The One Thing I Actually Want for My Kids (It's Not Good Grades)
- Kelsea Koenreich
- Jul 23
- 7 min read
I got to this decision the long way.
Two years of guilt every time I dropped my kids at school. The feeling, every single morning, that I was handing them off to something that wasn't quite right for them or for us, and then swallowing it because I didn't know what else to do. I had this picture in my head of what homeschooling required, and it looked overwhelming, and I kept telling myself I didn't have time.
I talked to Megan Garfield a few weeks ago. She has fifteen years in education, three homeschooled kids, and two programs built around helping families do this well. And what came out of our conversation was less about logistics and more about the question I didn't know I was carrying until she named it.
The Fear Under the Decision
When Megan said the thing holding most families back from homeschooling is fear of failing, I felt it in my chest before I registered it in my brain.
Because I hadn't named that. I had named all the practical objections, the schedule, the curriculum, the how, but I hadn't named the actual thing underneath them, which is that it is your child's education, and if you get it wrong, you have gotten something irreversible wrong.
And as entrepreneurs, we know what it is to take a risk. We have done it. But this feels different because the stakes aren't yours. They belong to someone who didn't choose them.
What you would be giving your child is more than they would be getting anywhere else. A school system built for thirty kids at varied levels, managed by teachers doing everything they can within constraints that are not their fault, cannot give your child what a parent who knows them and can design around them specifically can give. That is not a criticism of teachers. It is just the math of the situation.
And the perfection you're afraid of not achieving? School is not achieving it either. It is giving your child the average of what is available to a room full of different people. Your version, even imperfect, is going to be more targeted than that.
What It Actually Takes Per Day
For elementary school: twenty to thirty minutes of math, twenty to thirty minutes of reading and phonics. When Megan said that number, I had the same reaction my clients have when I tell them they can run their business in twenty hours a week. That's it. Less than an hour. The rest, the science, the social studies, the way the world works, they are picking up by being in it, by helping in the grocery store, by asking questions in the car, by existing in a household where curiosity gets treated as a feature and not a disruption.
I know the first reaction to that number. It can't be enough. And I understand it, because we have spent our whole lives inside a system that equated more hours with more learning, and the hours were never really about learning. They were partly about childcare, partly about standardization, and partly about the time it takes to manage thirty different children back to the same task after every transition.
When you remove the transitions, the behavior management, the time spent reteaching things to the range of levels in the room, and you replace all of that with twenty minutes of targeted instruction at exactly where your child is, the comparison stops making sense. Megan's daughter is going into third grade reading and doing math at a sixth grade level. Not because she's exceptional, though she may be. Because nothing in her education is being aimed at someone else.
The parallel to business is exact. I have clients who come to me working sixty and seventy hours a week, and when we redesign their schedule and pull out everything that isn't generating results, they land at twenty hours. And they cannot believe it at first. They say the same thing: there's no way. And then they do it, and it works, and they stop being able to explain why they were working the other forty hours.
The Thing I Actually Want for My Kids
I did not graduate college. I barely graduated high school. By the time I got there, I had already started down a path of self-destructive behaviors that would take years to climb back from, and all of it traced back to a period in middle school when I was being bullied and my confidence started caving.
I was smart. Academically I was in the gifted program. My brain worked fine. But I was not okay emotionally, and nobody was teaching me how to handle what I was experiencing, and without the confidence to move through hard things, the smart didn't matter. I made choices that cost me years.
So when someone asks me what I want most for my kids, the answer has nothing to do with grades.
I want them to know who they are. I want them to like themselves. I want them to be the kind of people who can walk into a room and talk to an adult with ease, not because they were taught a script, but because they've spent their childhoods around people who treated their ideas as worth hearing.
Megan talked about a moment at Publix where her daughter ordered her own food at the deli counter. The woman behind the counter asked Megan afterward what school she went to, because she could tell from the way the girl talked that she was homeschooled. She could see it in how she moved through an adult interaction, how she made eye contact, how she spoke like someone who had practice being seen.
That is what I'm after. The kind of confidence that isn't performed, that doesn't depend on external validation, that comes from a childhood where you were allowed to be yourself long enough to know who that is.
The school system is not responsible for building that. I know that. And for most of us, by the time we get our kids back at the end of the school day, there are maybe two hours left before dinner and showers and bed. Two hours to do the actual parenting of it. Two hours to be the person teaching them what they think of themselves.
I am not willing to give that up anymore.
And for anyone who is still afraid of getting it wrong: different looks like your daughter following her obsession with entrepreneurship into math and the writing and the reading. It looks like your son learning fractions by measuring coffee grounds. It looks like some days going sideways, and that being okay. You are not going to fail your child. You are going to show them what it looks like to make a decision that goes against the default because you believe something better is possible, and that is more of an education than any workbook they would have brought home.
You Don't Have to Do All of It Yourself
Megan doesn't change the oil in her car. She still drives the car.
That's her answer to the people in homeschool communities online who say that if you get a tutor, or use an outside curriculum provider, or hire someone to handle the design and progress monitoring and state submissions, you're not really homeschooling. And I appreciate the clarity of it, because that argument is one of the more exhausting things I've encountered as I've started paying attention to this space.
The point of homeschooling is that your child is at home receiving an education designed for them specifically. Whether you write the curriculum yourself, source it from someone else, or hire someone to do the whole build, your child is still home and still learning in a way that accounts for who they are. You are not your child's pediatrician either. Getting expert support with the parts you're not equipped to do yourself is not a failure. It's the same logic as hiring an OBM or a COO.
For families who want to homeschool but don't want to carry the research, planning, curriculum writing, progress monitoring, and state compliance themselves, that's exactly what Homegrown Minds is built for. Megan assesses the child, the family's schedule and values, and the learner's skill gaps, and then designs and manages the whole thing accordingly. You are still the parent, still making the calls, still deeply involved in your child's development. You're just not doing all of it from scratch.
And for families who want their kids learning alongside other kids whose parents have made the same choice, her Mindful Leaders Academy and Innovation Labs program is the local, in-person version of that community. Both are linked below.
There is a lot of support available, and using it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means you know how to find the right person for each part of the job. Running a business taught you that. Apply it here.
The Mom Founders Table Is the Room Where These Decisions Get Made
I bring all of this to The Mom Founders Table because the women in that room are making exactly these kinds of choices.
Redesigning their businesses so they have time for the life they want. Making decisions that don't fit the conventional path. Choosing a version of success that looks different from what they were told it was supposed to look like, and doing the operational and identity work to make it hold.
If you are a mom founder who is building a business that should give you more freedom than it currently does, this is the room where the structure gets built so that vision becomes real. Your people, your pricing, your processes, redesigned so the business runs without requiring everything you have, and you get to show up for the rest of your life, including your kids, in the way you intended to.
Applications are open now for the September 1st cohort, with 30 seats. Full details on structure, calls, the retreat, and the guarantee are on the application page.
Apply for The Mom Founders Table or message me on Instagram first if you want to talk through where you are.
You can find Megan Garfield and her local program at @mindfulleaderslwr on Instagram, and her curriculum support services at homegrownminds.com. If you're thinking about homeschooling and you want someone who knows this world at the curriculum design level to help you figure out what it could look like for your specific child, go book a discovery call with her.
