Before I start, I want to say something clearly. This post isn’t meant to make any mom feel bad about her choice, whether your kids are in private school, public school, or homeschool. This is simply our story, what worked for our family and our lifestyle. Please don’t read this and carry any guilt or shame. That was never my intent.
For months, people have asked me in my DMs why we chose to homeschool. I’d always say, do you want the long answer or the short answer. Here’s the long one.
There’s a moment I keep coming back to. My daughter, six years old at the time, came home from school and told me something about herself that no six-year-old should ever believe. I’m not going to give you her exact words. This can live on the internet for a long time, and I want to protect her. But it broke something open in me. And that moment ended a decision I had circled for years.
I wanted to homeschool my girls before I ever put them in school. The thought was always there. But fear held me back. Fear told me I couldn’t run a business and homeschool at the same time. Fear told me I’d fail at both. So I did what felt safe. I enrolled them. And every year, when re-enrollment season came around, fear won again.
The case I built before anything supernatural happened
Before I ever got a sign from God, I built a case. I asked questions, read books, and worked it out in my notes app at midnight when I couldn’t sleep.
Public school wasn’t an option for our family, and I wasn’t happy with our local system. So private school it was, and private school meant a tuition bill every single month since preschool. Real money, every month, for an education I wasn’t sure was the right fit. To be fair, the school was good. They loved our girls, our girls were straight-A students with plenty of friends. It just wasn’t the right fit for us.
Our mornings were miserable. Genuinely miserable. Tears, anxiety, both of my girls dreading the rush of getting up early, eating breakfast their bodies weren’t ready for, trying to think clearly while their minds were still foggy from waking up. That’s not how I wanted their days to start, and it’s not how I wanted mine to start either.
Then we’d pick them up, and there was homework, about thirty minutes once or twice a week per child, after a full day already spent in a classroom. I remember thinking, why. What is this accomplishing, instead of letting them come home and just play.
Then it was rush, rush, rush to whatever activity was in season. Soccer, theatre, gymnastics. Our whole life had this frantic rhythm that left almost no room for connection. PE was once a week. Recess was twenty minutes. My girls were sitting more than they were moving, and my philosophy on education had been shifting for a while, the more I read and listened, the more I remembered my own childhood in the nineties, so much more movement, more play, more exploration.
I love education, I’m a nerd about it, always have been. But I don’t believe a classroom is the best learning environment for every kid. I wanted my girls to actually get their ten to eleven hours of sleep instead of being rushed out the door half-awake, and with after-school activities running until six or seven most nights, that math never worked. I wanted the freedom to travel, or stay home if someone was sick, without feeling trapped by an attendance policy that somehow tells you your kid can only miss so many days, but also don’t send them to school sick. Those two rules don’t make sense together.
And honestly, I missed my girls. I wanted them to have free time to think and explore instead of every hour being accounted for by someone else’s schedule.
The number I couldn’t unsee
One day, months before anything supernatural happened, I did the math. I looked at a typical week, school, homework, extracurriculars, versus real, present time with me and my husband.
Fifteen hours a week with our family. Maybe less, depending on the season. Forty hours a week with someone else’s instruction, someone else’s belief, someone else pouring into my kids.
I hated that number. My girls were spending nearly three times as many hours with a teacher, a coach, an after-school program, than with the people who love them most. That’s the moment I stopped asking should we homeschool, and started asking how do we make this work.
The stranger at church
The case was building in my head, and I still hadn’t moved. I knew, with a certainty I couldn’t explain away, that I needed to homeschool my girls. So I prayed. Every day, for months. God, is this what you want from me and my family?
He answered. One Sunday after church, a woman I had never seen before in my life walked straight up to me, close enough that it made me a little uncomfortable, being a New Yorker. She was wearing beautiful, flowy, Afrocentric clothing, and I remember thinking she looked like an angel. She said, God sent me here to give you a message.
She told me I was no longer trapped. That my mission was bigger than four walls. And then she said the thing I will never forget. God doesn’t want His children trapped behind four walls. They’re meant to run. They’re meant to yell. They’re meant to play in the dirt. They’re meant to be kids.
I asked church security to check the cameras afterward, just to make sure she was real and I wasn’t losing my mind. She was real, though I’d never seen her at that church before or since. I drove home in a daze and told my husband everything. He was already on board with homeschooling, we just hadn’t figured out the how, but hearing that story moved him too. The decision was made in my heart that day.
The year I still didn’t obey
Even with my heart fully decided, we re-enrolled the girls for one more year. It felt wrong from the very first open house. I kept asking myself why we were doing this again when I’d heard from God so clearly.
If you’re in that gap right now, called to something and still not moving, hear me. The gap doesn’t mean you failed. Scripture is full of people God called who dragged their feet, some who even ran the other way. Obedience sometimes just takes longer than the moment of hearing.
During that year, my husband and I were quietly getting ready. Researching curriculum, asking every homeschool mom I knew every question I could think of, building a plan and a schedule, putting real systems in place so the leap wouldn’t fall apart two months in.
Around November, things got hard for my youngest. She started coming home saying things about herself that no child should believe, words that told me a classroom was teaching her who she was, and teaching her wrong. I won’t repeat her words here. But I remember the moment I knew we were done. Completely done.
That woman at church had told me God’s kids are meant to run and yell and play in dirt. They’re meant to be kids. And here was my daughter, struggling in a system doing the opposite. The word and the pain were the same message. I just didn’t see it until I had to.
What we’re actually building toward
This was never about escaping something. It’s about becoming something.
Five years from now, I want my girls to know, deep in their bones, that God designed the way they think and learn on purpose. That every person is wired differently, and that’s a beautiful design, not a flaw. I want them to have a faith everything else is anchored to. I want them to be confident global citizens and travelers. And I want them to know real life, how to cook, clean, budget, pack a suitcase, order for themselves at a restaurant, buy something at a store on their own, the things a lot of kids lose because they spend more time somewhere else than with their first and primary teacher.
More than anything, I want my girls to know how amazing they are, and that my belief in them is strong enough that I’m willing to sacrifice for it. Yes, this will be a sacrifice. We’re giving up a cleaner house, focused work time, probably some time with friends. We’re slowing down on purpose.
When my girls are grown, I hope they understand this. Not the curriculum. Not the schedule. How much I loved them, and that I gave them my very best self, not my leftover self.
A woman I never met told me God’s kids are meant to run and yell and play in dirt. They’re meant to be kids. I said yes to that. I hope you will too, whatever your version of it looks like.
If this stirs something in you, grab my free CEO Day Guide. DM me the word DREAM on Instagram, @nicolekvasco, and I’ll send it your way. And whatever you’re circling right now, don’t wait a year and a half like I did. Listen to the tug. He’ll equip you with everything you need.