The word homeschooling still carries a lot of baggage. People imagine rigid timetables, a parent standing at a whiteboard, children sat in rows doing worksheets. Or alternatively, the other extreme — unstructured chaos, children doing whatever they like, parents anxiously hoping they're not permanently damaging their kids' future prospects.
Most families who educate their children while abroad are doing neither. They're doing something messier and more interesting, somewhere in between. And most of them — including us — didn't start with a plan. They started with a situation.
Why families end up homeschooling
Some plan it from the beginning. They're worldschoolers or unschoolers by intention, and educating outside the traditional school system is part of the whole point.
More often, families end up homeschooling because local school options are limited, too expensive, taught in a language the children don't speak yet, or because the family is moving frequently and consistent school enrolment isn't practical.
We did a bit of both, at different times. Our kids have been in local schools (Portugal, Greece), in an international school briefly, and educated at home. The homeschool periods were some of their most educationally interesting years. They were also, periodically, exhausting for everyone.
What you actually need
You need a curriculum framework, not a full curriculum. The distinction matters. A full curriculum assumes a six-hour school day and a teacher delivering content. A framework gives you the subjects and approximate level your child should be covering, and lets you fill in the how.
Good framework options for English-speaking families:
Khan Academy is free, covers maths from kindergarten through university level, and is excellent. We used it consistently. It's self-directed enough that older kids can largely manage it themselves.
Duolingo and structured language apps for the local language. Not a substitute for immersion, but a solid foundation. Fifteen minutes a day consistently is worth more than occasional longer sessions.
Reading — real books, in volume — covers more of literacy, comprehension, vocabulary, and critical thinking than any formal language arts curriculum. Build a habit around this and you're doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
For structured curriculum: Twinkl, IXL, or year-specific workbooks from your home country's educational standards. Used selectively, not wholesale.
The honest truth is that a motivated child with a good book, consistent maths practice, and access to the internet will be academically fine. The anxiety most parents feel about whether their children are keeping up tends to be disproportionate to the actual risk.
The social piece
This is the more legitimate concern with homeschooling, not the academics. Children need other children.
If you're in one place for six months or more, enrol in activities. Football, swimming, art, music — anything that creates regular contact with other kids. These relationships develop on their own timeline, but they develop.
Worldschooling communities are real and active. In Portugal, Spain, Bali, Mexico, and many other popular locations there are loose networks of families educating their children outside the traditional system. Facebook groups, local meetups, co-ops where parents take turns teaching. They're worth finding.
The families whose children struggled most socially with homeschooling were the ones who were also the most isolated as families. The education wasn't the problem — the isolation was.
What a realistic school day looks like
I'll tell you ours, because I think the imagined version is often more daunting than the lived version.
At our most structured, we did: maths (Khan Academy, 30-45 minutes), reading (30-60 minutes of independent reading from a chapter book), and one other thing — a writing exercise, a project, a language lesson, or a topic they were interested in. Three hours total, roughly. Not six. Not every day was that clean. Some days were better, some were a wash.
By any reasonable measure, our children were not falling behind. When they returned to formal school they slotted back in without difficulty. One of them was ahead in certain areas because of the focused, individual attention that homeschooling allows.
The legal side
Legal requirements for homeschooling vary significantly by country. Some countries (Germany, Sweden) have very restrictive laws. Others (Portugal, Spain, UK) have frameworks that permit it with varying degrees of registration requirements. Some are essentially unregulated.
Check the legal position in your destination country before you assume you can homeschool there. In some countries you'll need to register or notify authorities. In others you won't. Your visa type can also affect what's permissible — some residency visas require children to be enrolled in local schools.
If you're planning to educate your children at home as part of a family move and want to talk through the specifics, our family logistics sessions cover this in detail.
