Finding Your People
How to find, join and start home-ed groups near you.
Friendships do not arrive on their own. The families I have watched struggle are almost never the ones whose children cannot make friends — they are the ones who have not yet found their two or three regulars. That is a practical problem, and practical problems have steps.
What to work out
There is no download here and nothing to buy. What follows is the shape of the problem — the five things that, worked through in this order, tend to end with two or three regulars in the diary.
- Where to look for what already exists near you — the specific places, in the order worth trying, rather than “search Facebook”
- What to do at a group in the first three weeks, written for a parent who finds that part hard
- How to tell a group that is wrong for your child from a group your child simply has not warmed to yet
- Starting something yourself at the smallest possible scale — two families, one regular slot
- Keeping track of what you tried and what your child thought of it, because three months on you will not remember
Who it is for
Families in a new area, families who have just left school and lost a ready-made social circle with it, and anyone who finds walking into a room of strangers harder than their child does.
What it is not
Not a promise about friendships, and not a claim about how sociable home-educated children are — nobody can tell you that about your child, and the comparisons you have probably been shown are worth less than they look. There is nothing in it that treats a quiet child as a problem to solve.
Get it
Bought on Etsy, downloaded straight away. Nothing arrives in the post.
Published through Termly, the home-education platform I am building with my husband Ed. Same person behind it either way — Termly is just where it lives.