My daughter's argument for homeschooling was that her teachers were just doing crowd control. She was nine. And she was right.
That was back in May of 2025. She'd been begging us to pull her out for a while, and the case she made wasn't "school is boring" or "I want to sleep in." It was sharper than that. Every year she got dropped into a class of about 17 boys and 5 girls, and she felt like the whole day was the adults managing chaos instead of anyone actually learning. Her words, not mine.
Here's the part that made us stop and listen. By every outside measure, she was thriving. Teachers loved her. She got leadership roles. She was on student council. If you looked at her from the outside you'd think school was working great. But she told us flat out that she didn't feel like she was learning anything, and she didn't understand the point of most of it. That's a hard thing to hear from a kid who's "doing well."
So this is the story of our first year of homeschooling. The why, the part where I did it completely wrong, the pivot that changed everything, and whether I'd actually recommend it to another family. Spoiler: yes, with one big caveat.
Why she wanted out (and why it wasn't a normal kid complaint)
We have a lot of adult conversations with our kids. Real ones, about healthy food, why movement matters, why screens aren't built for developing brains. Our daughter doesn't have a phone. No social media. None of it.
And because of that, she notices things. She'd come home and tell us how the kids who ate the school lunches and loaded up on sugar fell apart in the afternoons. She didn't think the school should be selling soda. She noticed how many kids were glued to their phones, and she put it together herself that a lot of the mean girls were also the ones with phones.
That's a level of awareness I didn't have at nine. So when she said "can we just try a year of homeschool, I really think this is for me," it wasn't a whim. It was a kid who was paying close attention to her environment and telling us it wasn't serving her.
Why we said no for so long
I'll be honest. We dragged our feet.
We'd already attempted homeschooling once, during COVID, while we were traveling. And it just did not work for us. Try sitting your kid down with a workbook when you're standing in Arches National Park or you've got Florida out the window. Nobody wants to be doing math worksheets in a place like that, including the teacher.
So our hesitation wasn't about whether homeschooling was good for her. It was about us. About time. About being the ones responsible for her education on top of running our businesses. That's a real thing, and I don't want to pretend it isn't. But she kept asking, and eventually we said okay. We'll give it a year.
How we started homeschooling completely wrong
We kicked things off in August, on a month-long trip for my husband's 40th birthday. We leaned into Greek and Roman history while we were there, which honestly worked beautifully. History lands different when you're standing in it.
And then we came home, and I tried to recreate school at our kitchen table.
The first thing I did was buy a giant whiteboard. I bought all the curriculum and the workbooks, I wrote out assignments, and I handed them to her like a teacher would. Then we'd sit down and go through it together. We did that for a few months.
And it slowly drove me a little crazy. It didn't feel like she was applying herself. I'd get frustrated and annoyed, like, why isn't this clicking, why doesn't she care.
Hindsight is 20/20. What I eventually figured out is that I have a kid who needs to fully experience what she's learning. Sitting her down to memorize all 50 states and their capitals, or grind through anatomy worksheets, that's just me reapplying the fifth-grade curriculum at home. And here's the thing I had to admit to myself: most of that isn't a marketable life skill anyway. I was recreating the exact system she'd asked to leave.
The pivot: project-based, skills-first learning
So we threw out the model and started over.
Instead of "here are your subjects," we sat down together and set actual goals. The question stopped being "what grade-level box are we checking" and became "what skill are we leveling up." Real skills. Things that compound. Things a capable adult actually uses.
That one shift changed the entire year. Once learning was tied to a project she cared about, the resistance disappeared, because she could see the point. Which was the whole thing she'd been missing at school.
Here's what that actually looked like.
STEM, in her hands
We enrolled her in a girls' STEM group, and it was phenomenal. She did robotics. She worked with different chemicals. They made bath bombs, rockets, little cars, the works. It was hands-on science instead of science on a page, and she ate it up.
Horseback riding
We put her in horseback riding, and it turned into way more than a sport. It taught her poise. It taught her responsibility and what it means to care for an animal that depends on you. You don't get that from a worksheet.
Carpentry, which is where the math finally landed
My husband led the way on this one. She wanted to build a cat litter box console, an actual piece of furniture to hide the litter box. So she had to figure out what materials she needed, the sizing, and then build a budget and stay inside it.
That's where her math skills came from. Not from a textbook. From needing the math to get the thing she wanted built. She also learned to use power tools and how to be safe with them, which is a confidence builder all on its own.
Real business skills
This is the part I think a lot of entrepreneur parents will appreciate. She built websites. She wrote marketing copy. She did customer service. A couple of times when we received a product that showed up damaged, I had her call the company and handle it herself. And she did.
If you've ever thought about putting your kids to work in the family business, this is exactly the kind of thing that teaches them more than any class could, and depending on how you structure it, it can come with real tax advantages too. I broke down the numbers and the rules in how to pay your kids from your real estate business, and I built Kids Payroll to handle the compliance side if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
The library habit that made her a reader
We made a library visit a weekly ritual. Every Wednesday, she could swap out three books. That's it.
I did not expect this to be the sleeper hit of the year. But because she had a deadline and a limit, she read more books than she ever had in her life. The constraint did the work. Three books, one week, go.
Creative writing, design, and yes, AI
She did a lot of creative writing. She learned to use SketchUp and got into interior design, which, given what we do, made me a very proud mom. She even learned to use ChatGPT to generate design mockups.
That last one matters to me. The kids who learn to use these tools well, early, are going to have an enormous head start. She's not afraid of the technology and she's not addicted to it either. She uses it like a tool, because that's how we've framed it.
Girl Scouts and getting outside
She also did Girl Scouts and went on three field trips where they learned to build shelter, start a fire, and canoe. Survival skills, teamwork, time outdoors. Some of the best learning all year happened with zero curriculum involved.
We traveled whenever we wanted
One of the quiet superpowers of homeschooling is that the calendar is yours.
This year we went to Boston and through the New England states, and we built the whole trip around Revolutionary War history and the Declaration of Independence. She didn't read about it. She walked it. That's the version of history that sticks.
For a family that already values being able to pick up and go, this was the unlock we didn't fully appreciate going in. The same freedom is what makes mini-retirements you take along the way possible instead of waiting decades for one big finish line.
The benefit I didn't see coming: time
I went in thinking about education. What surprised me was the family time.
Before, mornings were stressful. Getting her out the door was a whole production. She'd get home around 2, do chores, do homework, and if I'm being real about it we maybe had four solid hours with our kid in a day.
Now? At least ten hours of genuinely good family time. Let that sink in. We more than doubled the time we get with our daughter during these years that go by way too fast. No amount of curriculum could compete with that.
The money part: Arizona's ESA
I want to be straight about the financial side, because it's a real factor.
Because we live in Arizona, we qualify for the ESA program (the Empowerment Scholarship Account). For us it's around $7,100 a year, and it goes toward allowable education expenses, including a lot of the extracurriculars I mentioned. The STEM group, the field trips, plenty of it is covered.
A quick note: the exact amount depends on your kid's grade, and the program rules can change year to year, so check the current Arizona ESA guidelines for your situation rather than taking my number as gospel. But it absolutely made a difference for us, and if you're in a school-choice state, it's worth understanding what's available before you assume homeschooling has to come out of pocket.
So would I actually recommend it?
Yes. With one big caveat.
You have to have the time to invest in your kid. That's the whole ballgame. Homeschooling done well is not handing a kid a workbook and walking away. It's being present, paying attention to how they actually learn, and building around that. If you don't have the time right now, that's not a failure, it's just honest, and forcing it half-heartedly serves nobody.
The second thing, and I'd underline this: get out of the house. The magic for us was never at the kitchen table. It was the library, the barn, the workshop, the field trip, the trip across the country. The home in homeschooling is the home base, not the classroom.
If you want the backstory on how we even got to the point where saying yes was possible, I wrote about the bigger decision underneath the choice to skip school.
A year ago I was the reluctant one. Today, homeschooling is the best thing we've done for our family. Our daughter is learning skills she'll actually use, she's more capable and more confident than she's ever been, and we got back hundreds of hours together that we'll never regret.
She asked for one year. We're not going back.
If you're an investor or entrepreneur trying to build a life with more freedom and more time with your family, that's exactly what we write about. Join the Addicted to ROI newsletter and come hang out in the ROI Inner Circle.
This article shares our family's personal experience and is not legal, tax, or educational advice. School-choice programs like Arizona's ESA have specific eligibility rules and allowable-expense lists that change over time, so verify current requirements with the official program before making decisions.
