The hardest part of homeschooling Leyla
I never talked about.
When Leyla was 8, she couldn’t really read.
Other kids her age could.
And for the first time, Manon and I looked at each other and genuinely asked, are we getting this wrong? Are we failing her?
That doubt is a very specific kind of discomfort.
Because it’s not just about your child.
It’s about your choices, your values..
And the whole bet you’ve placed on a different way of living.
When you step outside the conventional path..
nobody hands you a report card.
There’s no teacher pulling you aside
to tell you she’s doing fine.
Just you, your gut, and the quiet fear that you’ve miscalculated.
We sat with that fear for a while.
Then we made a decision to trust her and the process instead of panicking back toward the norm.
Last year, Leyla read 200 books in twelve months.
The lesson wasn’t about reading.
It was about pace.
Every kid develops on their own timeline, and the only thing that disrupts that timeline is an adult projecting their anxiety onto it.
Kids are natural learners, they are curious by default.
What kills that curiosity is being forced onto a schedule someone else designed, learning things they don’t care about yet.
✅ Get the environment right.
✅ Give them confidence.
✅ Support them.
✅ Then get out of the way.
What I really had to learn was how to trust her more than I trusted my own fear.
📌 What are you not trusting your kid to figure out on their own?
PS: Enjoy this?
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