From Deschooling to Doing: What to Do Before You Buy Any Curriculum

You pulled your child out of school, and now it’s 10am on a Tuesday and your seventh grader is on the couch in pajamas. Every instinct you have is screaming that you need to do something. Buy a curriculum. Print a schedule. Set up a desk. Prove to yourself, and to your mother-in-law, that this is going to work.

I want to gently suggest you do none of those things yet.

I spent 15 years teaching in classrooms before I pulled my own two kids out of school, so I know exactly how loud that “they’re falling behind” voice can get. And I know it gets louder with every grade. When your child is twelve or fourteen, the stakes feel real: algebra is coming, high school is coming, and every quiet week can feel like lost ground. But the transition out of traditional school has a name, deschooling, and it’s not a problem to fix. It’s a process to let happen. There’s no fixed timeline, but here’s the pattern I’ve seen: the older the student, the longer it takes, and the older the student, the more tempted we are to rush it. For most middle schoolers it’s a matter of a few months, not a few weeks. Seven or eight years of being told when to sit, what to think about, and when to stop thinking about it doesn’t unwind over a weekend.

Here’s the part most deschooling advice gets wrong, though. Deschooling is not doing nothing. Doing nothing makes a tween stir-crazy and makes your panic worse. The families who come through this transition with confident and curious kids are usually doing something specific: real projects with real stakes, which don’t look like school at all.

Why real responsibility works when worksheets won’t

A kid fresh out of school is often allergic to anything school-shaped. Hand a thirteen-year-old a workbook and you’ll get the same slumped shoulders you were trying to escape. But hand them the grocery budget for the week and put them genuinely in charge, and something different happens. There’s no grade. There’s no right answer to be wrong about. There’s a real job that matters to real people, and an adult who trusted them with it. For a young teen, that trust is oxygen.

And here’s what you don’t need to say out loud: the academics are hiding inside, woven together the way they never are on a worksheet. Feeding the family on a fixed budget is unit pricing, percentages, and trade-off thinking. Planning a real trip is geography, scheduling, and budgeting fuel and time. Researching the family’s next big purchase and presenting a recommendation is source-checking, comparison, and persuasive writing. One real project crosses four subjects without anyone announcing it, and your child is learning the entire time. It just doesn’t feel like school, which right now is exactly the point.

Four projects to start with

• Hand over the grocery budget.  One full week, a real number, slightly too small. Let them plan, shop, and live with the trade-offs.
• Let them plan a real outing.  Route, timing, costs, backup plan. Then actually follow their plan, including the imperfect parts.
• The big-purchase report.  Whatever your family genuinely needs next, let them research options and pitch you their recommendation.
• Fix or build one real thing.  A wobbly chair, a better storage system, a repair they research themselves. Teens who make real things start believing they’re capable of real things.

What you’re watching for

You’ll know it’s working when your child starts something without being asked, defends a decision with reasons, or loses track of time doing something with their hands. Those sparks are the green light. That’s a kid whose curiosity is waking back up. And here’s the reassuring part: you don’t have to make any curriculum decisions until that happens. You’ll choose far better for a student you’ve spent a month actually watching, because you’ll know how they learn, what pulls them in, and what shuts them down. Deschooling isn’t the empty space before the learning starts. Done this way, it’s the moment learning quietly starts again.

Amelia Drouin

About the Author:

Amelie Drouin taught in classrooms for 15 years before switching sides of the desk to homeschool her own two kids, now 10 and 13. She’s the founder of Anywhere Learning, where she creates hands-on, real-world activities that build academics and life skills in the same task. Grab her free 7-day real-world learning guide at anywherelearning.co/free-guide.