Here is the original story form the first edition of The Miracle Morning for Parents and Families about our decision to homeschool our children. “Mike and I love to travel. When we first had children, we vowed that we would find a way to continue to travel as a family. We actually hiked Mount Kilimanjaro when I was four months pregnant (we got my doctor’s okay first) because we had already paid for the once in a lifetime trip and didn’t want to miss it!
After Tyler was born, we mostly stayed in the US. But like his parents, our son was a great traveller, even as an infant! He went on his first flight at eight weeks with no problems. When Ember came along about four years later, Tyler probably had more frequent flyer miles than the average adult. Ember’s first flight was at twelve weeks, and now at seven and three, they both have racked up miles and even have a couple passport stamps. We’ve been blessed that travel is still a big part of our lives.
Providence wasn’t the only reason we were able to continue to travel. It was written in our 5 year vision and all over our vision boards and we purposefully took the steps needed to achieve that vision. We travelled with our kids early in their lives to get them used to it and took them along for the ride on many adventures. Tyler attended his first concert at six months in Colorado, went to Grand Cayman Island, cruised to Mexico, snow skied in Colorado, and much more—all before his sister was born. Ember has had her fair share of adventures too, including seeing Niagara Falls, swimming in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, and visiting Legoland in California (twice), among other things. Everything was going along great for a while. But then things changed.
Step One. Vision: We wanted the flexibility to be able to travel, but without sacrificing the quality of our son’s education.
When Tyler started Kindergarten, our approach no longer worked. For the first time in our family life, we felt held back from traveling when and where we wanted to go. We had to plan around a school calendar, and we did not do very well. We maxed out the school’s attendance policy days and travelled every time he was not in school, but by the end of the school year, we felt burned out. We decided there had to be a better solution. But to find it, we had to get clear about what we wanted. On a date, Mike and I got out a piece of paper and created a vision for what would be the ideal situation. For schooling purposes, we wanted something that offered both structure and the flexibility we desired. Ideally, it would be a place that had a community feel like we experienced with his preschool.
Step Two: Define what you need to do to start moving in that direction.
Once we defined what we wanted, we did some research and interviewed every school in our area. We asked the administrators the same question: “What if we wanted to spend the month of January in Colorado?” At each school we had the same reaction—they cringed! We had been considered homeschooling as an option, but with all our travel and work schedules, we didn’t know how we’d achieve the structure we wanted to provide for Tyler’s education.
Step Three: Track your progress
We felt a little defeated but were reminded of a Thomas Edison quote, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this—you haven’t.”
I had been part of a homeschooling moms group since Tyler was 18 months old. I picked the other moms’ brains about their experiences, and one suggested we check out a place called Open Connections (www.openconnections.org). We looked it up online, and the more we read, the more excited we became.
It is a safe haven for homeschoolers to socialize, explore, and collaborate. Located on 28 acres of land, it helps homeschool students from ages four to eighteen learn through self-directing. We set up a meeting with the directors to go see first hand, and we fell in love with the place. Our son went for a trial day, and he too fell in love. The remainder of the school year, he kept asking when he got to go back and was so sad when we told him not until the fall.
Step Four: Constantly update and evolve your approach
Tyler has been at Open Connections since September 2015 and has loved every minute. We are truly living our vision of having a structured environment for the kids and one that is flexible so we can still travel when and where we’d like to go with no ill effects to their education. Without the clarity of vision, we may have settled for a less ideal option. However, this is not a one-time decision. Every year we will reevaluate whether this is still the course we want to take.
People often operate from a place of fear and the desire for comfort. It would have been much easier to simply fill out the paper work to send him back to his public school, but we would have had to give up one of the most important parts of our vision of the ideal family life. Because we were being purposeful, we took a leap of faith that has been very satisfying on so many levels.
I am not saying that homeschooling is right for every family, but I hope that sharing how we went from vision to reality in our own lives is helpful to you. When you are committed to your vision, it will come to fruition. There is a quote from T. S. Eliot on Tyler’s homeschool planner that says, “Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.” When we make a commitment, we find a way to make it happen, even when we are afraid or uncomfortable.”
Here I make it sound that travel is the only reason we chose to homeschool our kids, but that is not the full truth. Yes, we really do love to travel, we have traveled extensively, and most of our trips are not really vacations. My husband is the co-founder of a men's adventure mastermind group for entrepreneurs called GoBundance. The group takes several trips a year, so if the kids and I did not tag along, we would not see much of Mike. He is also the Regional Owner for the Greater PA region of Keller Williams Realty and gets to travel for training, teaching, and their annual conference called Family Reunion. We often tag along for those trips as well. Most of our travels are business related or visiting with family or friends who live all over the country.
Our decision to homeschool our kids was a very personal one. Travel did play a part, but was not the most important reason. We value a love of learning and personal growth in our family and felt public education was just not the best fit for our family. It was a difficult decision and I make no judgment on how other families decide to educate their children. We live in a school district that consistently ranks in Newsweek's Top High Schools. I love our superintendent, Jim Scanlon. He listens to the parents and truly does the best he can with the resources at his disposal. He has taken a strong stance on getting unnecessary testing out of our schools and I think he's taking small steps in the right direction. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about the public schools in our school district. They are FULL of dedicated teachers, counselors, and administrators. However, ALL public schools have limited resources. They are limited by the size of the school, by budgets, by transportation and by the government. Our family lives in a world of abundance, and as such, we did not want our kid's learning to be limited by bureaucracy.
As a homeschool family, the only limits are the ones that we put on ourselves. We are not ready to take on the system as a whole, so as a family we decided to "be the change we want to see in the world." Public schools are a relatively new creation and they were designed in the industrial age to create model factory workers. The business landscape is very different from that time, yet the system has not changed much. The world we live in now is one that demands innovation and creativity, yet our public schools have their hands tied behind their backs and don't have the freedom or resources to keep up with the demands of the market. This is not what we personally wanted for our children.
I did not include all the reasons we homeschool in the book because I didn't feel it was the right place to do so. As I share in my post, All Great Parents are Homeschool Parents... no matter where their kids go to school, "We didn't choose to homeschool because we think we can do school better at home, but that we can do HOME better than school." I am much more interested in the character development of my children than which facts they memorize. Here are a few videos that helped open my eyes to the state of education in our country and to what is possible with alternative education.
Do schools kill creativity?
Waiting for Superman Trailer
The history of public schooling
Homeschool at it’s finest!
I have many passions, one is personal development, another is teaching my kids how to find their purpose and one happens to be travel. Yes, we have co-created our lives in such a way that we get to travel extensively. We believe giving our children these travel experiences is an education they will never forget and can get in no other way. It's one thing to read about Niagara Falls and entirely different to feel the spray on your face and hear the intense roar of the water. It's great to see pictures of the Rocky Mountains, but so much more powerful to stand on the top of a mountain, witnessing the beauty of nature and having a mountain goat stand 10 feet away.
I'm grateful for alternative education and the community we've built around us and our children. I'm grateful for the lessons from nature and travel that we have experienced as a family. I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn side by side with my children and be their partners in the lifelong pursuit of growth and knowledge. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please comment below or join the conversation in our Facebook Community.
In Gratitude,
Lindsay