Home/Podcast/I Thought I Was Doing It for the Wrong Reason

Episode 5 transcript I Thought I Was Doing It for the Wrong Reason

Does a homeschool choice have to be purely selfless for it to still be right?

Claire reflects on grief, closeness, and whether a homeschooling choice can be right for a child even when it also matters deeply to the mother.

Direct answer

A short answer grounded in the transcript

No. A decision can meet your child's real needs and also matter deeply to you. Those truths can sit together without canceling each other out.

Dear Homeschool Mom: Grow Simply with Claire · September 1, 2026 · 3:51

Listen to the original episode

Listen on Spotify Apple Podcasts → Amazon Music → iHeartRadio →

Section 1

The question underneath the obvious ones

Claire names the harder fear beneath the usual homeschool doubts: whether wanting her son close after loss made the decision suspect. The episode brings that hidden question into the open instead of pretending it was never there.

Section 2

What grief changed and what it did not

The transcript separates two things carefully. Grief may have made Claire more open to seeing a different path, but it did not invent the fact that school was not working for her son.

Section 3

Two true things can belong in the same decision

The letter argues that personal longing does not automatically corrupt a parental choice. A child can need a change, and a mother can also feel relief or closeness because of that same change.

FAQ

Questions this episode helps answer

Is it wrong if part of me wanted homeschooling for personal reasons too?

Not necessarily. The important question is whether the choice was also responsive to your child's actual needs and reality.

How can I tell whether guilt is clouding a good homeschool decision?

Separate the emotional story from the concrete evidence. Ask what was happening with your child, what changed afterward, and whether the decision proved responsive to something real.

From Claire

About the author of this letter

Written by Claire from grovio

Claire writes Dear Homeschool Mom for families who need reassurance, perspective, and a calmer way to trust the work they are already doing.

Try grovio

Keep the record of what changed

grovio helps you capture the small patterns that make hard homeschool decisions easier to trust later.

Start with grovio free

Full transcript

I Thought I Was Doing It for the Wrong Reason

There was a question I carried for a long time that I never said out loud.

Not to my friends, not to my family, not even really to myself in any direct way. I mean — I knew it was there. But I didn't say it. It just lived underneath everything else, surfacing mostly at night when the day was done and there was nothing left to distract me from it.

Am I homeschooling my son because it's right for him — or because I need him close to me?

I had lost his father. I was alone with my son in a way I hadn't expected to be, and I missed him when he was gone. Not just in the ordinary way that mothers miss children who are at school — in a way that felt rawer than that, more urgent, like the distance between us during those hours was something I couldn't afford. And when he started asking not to go, when the mornings got harder and I could see something in him that wasn't right, I started thinking seriously about pulling him out.

And that's when the question arrived.

Because I couldn't untangle it. I wanted him home and he needed something different and those two things were pointing in the same direction and I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

Are you doing this for him, or for you?

I don't think I ever fully answered it. I'm not sure it's the kind of question that gets a clean answer.

What I believe now is that the grief made me open. It lowered something in me — some resistance to doing things differently — and that openness is part of why I was willing to make such a significant change when I saw that he needed one.

He needed to be pulled out. Not because I was grieving. Not because I wanted more time with him, though I did. He needed it because something wasn't working for him in that building, because he was telling me so every morning in the most honest way a child knows how, and because I was the person positioned to see it.

The reason I was open to seeing it — that might have had something to do with grief. But what I saw was real. And what I did about it was right.

Wanting something for yourself and choosing something for your child can both be true at the same time.

Both things. Neither one canceling the other out.

He is thriving. And I am close to him. Both of those things are true, and I have decided to stop treating that as suspicious.

But it took me longer to get there than it should have. And I almost let the question talk me out of something I already knew.

That's the next letter.

✦

A question I've been sitting with: Does the reason have to be purely selfless for the choice to be right?

Love,

Claire