The Temptation to Boast
Why homeschool families should resist the urge to advertise outcomes, and what to do instead
We have a confession to make. We have, at various points, been insufferable about homeschooling.
Not in the way you might think. We did not corner anyone at a dinner party to explain Charlotte Mason’s philosophy. We did not hand out unsolicited reading lists. Our particular vice was subtler and, we suspect, more common: We let our children’s accomplishments speak a little too loudly on our behalf. A well-timed mention of what one of our children was reading. A casual reference to a particular success one of our kids had that week.
None of it was untrue. But all of it was doing something we had not fully reckoned with: It was making the case for homeschooling in the worst possible way.
What Happens When We Brag
Here is a reliable law of human psychology: When people feel judged, they stop listening.
The research on this is extensive. Psychologists have documented what they call identity-protective cognition: The tendency for people to reject information that threatens a belief closely tied to their sense of self.1 For most parents, how they educate their children is not a casual preference like choosing a restaurant. It is bound up with their identity, their sacrifices, and their love. When a homeschool family shares an impressive outcome, even cheerfully, even without explicit comparison, the implicit message received by many public and private school families is: You could have done better by your kids, and you did not.
That is almost never the message intended. But persuasion is not governed by intentions. It is governed by what the listener hears.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written at length about how moral reasoning works: We make intuitive judgments first and then construct rational justifications afterward.2 When a conventional-school parent encounters a homeschool family’s highlight reel, the intuitive judgment is often defensive, they think they are better than us, and everything that follows is shaped by that initial reaction. The homeschooler’s data, thoughtful curriculum choices, and genuine warmth all get filtered through a defensive frame.
This means that every humble-brag about outcomes is not just ineffective persuasion. It is counter-persuasion. It makes the unconvinced less likely to consider homeschooling, not more.
Children Are Born Persons
If we want a better foundation for talking about education, we could do worse than Charlotte Mason’s first principle: “Children are born persons.”3
This deceptively simple idea has radical implications. If children are born persons, not blank slates to be written upon, not lumps of clay to be molded, then we parents are not the authors of our children’s stories. We are, at best, editors. And not always very good ones.
Mason understood something modern parenting culture has largely forgotten: Children arrive with their own temperaments, capacities, and mysterious inner lives. A child who reads voraciously at seven may have been born with a disposition toward language that would have flourished in many environments. A child who struggles with math may be contending with something no curriculum can simply override. We water and tend the garden. We do not make the seeds.
This is not an argument against effort or intentionality. It is an argument against pride. When we present our children’s achievements as evidence that our method works, we are quietly taking credit for things that may have little to do with us. We are also implying that other parents whose children have not achieved the same outcomes must be doing something wrong.
The truth is more humbling, and more freeing, than that.
The Limits of Parental Control
Behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin has spent decades studying what shapes human development, and his conclusions are bracing for any parent inclined to overestimate influence. In Blueprint, he summarizes the research this way: Genetic differences account for a substantial share of variation in psychological traits, shared environment (home, parenting style, school choice) appears smaller than many parents assume, and non-shared environment (the unique experiences that differ even between siblings) accounts for much of the remainder.4
This does not mean parenting does not matter. It means parenting matters in ways that are harder to measure and slower to reveal than we would like. The family that reads aloud every evening, eats dinner together, and maintains warmth and structure is doing something deeply important. But the fruit of that labor may not show up on a standardized test at age twelve. It may show up in how their child handles a crisis at age thirty-five.
Judith Rich Harris made a related and widely debated argument in The Nurture Assumption: That peer groups and social environments outside the home exert enormous influence on children’s development.5 Harris was not saying parents are irrelevant. She was saying that the parental-determinism model, the idea that if we get the inputs right we will get the outputs we want, is not an accurate model of real life.
For homeschool families, this should give us pause. If we are honest, we know children who were homeschooled beautifully and still struggled deeply. We know children who survived chaotic schools and turned out wonderfully. We know siblings raised in the same home who diverged dramatically. The variables are too many, and the interactions too complex, for any family to claim confidently that a single educational method produced a guaranteed result.
Peers, Context, and the Ecology of Growing Up
This brings us to something homeschool families do not always want to discuss: Social context.
One of the strengths of homeschooling is the ability to curate a child’s social environment during formative years. But curate is not control. The influence of peers does not disappear because we have chosen them more carefully. Children are social creatures. They learn from other children at least as much as they learn from us. They absorb values from friendships, churches, teams, neighborhoods, and media.
This is not a defect in the system. It is part of human development. Children need to learn how to navigate social complexity, hold convictions in the presence of disagreement, and love people unlike themselves. Homeschooling can provide a beautiful context for this, but only if we resist the temptation to act as though we have mastered socialization itself.
When we boast about our children’s confidence, maturity, or poise, we are often claiming credit for traits shaped by forces larger than our lesson plans.
The True Test
Here is what we have come to believe: The true test of an upbringing is not a child’s performance at sixteen. It is that child’s character at forty.
Do they keep their word?
Do they love people who can do nothing for them?
Do they handle failure without collapse?
Do they pursue meaningful work when it is costly?
Are they honest, kind, and faithful?
These are the things that matter, and they are precisely the things that do not fit neatly into social media posts or college application metrics. They unfold slowly, over decades, in the ordinary crucible of adult life. No homeschool newsletter will run a feature on “alumnus keeps his temper during a stressful week” or “alumna forgives a friend who wounded her.” But these are the victories that matter most.
And here is the uncomfortable corollary: We often will not know for a long time whether we have succeeded. That uncertainty is not a bug. It is the proper posture of a parent: Hopeful, prayerful, diligent, humble, and engaged, but not triumphant.
What We Can Do Instead
If we should not boast, what should we do?
We can tell the truth about our struggles. Nothing disarms defensiveness faster than honesty. When we share that homeschooling is hard, that we have bad days, that we question ourselves, we become approachable rather than intimidating.
We can ask questions instead of making claims. “What do you love about your child’s school?” is often a better beginning than any statistic about homeschool achievement. Genuine curiosity communicates respect, and respect is the precondition for influence.
We can focus on principles rather than outcomes. Instead of saying, “our children scored in the ninety-fifth percentile,” we can say, “we have found that more unstructured time helps our children grow in independence.” One is a boast. The other is an observation that many families can consider.
We can give credit where it belongs: To God, to our children themselves, and to the communities that sustain us. We did not do this alone. We are not self-made. Our children are not our products.
And we can play the long game. The most persuasive case for homeschooling will not be made by our slogans. It will be made by grown men and women who live quiet, faithful, competent, generous lives.
A Better Witness
We do not need to soften our convictions to embrace humility. We can still believe that homeschooling is a good and even beautiful path for many families. We can still invite others to consider it. We can still speak plainly about what has helped us.
But we should do so as fellow pilgrims, not as victors.
If children are born persons, then they are never our trophies. They are our neighbors, our sons, our daughters, and ultimately, God’s creatures entrusted to our care for a little while.
That truth should steady us. It should make us gentler in speech, slower to claim credit, and quicker to encourage parents walking different paths.
The world does not need one more tribe congratulating itself.
It needs families willing to form adults of virtue, quietly, patiently, and without applause.
Dan M. Kahan, “Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection,” Judgment and Decision Making 8, no. 4 (2013): 407–424. https://journal.sjdm.org/13/13313/jdm13313.pdf
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage, 2012).
Charlotte Mason, Home Education (1886), Principle 1: “Children are born persons.” https://www.amblesideonline.org/CM/vol1complete.html
Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998; rev. ed. 2009).