Homeschooler Impostor Syndrome
I suppose you could say that homeschooling made me who I am. It also gave me a crippling case of impostor syndrome.
Cultural references slide past me as I grasp at contextual clues. Who is Rick Astley? What is South Park? Why do peers wax nostalgic for these things called Scholastic Book Fair and Reading Rainbow? Does the rainbow signify that it’s part of the “homosexual agenda”?
Don’t let them know that you’re a fraud. Act normal. Smile and laugh when they smile and laugh. Google what it is later.
What kind of education isolates students to the point where they struggle to interact with other humans? In my case, it was homeschooling.
Surely not all homeschoolers feel like frauds, but there’s a unique form of imposter syndrome for the isolated homeschooler who enters the “real world.” How did we get here? Why are so many homeschool alumni from that first generation speaking out against these homeschooling practices?
Let’s rewind a generation.
1991 was a wild time to start homeschooling in New York state.
The crunchy unschoolers of the 1970s found themselves pushed to the margins by religious fundamentalists like Michael Farris, who formed the HSLDA in 1983. In 1984, my childhood church briefly considered starting a Christian school and then pivoted to a homeschool ministry. (One might speculate that the church wasn’t enthusiastic about the public school district’s authority over their qualifications).
Unlike the school reform advocates who turned to homeschooling, the church leaders who formed Christian Fellowship Academy had no problem with schools demanding compliance from students. They just thought it was the wrong kind of compliance asked by the wrong kind of people.
“I was first drawn to home education, in part, because I wanted to be the primary influence in the lives of my children. I was not ready to share that privilege with anyone else. I knew full well that a teacher gains significant status in a child’s mind and many a time, much to my dismay, I have heard a student choose to acknowledge the teacher’s counsel above that of the parent. I did not want that to be the case with my children. Therefore until my place of honor was well established I would need to guard it jealously.”
-Darlene Sinclair, The Four Pillars of Christian Homeschooling
When I started kindergarten in 1991, homeschooling still wasn’t legal in all 50 states (that would come in 1993). New York had passed sweeping homeschooling regulations in 1988, which allowed Christian Fellowship Academy to market their services to homeschooling families overwhelmed by the paperwork required by the state.
I was the first-born, the guinea pig, the pilot project.
And as far as guinea pigs go, I was fairly lucky. My mother had a degree in elementary education; that was not the case for many of my friends. Although I had my parents’ attention for the first year or so, homeschooling became more difficult with the birth of each subsequent child. By 6th grade, my days were filled with cooking, cleaning, and childcare, with a bit of schoolwork squeezed into the margins.
History and literature were easy and essentially self-directed—I just read stacks of books. Math and science were much harder; I struggled through algebra and geometry on my own for the most part and I never managed to do any lab sciences. My science curriculum was controversial among some Christian homeschoolers because it considered both Old Earth and Young Earth Creation theories. I fulfilled the language requirement by taking Koine Greek from my dad.
I’m not sure what my mother included for Health on the quarterly report forms required by the state, but it certainly wasn’t in line with state requirements. Education about my body was limited to The Care and Keeping of You and Period: A Girl’s Guide. I started homeschooling after New York started requiring HIV/AIDS instruction in 1987, but I didn’t hear about AIDS until I was in college.
Parents are required to provide health education at all grade levels. Section 804 of the Education Law requires that such health education include instruction to discourage the misuse and abuse of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. Section 135.3(b) of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education requires that the elementary and secondary health education curriculum include age appropriate instruction concerning the nature, methods of transmission and methods of prevention of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Parents must address the topic of AIDS as a part of the required health instruction at least once in grades K-6, once in grades 7-8 and once in grades 9-12. Parents may include instruction on human sexuality and family planning as part of their children's health education, but are not required to do so.
- Home Instruction Questions and Answers, New York State Education Department
New York has strict standards for homeschooling and requires regular standardized testing, but I never saw any parents held accountable if their students failed the tests. Testing throughout K-12 wasn’t enough to get me into college—I took the SAT and the GED to prove that I was qualified to enroll. I remember taking a PSAT prep course at a local school—which was terrifying because I had to enter A Public School Building—but it helped me figure out how all these tests were structured and feel less like an impostor in front of the Scantron cards.
New York can do better.
New York’s existing education laws work hard to protect homeschooled children; some of my younger siblings were homeschooled in Wisconsin and I was appalled at the state’s laxity. But my homeschooling experience in New York highlights some loopholes in the state’s ostensibly stringent homeschooling regulations.
As long as students can make educated guesses on the standardized tests, parents can get away with “grocery shopping” as math class and “bread baking” as science. In rural communities where the largest town doesn’t top 15,000 people, parents can isolate their children to such an extent that they have no interactions with the “outside world.” I seldom left my house except to attend church. The homeschooling parents in my community mocked the “what about socialization?” question, but our social interactions were limited to a tiny bubble.
Most importantly, New York does not require parents to meet a minimum standard to homeschool their children. Parents who are convicted of child abuse are still allowed to homeschool. This means that a man from my childhood church who molested two of his toddlers still has 24/7 access to his homeschooled child victims. The stories aren’t mine to tell, but many of my homeschooling peers could have been spared tremendous pain if New York had required them to have contact with mandated reporters.
Perhaps some homeschooled alumni are glad that they grew up without outside interactions or that they didn’t have to sit in classes all day. Perhaps some alumni found that homeschooling was a good choice for their neurodivergent brains. But that wasn’t me.
I just wanted to be normal. I read enough books to know that my life was strange and felt crushing pressure from the church homeschooling community to prove that homeschooling was better than all other forms of education. My childhood church promised my parents that if they homeschooled their children, they would “become who God created them to be by seeking Him first.” The stakes weren’t just high—they were eternal. Average was bad. Zeal, purity, fire, and complete surrender were good.
I read and re-read Emily Post’s 1937 edition of Etiquette because it was the only resource available in the pre-internet age. I wanted to know how normal people acted in social situations. I didn’t realize that memorizing table settings for a fancy dinner party wouldn’t make me appear well-adjusted.
That became clear when I arrived at college with hair to my waist and a chip on my shoulder. I had never interacted meaningfully with a non-white person. No one cared that I had read all the Longfellow and Emerson in my house. My ability to make 6 loaves of bread at a time wasn’t needed in a dorm room. My ignorance of history post-WWII meant that I had to play catch-up in multiple classes.
Was my homeschooling education successful?
I’m not sure if homeschooling worked for me. I don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s possible that the local schools in one of New York’s poorest counties wouldn’t have suited me either, but I’ll never know.
Homeschooling gave me the tools to learn on my own. The persistence and determination I developed while working as my siblings’ surrogate mom have proved useful for unlearning everything that was forced into me as a child. I suppose you could say that homeschooling made me who I am. It also gave me a crippling case of impostor syndrome.
In the end, it turned out that I had crammed for an illusory comprehensive exam. The real world was nothing like I imagined. I trained for a life that only existed within the homeschool bubble—unless you need me to plan a dinner party. I know how to do dinner parties.
Parenting is a multifaceted and irreplaceable function in the lives of children. It seems tragic to me that parents so undervalue the role they play in their children’s health and happiness that they intentionally sabotage themselves by taking on the additional role of educators.
The fundamental question, it seems to me, is “who will parent if parents abandon their role to become teachers?”
There is such a thing as great homeschooling. One test to distinguish the good kind is, are the parents happy - eager - to take advantage of opportunities offered by other adults, outside the home, that give the kids more diverse exposures.
Parents who choose homeschooling because they sincerely want a *better* education than local public schools may provide, and who do the work to be good teachers of the academic basics themselves, tend to also recognize the limits of the home (+ home church) classroom setting. Also, they're working hard enough that they're glad to have a break once in a while.