There are approximately one million boxes left in my living room, give or take, and nearly all of them are books. My husband is doing what feels like eleven jobs at once right now, and “hang the floating shelves” is somewhere near the bottom of a very long list that it isn’t his fault about, lol – so I’ve made peace with the fact that cardboard may be part of our decor until Thanksgiving.
My own boxes are labeled with borderline excessive detail – contents, room, priority, the works. Somewhere in this house, though, sits a box labeled only with one of my color-coded labels that say “KITCHEN,” no further information provided, courtesy of a household member who shall remain nameless. It is a small wound. I may never recover.
The dog – who is, appropriately, named Bofur because we were reading The Hobbit at the time – has claimed the a spot in the boxes as a fortress and refuses to be moved on principle. He’s snoring beside me as I type.
My daughter asked me when we are “doing school again.” I have an answer for us, which is a date we chose together, but I also have another one that might work for you in your homeschool adventures, and it starts with a word most homeschoolers only use in their first year: deschooling.
If you’ve never heard the term, or you’ve heard it and assumed it doesn’t apply to you anymore, this post is for you. Because deschooling isn’t a beginner’s phase you age out of. It’s a tool. And it turns out the other half of that tool is knowing exactly when to put it down again.
What Deschooling Actually Means
Deschooling gets tossed around in new-homeschooler circles as the decompression period after pulling a kid out of traditional school – weeks or months of no formal lessons, letting the “school” mindset drain out of everyone’s system before starting fresh. It’s usually framed as a one-time rite of passage. Do it once, on your way in, and you’re done.
I’d argue that’s too narrow.
Deschooling, at its core, is the practice of separating learning from performance. It’s the recognition that a child (or a mother, let’s be honest) can only absorb, process, and grow when they’re not being asked to prove something at the same time.
Besides that, I have found in my coaching for over a decade that families also need time to figure out how to live with each other at home all the time and have peace when they are used to shuffling out the door by 7:30am and not seeing each other again until around 4pm.
Charlotte Mason built her entire philosophy on a version of this – the idea that children are born persons, not vessels to be filled on a schedule, and that real learning happens best in an atmosphere, not a factory line.
A move qualifies. So does a new baby, a diagnosis, a family emergency, a cross-country transition, or – in my case – the discovery that our internet provider does not, in fact, service our new address, despite what three separate customer service representatives promised me. So annoying…
Any season where the ground shifts under a family is a season where deschooling isn’t a failure to keep up. It’s the appropriate response.
The Move That Taught Me I Needed to Deschool Too
I packed our homeschool room as one of the last things to go. I told myself I’d keep “just the essentials” out for the transition, the things that my daughter would be for sure using when we started up again.
The same month, we were also moving my oldest into a college dorm for the first time – in-state, not far, and still somehow one of the bigger adjustments our family has made. Two kids, two completely different transitions, one house full of boxes. Nobody in this family was operating on their normal rhythm. Did I mention that my husband started a new job, too?
Here’s what I didn’t expect: it wasn’t just the kids who needed permission to stop performing “real school.” I did, too.
I’ve spent more than fifteen years building a life around the idea that learning should feel like an unhurried walk through a good book, not a race against a curriculum map. And yet the first week in our new house, I caught myself feeling guilty for not opening a single workbook. As if the moving truck, the sixteen boxes labeled “MISC” that were packed in a hurry when we were having to be completely done for the cleaning service, and the fact that none of us could find the silverware for four days somehow didn’t count as a legitimate reason to pause.
That guilt has a source, and it isn’t Scripture. Despite what certain corners of Christian mom culture would have you believe, rest is not a moral failure. Nowhere in the Beatitudes does it say blessed are the ones who unpacked the school supplies first! Peace is where it’s at! I’m all about the peace and love of Jesus shining into every area of our lives.
What Deschooling Looks Like When Life Is in Boxes
Practically, deschooling during a disruption doesn’t mean nothing happens. It means the “something” changes shape.
For us, this didn’t mean abandoning school altogether. It meant narrowing it down to almost nothing. In the last month before the move, I picked two subjects – the two that actually mattered right now – and let everything else go quiet.
My daughter kept a single backpack packed with just those materials, something we could pull out for twenty minutes between loading boxes and set back down without ceremony. I tracked what got covered. Everything else waited its turn.
That’s not the same thing as doing nothing. It’s triage. And triage counts as deschooling, too – you don’t have to choose between the full curriculum and total collapse. There’s a whole middle ground where you decide what actually matters this month and let the rest wait.
This is also, not coincidentally, exactly the territory I’ve been writing about for a project I’m finishing this fall – a full deschooling guide for homeschool families walking through their own version of “everything is in boxes,” whether that’s literal or emotional. It started as a resource for families new to homeschooling. It’s turned into something bigger: permission for veteran homeschool moms, too, to stop treating rest like a debt they’ll have to repay later.
Choosing to Start Again Before the Boxes Were Gone
Here’s the part that surprised me: deschooling wasn’t the whole story. Knowing when to end it turned out to matter just as much.
I know that I cannot wait until the whole house is unpacked before we start again.
We have been in the new house for only a few days, but we have a date to start that is not not “whenever things calm down.” Because here’s the thing nobody tells you: your kid doesn’t need the house to be settled. They need one piece of their life to feel like it still belongs to them.
That meant planning the whole restart together, not handing her a schedule and walking away. I’ve always felt strongly that a kid should have a say in how their own time gets budgeted – it’s part of how they learn to do it themselves eventually.
So, we sat down and picked the date together, and talked through what the week would actually look like. She asked for something specific in return: Fridays as a catch-up day, no new material, just room to breathe if the week had gotten away from her. Done. Choosing the date together, and that one request, probably did more for her buy-in than anything I could have planned solo.
I also didn’t leave the restart to chance. I made her a planner in Canva months before we knew our exact move date, with matching binder covers and spines so the whole system looks like one connected thing instead of six mismatched folders fighting each other.
I had it all printed at Four Pillars Printing (who were AMAZING, by the way!!) and ordered every bit of it in advance – binders, dividers, the works – even knowing full well it would be weeks before we needed any of it. I did not want “we can’t start because we can’t find the folder” to be a real obstacle on top of an already chaotic month.
Then came the part that is entirely, unapologetically my personality: every subject got its own pastel color. Matching binder, matching binder bag, matching dividers, matching pencil pouch. One subject is a full monochrome pink situation – pink mechanical pencils, pink pencil bag, pink binder, the lot – so when she sits down to do that subject, she isn’t hunting through a junk drawer for a working pencil. She just opens the pink bag. Everything she needs for that subject lives together, always.
Call it excessive. I call it removing decision fatigue from a season that already had plenty of it.
Giving Yourself (and Your Kids) Permission to Pause – and to Start Again
If you’re in a season like mine – boxes, transition, the ground moving under your feet in whatever form that takes for your family – here’s my case for doing both of these things on purpose instead of white-knuckling through the whole thing:
First, your kids will not fall behind during the pause. Learning that happens through conversation, observation, and unstructured time is not lesser learning. It’s the kind Charlotte Mason spent her whole career defending.
Second, you are allowed to model rest. Somewhere along the way in America we started teaching kids to chase excellence while forgetting to show them what it looks like to simply stop. A homeschool that never pauses isn’t teaching sustainability. It’s teaching burnout with better branding.
Third, you don’t need the boxes gone to start again. You need a date, a plan your kid had a hand in, and – if you’re anything like me – a color-coded system that means nobody’s hunting for a pencil at nine in the morning. Starting school again isn’t about being fully moved in. It’s a bridge back to normal, built one subject at a time, while the boxes wait their turn instead of yours.
The guilt lifts faster than you’d think once you name what’s actually happening, on both ends of it. This isn’t slacking, and restarting isn’t rushing. It’s deschooling with a plan for coming back – and like every hobbit who’s ever left the Shire unexpectedly, it has an ending. The road goes on, even from here.
If you want the deeper version of this – a full framework for deschooling through any disruption, not just the beginning of a homeschool journey – I have two resources for you!
And a downloadable Deschooling Guide.
Until then, may your boxes be few, your pencils be sorted by color, and your rest be guilt-free.
