Organizing Events in the Home/Unschool Space (Part 2 - The Tween/Teen Years)
There's no one way to do it and the only constant is change
I’ve been mulling this post over for a couple of weeks now, paying close attention to how my kids and other home educated youth around us are spending their time together. It feels so much more complicated to help foster social relationships for tweens and teens. I’m not sure our experience is generalizable for a variety of reasons, but I’ll still try to share a bit about what I’ve noticed here in our community - it may be different where you are or for your kids.
Much of what I wrote about in Part 1 of this series can still apply for tweens and teens.
They even start creating activities of their own, which is fun to observe and support. My 11 year old and their friends (I’m using they/them pronouns for my kids for anonymity) have been very busy writing and practicing a play this year, which they do as an addendum to our science club meetups. They write in a shared google document and message about their plans throughout the week before our Monday gatherings (none of the kids in our circle have personal phones, but they do talk on google chat). Some of the tweens I know are active in online D&D groups with friends they know in person. They have put together book discussions and other youth-driven events around their interests. Other tweens and especially teens have online gaming friends and a lot of their socializing happens in that way. Still others find their friends through afternoon/evening extracurriculars like sports or robotics, which include a mix of homeschooled and schooled kids.
Home educating parents can and do organize groups, co-ops, and classes based on their older children’s interests. Tweens especially still seem open to these kinds of parent-led events which are usually mixed-age in the homeschooling world. We participated in an epic end-of-year book club celebration last week. It was like a giant book-themed birthday party with homeschooled kids ages 5-16 running around the park in costume, complete with games, trivia, and a buffet of themed snacks.
It was awesome, as events set up by this particular friend tend to be. There were 27 young people in attendance (space was limited to make planning easier, so the event was by signup). The breakdown by age: twelve kids ages 5-11, eleven tweens ages 11-13, and and four teens ages 14-17. That was a pretty darn good turnout for middle aged youth, no doubt influenced by the main organizers being parents of teens and tweens who have deep roots in the community.
It was also a pretty standard teen turnout in our area at a big mixed-age event – that is, sparse. My own teenager was still fast asleep at the 10am start time. But even if it had been in the afternoon, parent organized events like these are a tough sell for many older youth. They’re much more likely to be doing their own things, meeting up with individual friends, attending online and in person classes and events based on their specific interests.
I do wonder how much the social lives of our current teens were influenced by the Covid-19 Pandemic. These teens were tweens at the height of the pandemic, and their social connections and opportunities were severely disrupted. After experiencing isolation and the breakdown of existing, in-person homeschool infrastructure like co-ops, many young teens opted to attend traditional school, while others chose to continue homeschooling with a smaller pool of fellow homeschoolers to draw friends from. We’re all still dealing with the fall out of those experiences in a variety of ways.
A friend who homeschooled her kids through high school in our old neighborhood of Washington, D.C. tells me that the teen scene is much more vibrant there. I have to say I’m a bit jealous, although there are so many factors that go into each family’s homeschooling experience. There is a luck aspect around making friends at young ages who stay local and continue homeschooling into the teen years.
Here in Colorado, there are a variety of homeschool enrichment programs through the public schools. These are popular with many homeschoolers, for good reason. They are a free one-day-a-week opportunity for kids to try out a variety of classes in a schoolish environment, but one that offers a lot more choice than a standard conventional school and is tailored for homeschoolers. My tween currently attends a program once a week that is entirely enrichment-based, with classes like Potions and Slime, Technical Theatre, Robotics, Art, Math Games, Ukulele, and Chorus.
A lot of people here love their enrichment programs. This seems especially true in high school, when they become more “robust” in terms of keeping a low number of hours physically in the classroom but still helping teens meet high school requirements to get a public school diploma. Parents like outsourcing the more complicated high school requirements and getting help with teaching at the high school level. They can step back into a support role. Teens like having access to some structure and a set community, without necessarily having the restrictions of full-time, five-day-a-week high school. They’re a great option for many people. When my teen and I looked into the options, they looked too much like standard high school fare for their taste.
There is another big downside to having these set public school organized homeschool enrichment programs that mainly take the place of parent-led co-ops. In our area, there are not a lot of home educating parents focused on creating rich homeschooling high school experiences. Though there are some!
I asked a homeschooling friend of mine who has a very active, social, and academically-oriented teen, to describe how they navigated her first year of homeschooling high school last year:
“My 9th grader had times in the week she took classes and then times blocked out to do the work, but it varied a bit week to week as the workload for each class wasn't consistent weekly. She did Mr. D. Honors Geometry this year, a short story class first semester and a literature and composition class second semester, Honors Biology in a class a friend and I designed and executed, PE both semesters (yoga for the win for her), one semester of a fine art elective comparing Six the musical with the lives of Henry VIII and his six wives, a public speaking class done as dual enrollment with ASU, a practical arts elective where she focused on culinary skills (we all benefitted from that one!) and my husband took the lead on that (and for instance, time wise, sometimes she'd be planning/shopping/cooking most of the day on Sunday so the bulk of her hours came from large blocks on the weekends), and a one semester health class that I designed. It was a great year for us and my kid and I pretty much feel like we're rocking this homeschooling high school thing. But it can be done SO many different ways!
[For social events] we have been meeting up with others to do things like axe throwing, going to the trampoline park, roller skating/roller blading. We host puzzle club once a month, and go to a weekly game day. She’s in an Outdoor Challenge program - and they have Wednesday base camps and Saturday challenges once a month. She’s in Girl Scouts and she’s had weekly D&D this year. She’s on the Teen Advisory Board for the library and volunteered at the Library as a reading buddy. Pretty packed, actually.”
This is awesome. And I’m tired just reading about their year! I wanted to share their experience because my friend is still heavily involved in creating and leading events for her high schooler, while my teen hasn’t wanted my participation in that way in some time. To be completely honest, it took me a while to come to terms with this reality, and I had to go through a grieving process over not being needed in that way. But that is also the whole point of supporting youth in being self-directed! They get to make choices and decide what they want their lives to look like. I suspect my middle child’s teen years will look very different and I’m doing my best to support each of my kids where they are at.
Our family also likes a lot of time at home to just be and that’s the beauty of home education - it’s all personalized. My self-directed tween and teen spend a lot of time pursuing their own interests at home. Drawing, reading, playing board and video games, solving rubix cubes, making things. We have friends over and sometimes go on field trips. One of them is involved in many community classes and events, while the other does a few classes online (of the high-interest, low-output variety) and sporadic things in person.
All that to say, it seems teen homeschooling opportunities and inclinations vary widely. Some teens go through a prolonged “cocooning” stage where they focus less on external activities and social interactions to instead pursue their own interests and have a safe place for self-discovery. On the flip side, others dive headfirst into their local communities looking for new challenges. As home and unschooling parents, our role evolves based on our children's needs and desires. Supporting them means respecting their autonomy and allowing them to shape their own educational paths.
So, what’s your experience?
What does home/unschooling look like for your tweens and teens?
Are these years turning out differently than you expected?
What opportunities do you see in your area for teens?
Do you have cocooning kids or social butterflies?
If you aren’t quite there yet, are you nervous or excited about the prospect of parenting teens?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments! Engaging here with friends new and old is what keeps me coming back to Substack. :)
- Marni
All of the free opportunities seem to revolve around park playdates with mixed ages in my area, and my kids don’t like the chaos even if there are teens there.
I’ve noticed that the people who started co-ops in the past few years have hired parents to offer certain activities and now charge (quite a bit) for the one-day programs. Several of these businesses have popped up.
My kids aren’t interested in anything that looks like traditional school. They have a full course load of hand-picked, online classes. They just want to make casual friends.
Our local museum offers something for younger kids a few times a month, and the libraries try to offer things for teens, but they are all led/directed by staff.
I am inspired to reach out to the museum program coordinator to offer a space weekly for older kids to meet while the parents do something separately. Then I’ll have help with advertising it, and I won’t have so much responsibility over the whole thing.
I’m finding what we’re missing is a space where parents aren’t allowed to hover. That’s the main problem I see. My kids have zero space to go where a parent or other adult isn’t hovering.
For example, I drop my kids off at the library once a month for DnD. It’s a new program this library has started, and the DM is in her 20’s. It could be fun! However, there’s a dad who says he has to be there in the room for his daughter, but he interrupts the DM and instructs my kids (who have been playing for years and don’t need the advice). It’s frustrating for my kids. They still like going, but it could be better.
You’ve got me thinking about how I can help create something.