor Gatto et. al. 

It very quickly became apparent to me that self-directed/autonomous home education (often called Unschooling, especially in the U.S.) was seen by many as superior to all other forms of education; even other forms of home education (also known as ‘homeschooling’, again particularly in the U.S.) I joined some online spaces (Facebook was still very much in its infancy but there were already some groups where interested parents could discuss and learn) and was told about the dangers inherent in ‘creating school at home’; I decided that if I was going to home educate, it was absolutely essential that I ‘unschool’ my eldest (at that point my ‘only’). Anything else went against everything I’d read and researched. 

And then it all fell through, for reasons I shan’t share here, suffice to say that it wasn’t because I stopped believing in home education or unschooling. My eldest (who is not autistic) went through the school system, but he came out the other end relatively unscathed. 

When, ten years after my eldest was born, my youngest came along, with a different father to my eldest, who was much more in favour of home education, we decided not to apply for school (or even nursery). At first it was a philosophical choice. However, it very quickly became apparent that she had a much higher level of support need than my eldest had at the same age. Her distress behaviour in particular ruled out school as a possibility; too many children who respond the way my daughter does to distress end up being restrained. [This is a separate issue, but as someone who has worked in a school and undertaken restraint training myself I am constantly shocked that the main message (de-escalation, de-escalation, de-escalation, with physical restraint as an absolute last resort) seems to be forgotten by some practitioners the second they step foot back into the school building.] 

During this period, I received an autism diagnosis. Not long after, so did she. 

For us, home education has been a very mixed experience. I feel that it’s often touted as a solution for parents of neurodivergent children who have found the school system traps and limits them at every turn, who’ve had to fight ‘tooth and claw’ for every tiny concession and accommodation. But in fact there is a lot of – I would possibly even call it ‘propaganda’ – out there about the wonderful life-changing properties of home ed for ND kids. The realities can be quite different to how home education appears when one reads on Facebook groups. 

For example – and I own that I am speaking purely from experience here, and the experience of others may be very different and is valid – there are often conflicting access needs at home ed social groups amongst children (and adults) which are rarely addressed or even admitted to. There seems to be an idea that if children just have opportunities to play amongst themselves then everything will work out beautifully; that unstructured play is deeply freeing, and that adults can leave the children to it; often issues which ironically might be tackled in a school situation (e.g. pushing, name-calling and so on) are glossed over as just ‘kids being kids’ (and I’ve definitely noticed a ‘boys will be boys’ theme in some groups, where the concerns of sensitive children are seen as an overreaction to their more spirited peers, especially if those peers are boys). There seems to be a high prevalence of MLM (multi-level marketing; essentially, legalised pyramid schemes) reps amongst home educating parents; MLM sales techniques are highly manipulative and often involve building a seeming friendship for some time before using that friendship to sell supplements, essential oils and so on (often supposedly to help things like executive dysfunction, sleeplessness, hyperactivity, distress behaviour and so on in neurodivergent children). The manipulation and the confusion over friendships and ‘authentic connections’ can be especially difficult to cope with as an autistic person who already struggles with social cues, too. Some home educating parents dislike ‘labels’ and do not wish to seek assessment for (or self-diagnose) children who are possibly neurodivergent. Some believe that ADHD in particular is a byproduct of the school system, and that home educated children are proof it isn’t ‘real’. I have certainly come across a high prevalence of anti-vaccination sentiment within the home ed community – I am pro-vaccine, but I accept others may feel differently. However, even the ‘vaccinations cause autism’ belief – thoroughly debunked – seems not to be as fringe amongst home edders as it is in the wider world. Sometimes this is even believed by people whom one suspects may themselves be neurodivergent. And there are the limits of things like transport (some meet-ups, especially ‘forest school’ settings, are simply not accessible by public transport.) Some are expensive. And so on. 

When I entered this world with my daughter, I felt disillusioned; where was the world of Holt, Illich and Gatto now? But at least, I thought, I had the education side of this right; unschooling was clearly the way to go; that is what all the theory said.

Until my daughter had other ideas. In order to preserve her privacy, I will simply say she found unschooling quite distressing. Perhaps it was the enormity of having to decide what to do. Perhaps she found ‘strewing’ (put simply, one leaves around items and activities one believes may be of interest to one’s child – they may or may not decide to engage with them) manipulative (she is very direct). Perhaps it was the lack of structure and routine. It’s hard to say, and when asked for input, she didn’t know herself.

The problem is that when one turns to unschooling groups to ask for assistance, one is either met with resistance – told that what one is doing isn’t true unschooling; one needs to unschool better in some way – or occasionally, the idea that it is possible to be very structured, follow routines, curricula and so on and yet still call oneself an unschooler (which often leads to arguments in comments, as other, more ‘true’ unschoolers call out the ‘heretics’). Occasionally one is told that the reason one is unsuccessful at unschooling is because one has not ‘deschooled’ enough; deschooling is originally an idea from Illich which seems now largely to mean a period of questioning one’s own schooling and (if one’s child attended school) theirs, too, and abandoning all dogmas relating to school. 

But the more I read, the more I started to feel as though unschooling was in and of itself a sort of dogma; certainly the way many of its adherents spoke about it, at any rate. As someone who’d come to home education initially via the idea of unschooling and autonomous home ed, perhaps it wasn’t just the case that I needed to deschool; I needed almost to ‘de-unschool’, too. 

I started to feel that deschooling – or perhaps one ought to call it dedogmatising – was more akin to unmasking, the process many autists go through when they first receive a diagnosis (or self-diagnose), and try to work out who on earth they actually are (in fact I feel demasking can sometimes be a bit like peeling an onion – but that’s beyond the scope of this piece). Instead of looking at the theory, I needed to look at my child, and her needs, and really observe her and the environments in which she thrived. Whilst true that it can be something of a dogma in and of itself that autistic people ‘need structure / routine’, it turned out some of my daughter’s anxieties did lessen when she had something almost akin to a timetable. When she was a baby there was almost a sort of optimal tightness at which she liked to be held; not too tight, and not too loose. It was like that with the routine on which we eventually settled. I had absolutely believed it was essential that a home educated child’s activities and learning be led by them, but watching my daughter thrive in playgroups where an adult had set up an activity with instructions gave me the ‘permission’ I needed to try giving her things to do at home, rather than wait for it to come from her. The relief from her was palpable. 

I was scared, of course, that I was doing what the unschoolers warned me about; re-creating school at home. It was quite funny then when my daughter started asking me to ‘play school’, where I was the teacher, and she was a pupil (albeit I was a cat, and she was a kitten, because of course), and that she wanted me to incorporate actual real-world ‘lessons’ into this game. In fact, our ‘little kitten school’ continued for the best part of a year! 

But of course home education is dynamic. Being largely adult-led worked beautifully for us until she got to the age of about six-and-a-half, at which point she started to become a bit more resistant – and I started to struggle too. At that point, two things became clear. Firstly that it was okay for me to reassess where we were, to solicit more input from my daughter, to shake up what we were doing – but also, secondly, that home education needed to work for me, too; not solely her. In fact, our own home had a case of conflicting access needs, the kind I had been seeing writ large in home education social and learning groups (and in the wider neurodivergent community too). And that it was actually okay for me to have my needs met too, provided it wasn’t taking something away from her. (Sometimes, conflicting needs can be a ‘zero-sum’ game. There are usually ways around this, but not always. This is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is something to consider.) For example, I rearranged our downstairs space to make everything easier to access, and I learnt to get over some of my fear of mess, whilst using declarative language (in a direct, non-manipulative way) to solicit my daughter’s help with tidying when/where possible. I used a pair of headphones with a ‘transparency mode’ so I could stim whilst listening to music as the same time as being able to hear my daughter as she spoke to me. I sought help with figuring out my ‘window of tolerance’, and identifying cues as to when I was nearing its end. I realised that it wasn’t just she who needed routine; it was me, too. There were other ways I focused on our joint and our differing needs as a dyad and as part of the wider family unit, too.

And I did shake up our home ed. So at the moment, in play, I follow her lead; in (slightly) more formal learning, I suggest, but she has power of veto. If forced to describe our home education ‘style’ I would say ‘eclectic, dynamic, consent-based’. I think a lot about the way I learn, and where it is and isn’t similar to her. I absolutely have to read as much as I can about a topic in which I’m interested, but sometimes I need help making sense of what I’ve read (my best subjects were the ones in which I was able to follow my own monotropic spirals but also speak to an expert in that subject to check I was on the right ‘path’). I suspect I’m hyperlexic and a gestalt language processor and that this ties into that; my daughter is definitely hyperlexic and a GLP too, but her learning styles (I’m aware that the ‘theory of learning styles’ is widely debunked, but if anything, I think it is because there are more – many more – learning styles than the suggested five or six, not less/none, and that these are fluid and ever-changing, depending on need and mood and place and time and so much more) and preferences include much more ‘hands-on’ involvement too. In abandoning the idea that one must unschool, I’ve opened up so many more possibilities; I’m excited to see where we end up. 

Yes, there are still the other issues I mentioned earlier around the social side of home education. We’re working on it, and I think an admission within the home ed community that conflicting access needs are a real issue that needs addressing (especially as more and more children come to home ed not through choice but of necessity after being failed by the school system) would be useful and timely, rather than ‘burying our heads in the sand’, but that’s another topic. 

If you are considering home education as a neurodivergent parent or a parent to neurodivergent children (or, as seems often to be the case, both), my strong suggestion would be to read and digest, as is most of our wonts as ND people, but also, not to be afraid, then, to step outside those pages into the world you and your child/ren inhabit as unique individuals. 

“Home Education and De-dogmatising” by Ruth Moss is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.