How do you feel when you see the first Back to School sales start? What memories does it conjure?

For child me, it was new (hand-me-down or thrifted) clothes, a new backpack, and the smell of paper.

For parent me, it was hoping we could afford the ever growing list of school supplies that schools don't buy anymore so now parents must purchase, finding shoes my barefoot kids could tolerate, and the smell of paper.

For unscchooler me.... well, now I must make my own lists of the supplies we can afford to spend on now to get the most value for our money, hunting backpacks that are rugged enough for both our outdoor adventures and the stacks of library books we always have, the aforementioned tolerable shoes (because even homeschoolers need to go into libraries, stores, museums, and zoos), and-you guessed it- the smell of paper. 

I'm a reader, and a writer, and an office supplies nerd, hence the love of the smell of paper - books, notebooks, crafting and construction paper.... gloriously comfortable. I've always lived well below the poverty line, so budgeting was always task one. I've been barefoot (on purpose) most of my life, hence the need for tolerable shoes.

What is it for you?

And what are you going to do now that you have exited the mainstream school systems and therefore no longer have someone else -a system- dictating your purchases and schedule? How will you answer questions from well-meaning family, friends, neighbors, doctors, strangers? What will you do the week before school starts, or the first week all the other kids are back in school?

How do you stop yourself, and your kids, and your budget from drowning in the hype, get what you actually need, and celebrate the new season?

Here are some ideas.

What is the Back to School hype all about?

Hype is extravagant, intensive, often exaggerated publicity or promotion. Basically, strong-arm advertising or marketing. In this case, backed by a system we are required by law to participate in, often actually requiring certain purchases, and highly recommending others, not to mention the mental health armor needs of kids in forced and competitive social situations that create false hierarchies, such as new or expensive or trendy clothes, shoes, make-up, etc.

This is a hugely emotional time for kids in compulsory school. Boredom, social anxiety, fear... Back to school hype isn't just about corporatist capitalism and making money, it's also about distracting kids (and parents!) from their feelings about returning to school.

Some parents and children are relieved, even pleased, to be going back, and many more believe they are. Many parents are hiding their feelings of guilt, and their children hiding their feelings of fear, sadness, or boredom, behind this manufactured excitement of consumerism. In case you haven't heard me rant about this yet, hiding our feelings behind consumerism is very common here in the West. Destroying our self esteem in competitive compulsory schools full of bribed or coerced obedience and forced social situations, and breaking our spirits for industrial mindlessness has a fabulous for business side effect if you teach people to self medicate their depression with consumerism... I digress. Summed up, we hide our true feelings just to get through the endless hard parts like a family planning to get ice cream after a visit to the dentist. 

Everyone wants, or has been led to believe they want, new clothes and supplies. Everyone is asking what grade the kids are going into, who their teachers are going to be, if they are excited to go back to school... literally everyone. (I LOVE explaining to old school pediatricians that our kids don't have a grade level, the world is their teacher, and they are never going back to school.) No one ever asks what a kid likes to do, it's always, "What's your favorite subject?" No one ever asks a child who they are or what they believe, it's always, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Especially during back to school season, it seems like school and becoming an adult sometime in the far future are the only things that matter about a child. Gross. No wonder Peter Pen went to Neverland.

How can we combat the back to school hype?

Whether or not your family chooses to use schools, the hype is, at best, a lie. A mask for feelings we don't believe we are allowed to feel. At worst, this hype leads us back around the exploitative circle of production and consumption on a scale neither humans nor the planet can sustain. 

The best first step is simply to realize that the excitement you may feel is not real and your real feelings are completely valid, and then talk to your children about it in ways they can understand. It might be many discussions depending on the age and temperament of each child, including how much advertising exposure they receive, how much of a lifestyle change it is for the parent, and how quickly the parents embodies this new knowledge. 

Because that is the next step, embodying and modeling for the children what it looks and feels like to live without a constant stream of new distractions someone else decided you should buy, how to feel your true feelings, and what to do with these feelings. 

That might look like keeping last year's clothes because they still fit and are your preferred colors instead of rushing out to buy whatever styles and colors are available this year. That might look like having your children help insect their backpacks for damage and fit and deciding together whether they need replacing. That might look like only buying what what you know you will use up in a year so you aren't storing things you won't need, even though absolutely everything is on sale.

It definitely looks like not getting caught up in the hype, intentionally until that is your default response, and also definitely not adding any hype you are feeling on top of the hype your children are already exposed to. And of course, because we are humans that make mistakes, it definitely looks like apologizing when we get it wrong. 

In fact, your ability to apologize when you make mistakes with your children and while you learn and establish new habits and change your lifestyle, as well as having big deep discussions about the process of growth and change and mistakes and backsliding that must accompany such mistakes and apologies, is arguably the most important modeling and skill you can offer your children.

Homeschoolers tend to be in one of two camps here. We either don't buy what we need in rebellion against corporatism, or we are extra susceptible to the hype out of fear that our children are weird, or behind, or are missing the school experience. If they are odd, that's a good thing; there's no such thing as behind; and the school experience is harmful, so deschool all those beliefs and fears as soon as you can.

And that brings us neatly to the next section:

How do we know what is essential and how much is enough on our homeschooling journey?

If you use schools, its easy, you just do what you are told, buy the supplies on the list they give you, and all the kids will be wearing the clothes available on the racks, so just buy them. Easy peasy, as long as you have the financial privilege to do it. We never were, in school or out, and I am glad of that every single day. Which is probably why I have such crazy shadows around money and scarcity. Again, I digress.

If you are homeschooling or unschooling, there's literally no end to the possibilities.

Lots of boxed curricula meant for recreating school at home come with what they need, and many also have a list of additional supplies and books you either need or may want.

Unschoolers have nearly no guidance, beyond knowing themselves. 

As previously mentioned, I love office and school supplies, and as an unschooler I have an excellent excuse to buy, collect, gather, ad otherwise obtain all of the pencils, pens, and paper I could want. I also had the delightful luck when we began homeschooling to inherit most of the furniture and supplies from a closing preschool and haven't needed to buy a crayon, marker, or colored paper in years. This past year though, we went through until numbers of notebooks. We actually ran out. We journal, plan, draw, and design endlessly at our house. So I know this year we need to get lots of notebooks- lined, graph, dot grid, blank... alllllllllllll the paper. 

We also enjoy playing a lot of games- board games, TTRPGs, cards games, game shows, video games- so we will probably add to that collection this year, maybe Ecosystems or Ecologies, maybe Catan, Wildcraft, I'd like to learn to play Go, we will probably get a new Game of Life too, as my son collects the different versions. We love Villainous, and are trying to play the Star Wars version; we love Jeopardy; the kids play Dungeons and Dragons and MineCraft....

How can you know what you need, or how much, especially if you are new to this life or have any element of interest based learning in your homeschool that cannot be predicted ahead of time?

Knowing what is essential in your homeschool really comes down to knowing every member of your family REALLY well. Here are some questions to get you started: 

• What is each member interested in learning?
• What homeschool philosophy and style suits your whole family best right now?
• What, if anything, will you require your kids learn or be exposed to?
• What are everyone's favored learning styles?
• Do you have a teaching style?
• What field trips do you all want to go on?
• What is your lifestyle like, and how will that impact your educational ideas? Do you travel a lot, or stay home? Mostly introverts of extroverts? Early birds or night owls? Outdoors or inside? Snow or sand?
• Do you have religious or spiritual beliefs that you want to include?
• Are your kids crafty, engineering oriented, detailed, archetypal? Do they enjoy math? Literature? Sports?
• What role do screens play in your life? Books? Games? 
• What is your educational budget?

I could ask more, but this is a great starter list. In my upcoming course, there will be a whole section on knowing yourselves. For now, if you need someone to process with, you can book a chat with me here.

For beginners, for families that are just jumping into homeschooling and have done minimal deschooling work, I really just recommend the basics. And spending the entire first year deschooling. If you don't know what that is or why you should do it, you can read my other post here or follow the link just above to chat directly with me.

To be honest, I don't really believe in ready, but you can be prepared. You simply cannot know who you all are until you learn who you all are, and until you've both done your deschooling and had at least a year of experience, you won't really have any idea what or how much you need. I suggest you err on the side of less is more, and never let fear motivate your gathering or purchasing, you'll only end up storing stuff you may never use, or outright regretting purchases. 

I suggest:

• a library card, first and foremost, no matter the ages of your children,
• a well-stocked kitchen,
• educational games (most of them are!),
• pencils and paper (good job if you at least know whether you need drawing, writing, or construction),
• arts and crafts supplies, 
• measuring tools,
• a zoo/aquarium/museum pass if possible,
• and of course any supplies relevant to any current known interests of you and your children.

If you plan to use any kind of curriculum, make sure you DO catch that on sale, or even used if possible, that stuff gets expensive FAST, especially when you consider you may or may not actually like and use any or all of it, and especially-specially if you add in all the stress you all will acquire trying to use or finish all of it on the schedule it recommends. Just thinking about it makes me super glad we unschool. Sorry not sorry. If you feel the same, join the unschooling revolution, we have freedom!

Back to school traditions

At its core, back to school hype, excitement, and sales are simply capitalist traditions, like Black Friday, or the sales that have become attached to Labor Day and Memorial Day, even Independence Day.

If your family was big into back to school traditions, I highly recommend that you replace those festivities with new traditions, because as religious empires have known since the dawn of history, the best way to convert new subjects is to replace their traditions with those of the empire. It is much easier to transfer your excitement to something else than to go without it completely, as any dieter avoiding specific foods can tell you. 

In my family, we were never big spenders, so back to school season was always fraught with money scarcity fears and simple pragmatism. For us, letting go of a long list of supplies we wouldn't ever choose to buy or use for ourselves was a huge sigh of relief. Now we can spend our money and our time on things we actually want, like hiking packs and Lego sets and costume fabric and whole cases of notebooks. 

We don't really celebrate NOT having a first day of school, we prefer to just sleep in as usual and go about our usual lives, because for us, unschooling isn't about being against schools, although in their current state, we definitely are. For us, unschooling is about living authentic lives in respectful relationships with each other and nature, more as if school didn't exist- other than, of course, avoiding the roads the buses are driving on and roads that go by big schools during arrival and dismissal times, and appreciating smaller crowds at our favorite places during school hours, and making plans around our schooled friends' schedules...

What kind of not back to school traditions are right for your homeschooling family?

Maybe its just the usual fall celebrations. Maybe you'd prefer to celebrate definitely not going back to school.

If you have certain things that are part of all your family traditions and celebrations, make sure to include those. If you always bake holiday cookies or birthday cakes, maybe you could bake something special. If you tend to travel for holidays, maybe you could plan a hike, or a picnic, or a weekend trip. If your family is the entertaining type, maybe you host a homeschool gathering with food, music, and games. If you are religious or spiritual or just particularly introspective, maybe you have a ritual or spend time journaling your gratitude, desires, and fears for the year ahead. If you've been making your kids wait for some much anticipated new learning opportunities or resources, maybe you wrap it all up and open them together, like Christmas for education.

Whatever you choose to do, make sure it makes you feel how you authentically want to feel about this time of year and a new season of learning, or a new season of avoiding school. Want to be chill? Do that. Want to feel excited? Find something that excites you. Want to feel connected? Adventurous? Free? Do things that leave you all feeling how you want to feel, and appreciate and celebrate making the choice to live in a way that allows you the freedom to do it your way, for the good of your family.

If you need to talk to someone to process your thoughts or brainstorm with, you can book a day of conversation with me here.

If you haven't quite been able to map out the direction of your new parenting and educational journey, I will soon be offering a course that will help you observe and plan, and you can follow me on social media to catch the announcements. Or you can chat me up at the link above if you need the work now.

Love Always.