I have been homeschooling my children for almost half my life and have learned a lifetime of lessons. Which of these lessons would be most valuable to share with you? How to keep extra murals to a minimum? How to not rush into buying too many curricula? How to enjoy long slow days at home with young children? How to continue to guard your older children’s minds and hearts? How to keep your relationship with your spouse as top priority through the years of homeschooling?

No, I think I need to focus on the lesson of the sandpaper effect that being with your children 24/7 has on the character of a mom because this has been the defining part of my homeschool journey with my children.

When I started out homeschooling 19 years ago with my first born, who is now a married woman of 21, I was a huge idealist. Having "teethed" on the writings of Karen Andreola about Charlotte Mason and Sally Clarkson and her Educating the Wholehearted Child I had a beautiful picture of what our days would look like. As the years wound along and the children matured from toddlers to teens, the picture didn’t look the same as what I had in mind all those years ago!

If I had been more of a pragmatist and had entered homeschooling with the thought that we were simply going to educate our children at home using a school based programme, things may have not been the same. But we didn’t, we always knew the process was to be much more – the shaping of a whole person, body, soul and mind. So I set out with a very detailed plan of how I was going to do this.

But being an idealist, I thought that if I exposed my children to nature study, classical music, books, the Bible, chores etc., then I would get lovers of nature classical music and books etc. Life just doesn’t fit like this – there were many things I thought would happen which didn’t happen and many things I never thought would happen, did! Although now with hindsight I can see many of the values have been taken up by our children, which I set out to instill in them as younger ones.

So I wish I had known myself more at the beginning. I wish I had known I was an idealist because I would have saved my children and myself a lot of struggle and pain. There would have been more mercy for messing up – towards myself and for my kids. Being a family of 6 there are so many relationships at play, so many interests, so many characters and none of us started out homeschooling as whole people, and if there is one thing that homeschooling is going to do, its to show your cracks.

But if I look back over this long history we have with homeschooling and I count the successes in each of my children’s lives on many levels, I know that while I made the plans…many, many plans…it was the Lord whose will was brought in each of their lives, as we figured it out along the way. And He is still busy in all of us.

Plans are good, having goals are good, reading homeschool books is good…but there is a tipping point where it becomes too much. As the years unfolded in our home I became more relaxed with each child’s individual progress, moved more into a facilitator role and became their champion cheerleader. I extended mercy and grace to them more readily and allowed them to find their own way in life, instead of into the image I believed we needed to match.

There was and is nothing to prove to anyone else looking in on our lives, as we simply need to continue to raise whole-hearted children who are walking out their lives with confidence, picking them up when they stumble (and they do!) and helping them back onto the path.