What Is Deschooling, and Why You Should Do It Before You Start

You've just taken your child out of school, or you're about to. You're ready to start. You've maybe already ordered some curriculum books, bookmarked a few programmes, drafted a loose timetable in your head.

I'm going to ask you to wait.

Not because you're not ready. Not because home education is complicated. But because you and your child both need to decompress before you can figure out what your home education actually looks like. Skipping that decompression is the number one mistake I see new home educators make, and it costs them months of frustration that they didn't need to have.

That decompression period has a name: deschooling.

What deschooling actually is

Deschooling is the period of adjustment after leaving school, where a child (and their parent) gradually lets go of school's way of doing things. The assumptions, the pace, the idea of what learning looks like and when it counts.

The term comes from educator and philosopher Ivan Illich, who wrote about it in the 1970s, but the concept has been used in home education communities for decades. A rough rule of thumb that gets passed around: allow one month of deschooling for every year the child was in school. A child who did four years of school? Expect four months before they're really ready to settle into home learning in a natural way.

That might sound like a lot. It isn't wasted time.

What's actually happening during deschooling

When a child leaves school, they carry a lot of invisible baggage with them. Associations between learning and anxiety. A belief that they're "bad at" something because a teacher moved on before they were ready. A habit of waiting to be told what to do next. A reflex to ask permission before acting on curiosity.

These don't disappear because they're now at home with you. They need time and experience to dissolve.

During deschooling, your child might seem to do very little. They might want to play, watch television, spend time outside, revisit things they loved when they were younger. This often alarms parents who feel like precious learning time is slipping away.

It isn't. This is exactly what needs to happen. The child is recovering their sense of themselves outside of an institutional context. They're starting to rediscover what they're actually interested in, separate from what they were told to be interested in. That rediscovery is enormously valuable information for you as their educator.

It's not just the child who needs to deschool

This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough.

You went to school. You spent years being assessed, measured, compared, graded. You absorbed a very particular model of what learning looks like. Even if you consciously reject it, it lives in you. It's why you feel guilty on a slow day. It's why you find yourself watching the clock. It's why you feel vaguely anxious when your child seems to be "just playing."

Deschooling is your decompression period too. It's the time to observe your child without rushing to structure what you see. To notice what they return to when nothing is required of them. To let yourself be surprised by what they choose.

This observation period is not passive. It's some of the most important research you'll do as a home educator, because it tells you who your child actually is, separate from the version of them that school produced.

What to actually do during deschooling

The short answer: not much. That's the point.

Let your child have unstructured time. Say yes to things they want to do. Go places mid-week when they'd normally be in school, the library, the beach, the museum. Let them stay up a bit later and see what happens to their natural rhythm. Read aloud together with no agenda. Cook together. Walk together.

Notice what they're drawn to. Are they building? Drawing? Asking questions about a specific topic? Organizing things? Making up elaborate stories? Write it down if it helps. This is curriculum research.

For you: read about different approaches to home education. Not to choose one immediately, but to expand your sense of what's possible. Charlotte Mason, unschooling, Montessori, project-based learning, classical education. You don't need to pick a philosophy. Most New Zealand home educators end up eclectic, drawing from several approaches depending on the child and the subject. But seeing the range helps you stop defaulting to "school, but at home."

Why rushing deschooling backfires

Parents who skip deschooling and go straight into a structured programme often hit a wall at around the six-to-eight-week mark. The child is resistant. The parent is exhausted from trying to hold a school-like structure together. There's tension around "learning time." The whole thing feels harder than expected.

This is almost always the result of too much, too soon. The child wasn't ready. The parent didn't yet know their child's actual rhythms and learning style. They were running a programme designed for someone else's child, because they hadn't taken the time to figure out what their own child needed.

Deschooling is what makes the rest easier. It's the foundation. Don't skip it.

When is deschooling over?

There's no official end point. But you'll usually notice a shift. Your child starts asking questions about things, wanting to go deeper into a topic. They pick up a book because they want to, not because you've asked. They seem settled in the rhythm of being home. The low-level anxiety or resistance that was present in the early weeks has faded.

That's your cue. Start gently. See what sticks. Adjust from there.

Most families find their home education approach through iteration, not planning. The deschooling period is what makes the iteration possible, because by the end of it you actually know your child well enough to iterate intelligently.

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Frequently asked questions

Q: Does deschooling apply if my child is very young, like five or six? A: Younger children tend to deschool faster because they haven't been in school as long and haven't had as many years to internalise its patterns. For a five-year-old who did a year of school, a few weeks of relaxed time is usually enough. What matters more at that age is establishing a warm, curious, low-pressure home environment, which is something deschooling naturally supports.

Q: My child wants to do schoolwork during deschooling. Should I let them? A: If it's genuinely child-led, yes. Some children feel more secure with familiar structure and will ask for it. Follow their lead. The goal of deschooling isn't to prevent all learning, it's to prevent you from imposing a structure before you know whether it fits. If your child is asking for it, it fits.

Q: How do I explain deschooling to skeptical family members who think we're just doing nothing? A: You can call it an observation period, or an assessment phase. You're spending time figuring out how your child learns best before committing to a programme. That's accurate, and it tends to land better with people who want to see intentionality. You don't owe anyone a detailed explanation, but framing it as research rather than rest can help.

Q: Do I need to have my exemption application approved before deschooling begins? A: Your exemption application needs to be approved before your child is legally enrolled as a home educated student, so ideally you apply before or around the time they leave school. The deschooling period can overlap with the application process. What you observe during deschooling can actually strengthen your application, because it gives you real, specific things to say about your child's learning style and interests.

And when you're ready to tackle the exemption application, Pulled makes that part easier. See how it works →