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Parenting Through School — Getting Your Child Ready to Integrate With the Community is Part of Your Healing Journey too!
Difficulty integrating into school is normal in our family. All three of our children had different experiences, and none of them followed the timeline or the path that the school system expected. What we learned is that understanding our child is more useful than pushing them.
Where we live, school attendance is optional — in that we are allowed to homeschool. That said, if we don't send our kids to the local school, we limit their access to local friendships. It is also important to trust our kids to be able to handle being exposed to different ways of doing things.
Because I have always focused on being a better parent than my parents were capable of being, I struggled with many aspects of integrating my children into mainstream society (whether that's our extended family, extracurricular programs, or school). I can see that the school environment cannot hold space for our kids the way we can at home — but readiness for school is not about sending in a kid who already knows their letters, numbers, colours, manners, and how to use the bathroom (although these things help). It is more about sending in a kid who can handle the added challenge of being in a class of 26 kids with varying levels of need and understanding of what it means to respect other people's boundaries. And also, dealing with teachers who feel like their goal is to make sure their students get good grades, as opposed to holding space for the unfoldment and the development of their interests and curiosities.
I wrote this article a long time ago:
→ What Would My Dream School Look Like?
But the goal is not to duplicate home at school. It's to build an understanding of our child that we can hand to the school, so that our child is sufficiently held — within the bounds of what the school can do — so that they can enjoy one of the most enriching things there is in life: learning, understanding, connecting, developing, growing, and feeling safe.
What school asks of a child
School asks a child to separate from their primary attachment, regulate their nervous system in a group environment with limited support, follow instructions from people they do not yet trust, sit with discomfort when things are hard, and tolerate the unpredictability from peers. For a child who does not yet have the resources, the resilience, and the inside felt safety, this is an enormous ask. For a child who has not yet been understood by the adults in their life, it can feel impossible.
The school system was designed before it became normal to notice that kids are different. Some children can still handle being told to go to school whether they like it or not. But it is worth pausing on how many children do not like school — when it is supposed to be an opportunity that children in under-resourced countries would risk everything to access.
Whether your child needs to stay home longer before they are ready, or whether they are ready but then have trouble getting up and going, there is always something we can do to understand why.
Remember that a big part of anything when it comes to kids is healing our own wounds. When I think about what makes someone a good parent, the first thing that comes to mind is to work on enough of our own stuff so that when we are holding space for our kids, it is about them and not about us. Of course, we also need to show our kids how their actions affect others — and they will encounter plenty of that at school too.
A child who is ready, settled, understood, and supported to participate in the community on their own terms is a child who is going to enjoy school. Teach a kid to fish and they will never go hungry again.
For some idea on how we would navigate a child that we want to get ready to go back to school, see:
→ Supporting Your Child to Go to School Without Compromising Your Relationship
→ What We Brought to the 2026 Fun Fair