by Renée Gotcher

Whether you are new to homeschooling teens, a few years into your journey with high school on the horizon, or still considering whether to homeschool through the high school years, you are probably struggling with concerns like:

• What if I’m not qualified to equip my teen for academic success?
• If we continue homeschooling, will my teen gain enough knowledge and skills to succeed after high school?
• What if I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing a lot of the time?   

Questions like these can be summed up with one word: fear. As parents, we strive to do everything right for our children, so we fear making mistakes. However, as homeschooling parents, bucking our society’s traditional education model, our fears are magnified by outside scrutiny and conventional definitions of success. We can easily become overwhelmed and discouraged as our children reach high school and our self-doubt escalates.

As a mother of three homeschooled high school graduates, I am well acquainted with these fears. And it’s natural to feel this way — we want the best for our children! But what if I told you that the secret to homeschooling success isn’t ensuring your teen masters every school subject or aces college entrance exams? What if the key ingredient to preparing your teen to thrive in adulthood is something you’re already doing?

What’s Your Definition of Success?

I still remember the first local homeschool group meeting I attended when we started homeschooling in 2010. Excited to see so many other homeschoolers in our town, I gravitated toward one mother who seemed to be pretty experienced, given the ages of her children. When I had the chance to talk to her one-on-one, I peppered her with questions about the curriculum and tools she used during their high school years and what they did after graduation. 

I was relieved to hear that her eldest sons had gone straight to college and performed well there — one was heading to graduate school, and the other was considering law school. Wow, impressive! A mother of six, she had been homeschooling for years and obviously doing a good job of it, I surmised. 

Little did she know she was checking off all the boxes on my mental list of accomplishments I equated with homeschooling success. Her story was my proof that homeschooled graduates can be equally, if not more, prepared to flourish in higher education. I made plans to stay in touch with her; she was mentor material!

However, I also met a handful of veteran homeschooling moms with different examples of homeschooling success. Their experiences helped me realize that academic achievement was just one part of the equation. If my goal wasn’t to replicate traditional school at home when we began homeschooling, why would I define our success in terms of expected academic outcomes alone? 

Redefining Your Measures of Success

As I shared in a recent blog post about homeschooling with the end in mind, the beauty of homeschooling is that you can set goals outside the traditional box of academic success. You can influence your teen’s preparation for adulthood in ways that will help them thrive, not just achieve success, after high school. 

What’s the difference between thriving and achieving success? And why is it essential to differentiate those goals? Traditional definitions of success include external achievements such as wealth, status, recognition, and other measurable accomplishments. However, as Christians, our lives should be marked by the pursuit of internal transformation — a transformation that affects all aspects of our lives.

Because you are homeschooling, you are already having an impact on your teen’s worldview — you are showing them another way to view education that’s based on God’s Word and Truth. This lays a strong foundation for adult decision-making, where guidance and direction should start with scripture, not popular opinion.

God’s Word also provides you, as the parent, with direction for redefining success and setting goals according to His Truth. A good place to start is Galatians 5:22-23, where the fruits of the Spirit are described. Helping your teen develop the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) will pave the way for lifelong fruitfulness.

Equipping Your Teen to Thrive

Here are some practical examples of ways you are equipping your teen to thrive as an adult:

• Taking educational responsibility: In the traditional model of classroom education, the teacher is responsible for imparting knowledge to the student, and the student exhibits that knowledge has been gained by taking tests and completing assignments. However, you are demonstrating for your teen daily what it looks like to take responsibility for the learning process. You are modeling how to research, evaluate, and interpret information when you choose a curriculum, write lesson plans, and create assignments. You are also modeling that it’s okay if you don’t have all the answers — learning is a life-long journey. When you empower your high schooler to take responsibility for learning independently, they will be equipped to do so in future roles and careers.
• Building healthy relationships: When you homeschool, you make time and space for your teen to build relationships outside of a classroom setting. I think we can all agree that spending the entire day with peers alone doesn’t teach healthy relationship-building skills. Starting with siblings, your teen is learning how to relate positively to children of different ages and stages. Add to that co-op experiences, hands-on clubs such as 4-H, and even apprenticeships, and your teen is regularly interacting with a variety of people, and learning to navigate those relationships with wisdom from scripture.
• Serving others: One of the best ways to equip your teen to thrive in adulthood is to provide opportunities for them to serve and view life outside the narrow scope of education for personal gain. This also starts at home: giving your teen responsibilities that they wouldn’t have time for if they were in classrooms all day. If your teen has younger siblings, you can involve them in teaching activities that develop leadership while allowing them to serve and be examples of service. Outside of home, you can also make time to get involved in serving at your church, your homeschool community, and your local community. Learning to serve others equips them to have a servant’s heart wherever the Lord leads them as adults.
• Living with purpose: When you redefine success post-graduation in terms of thriving vs. achieving, you are reinforcing the most important lesson your teen needs: To live for God’s good purposes, not a worldly agenda. You are already modeling this lesson by following God’s calling to homeschool. Your children see obedience in action throughout the day, every day, as they see you navigate the challenges of homeschooling, parenting, relationship-building, problem-solving, and trusting God with the results. Not to say that we do this perfectly — we can’t! Surrendering to God’s purposes begins with us, and we pray that the Lord will help us equip our children to do the same. 

Writing Their Story for His Glory

What happened after graduation for my three homeschooled daughters? Although they did attend college (the eldest is now in graduate school), their paths were clearly directed by the Lord’s gifting and calling in their lives. I could not have expected, or planned for, the outcomes that God designed for them — praise the Lord, I didn’t have to! And I am grateful that I didn’t cling to that initial checklist for homeschooling success. 

When we allow God to lead us in how to lead our children, we’re no longer driven by fear of the future. We have the privilege of playing an integral role in the story that He is writing, and we can trust Him with the results. 

So breathe a sigh of relief, friend! You are already doing what God is calling you to do, and you can trust that He will lead you to equip your teen to thrive for His glory.

Your Homeschooling Friend,

Renée Gotcher

Dive Deeper into This Topic

• Listen to the podcast “Your teen can be extraordinary at ordinary things!“ with Jonathan Brush on the Colorado Homeschool Podcast.
• Read the article “Homeschooling With the End in Mind” on the CHEC Blog.
• Attend the Life Launch Track at the Rocky Mountain Homeschool Conference in June.
• Volunteer with your teen: You’ll find a variety of opportunities to volunteer together at the Rocky Mountain Homeschool Conference in June.

P.S. Are you concerned that you might not be doing enough to prepare your teen for success after high school? What questions do you have about practical ways to equip your teen to thrive? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

About the Author: Renée Gotcher

Renée Gotcher is a freelance writer, editor, and recently “retired” homeschooling mother of three daughters (her youngest started attending Bob Jones University last fall). Renée and her husband of 30 years, Kenny, are next-generation homeschoolers who were homeschooled for part of their schooling and started homeschooling when they moved to Castle Rock in 2010. Soon after, she launched a homeschooling blog, NextGenHomeschool.com, and actively supported the local homeschool community through part-time teaching, administrative roles, and volunteer leadership positions at homeschool support programs. As a freelancer, she contributed to “Life Changing Stories: A Devotional Collection Revealing God’s Faithfulness and Transforming Power” and currently writes monthly devotionals for the Daybreak Devotions series on Crossmap.com and her personal blog, The Pace of Grace.