Season 6 is here: The Tricky Bits of Home Ed (starting with our September brain chaos)

Let's be honest for a second. Home education isn't always the sunshine-and-nature-walks highlight reel we scroll past on Instagram. Sometimes it's siblings who are sick of each other's faces by 10am. Sometimes it's the comments, the comparisons, or that little voice in your head telling you you're not doing enough.

That's exactly why we've called Season 6 of The BIG Home Ed Conversations Podcast "The Tricky Bits." In each episode, Ashley and I pick one of those real, unglamorous corners of home ed and dig into what it's actually teaching us, and whether there's a different way to look at it.

So for our first episode back, we're starting with the trickiest bit of all: September.

"I swear it is the same every year," Kelly admits. "There is a massive go energy right now, and I genuinely hate it."

If you've felt that back-to-school pull this month, even though your kids don't go to school, you're in good company. Ashley got back from a family trip to Italy on a Sunday night and started home ed on the Monday morning. The suitcase is still upstairs, unpacked. "I feel like I'm playing catch up," she says, "and I hate that feeling."

For Kelly, as a neurodivergent family, the switch from summer mode to learning mode is its own challenge. Going from one frame of mind to another, she says, "can feel like grinding gears." In this episode she shares the new system she and her kids built together, why the first two weeks of it felt painful for everyone, and the Sunday morning she sat back, looked at the week ahead and realised she actually felt calm again knowing she'd got her head back on straight.

We also get into something we hadn't fully named before. When you home educate, there's no closing the classroom door at 3pm. Ashley describes looking at the air-dry clay pots the girls made, now drying in her kitchen, and realising that in a school they'd be at the back of a classroom and she'd go home and stop seeing them. The teaching, the tidying, the laundry and the "please put your plate in the dishwasher" all happen in the same space, all day. Kelly's answer to that is a lot of hats. Mum hat, teacher hat, chef hat, project manager hat. "They're just gonna keep falling off my head," she laughs. "I need to choose which one I'm wearing right now."

Then there's the wall. With a pad of post-it notes and a pen lid, Kelly showed her son what it looks like when a task feels too big to even start, like a huge solid wall your brain just says no to. "The only way we bring that wall down," she told him, "is with consistent, little gentle practices." She asked him whether there was anything he'd truly persevered at and not eventually managed. He couldn't think of a single thing. You'll want to hear the rest of that conversation.

We also wander into the bigger questions every home ed parent wrestles with: how child-led is child-led enough, what to do about the "unglamorous" skills nobody fancies practising, and how to balance learning at your own pace with a world that still runs on timetables and entry requirements. We don't claim to have it all figured out. That's rather the point.

If there's one thing we hope you take away from this episode, it's this: "It is hard, but it shouldn't always feel hard." If it feels hard all the time, that's a sign something needs tweaking, whether that's the time of day, the environment, the expectations or the whole rhythm of the week. And none of us are getting it wrong. As Kelly puts it, "We're just in the iteration that we're in right now."

Pop the kettle on and have a listen. It's honest, a bit all over the place in the best way, and it'll probably make you feel a whole lot less alone in your own September chaos.

Next week we're kicking off properly with consistency. Not the Pinterest-perfect, colour-coded timetable kind, but what actually gets in the way of showing up for your kids day after day. If you've ever started a term with a plan and abandoned it by Wednesday, that one's for you.

And if you're enjoying the podcast, we'd love a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Every review and recommendation helps other home ed families find us.

Want to go deeper with this season? We're putting together "When Home Ed Gets Hard," a reflection journal with questions for every Season 6 episode. Join the waiting list for early access and an early-bird discount:

 https://www.bighomeedpodcast.com/when-home-ed-gets-hard/