My Kids Weren’t the Chaos
OR:
The Moment I Stopped Trying to Run a Classroom in My Living Room
From the Lyra Journal.
I didn’t set out to reinvent the way I homeschool my four children. It unfolded the way certain truths do in family life: quietly, in the middle of the everyday, long before you realize you’re changing anything at all.One morning, in our small Jamaica Plain apartment, I was sitting on the floor, wedged between the toy bin and the coffee table the way parents often are, because children always take the best real estate. My oldest daughter was cutting cardboard into one of her inventions, my younger son was building a cushion fortress with the urgency of someone defending a nation, and the other two drifted in and out, not quite playing, not quite done needing me. I was trying to drink a cup of coffee before it cooled into that uncanny lukewarm state every parent knows, when one of them asked why the villagers in Minecraft live together in groups.Kids ask questions like that all the time, but for whatever reason, this one settled differently. So we talked — about communities, about shared work, about why a world feels fuller when people rely on one another. And my nine-year-old, whose mind normally leaps whole worlds ahead before you finish a sentence, suddenly stilled. For days afterward, everything in our home became “the village.” Multiplication made sense when it was shaped like groups of villagers trading wool for wood to build their houses, and ideas that used to evade her finally found something solid to rest on.Moments like that don’t resolve into tidy morals. They bleed into the next day, the next question, the next spark. That week, I noticed something I couldn’t quite name. Even though I had neat worksheets and boxed sequences ready to go, the kids kept returning to the things they’d built themselves: the forts, the cardboard inventions, the “village.” The learning that stuck wasn’t coming from the tidy plans I had laid out — it was happening in the messier corners of real life. I didn’t draw any conclusions yet, but the contrast lodged itself somewhere I couldn’t ignore.That tension felt familiar. I know teachers; I’ve stood in their shoes. I know the shifting initiatives, the pacing guides that never quite match the children in front of you, the quiet pressure to keep moving so no one falls behind on paper. Part of me assumed that tug — between what was planned and what was actually unfolding — was simply the nature of teaching. I didn’t yet see what it meant for us at home. I only knew it felt strange to watch my children lean in so fully to something that wasn’t in any of the plans I’d prepared.I’d seen something similar for years in my tutoring work. One-on-one instruction was never just “extra help.” It was the only setting where a lesson could actually bend around the child: their pace, their interests, the exact place their understanding frayed. When the work stopped being “finish this page” and became “let’s make sense of this together,” the whole mood shifted. Compliance turned into conversation, and children stood a little taller when the learning was clearly meant for them.Of course, “one-on-one” looks different when you have four children orbiting you at once. One child might be having a breakthrough in understanding at the exact moment another is screaming because the green bowl is in the dishwasher. And just as you’re trying to salvage the moment — turning a three-year-old’s forbidden toppling of the block tower into a lesson on cause and effect — someone else is announcing that lunch “wasn’t their favorite,” punctuated by spaghetti on the wall. Parenting asks for composure in moments that would break a lesser profession, and it rarely pays you in thanks. It’s intimate, invisible work. It consumes your whole day, but shows results only in glimmers. When the house feels tense, parents assume it’s a failure of character, not a failure of design: if the results feel thin, they assume it must be because they themselves aren’t doing enough.What surprised me was realizing the pressure didn’t come from my children. It came from the school-shaped frame I’d imported into our home. The more I tried to manage a structure built for classrooms, the more I felt like I was falling short of it. But when I finally loosened my grip — when I stopped performing a system that had never been designed for families — the whole tone of our home shifted. The work didn’t shrink, but the indignity did. My kids felt lighter. I felt more present. The ambient tension in our home began to dissolve. And in its place, something truer began to form: learning shaped around the relationships that make a family a family. Lyra began as a way of thinking clearly about learning inside real families—and grew into a system that now holds that clarity when parents are too tired to.People sometimes ask what Lyra promises. I don’t talk about magic. I talk about breathing room — the kind that returns when parents stop contorting themselves to meet a structure that was never built for them. Human. Curious. Personal. Alive. The pace of real families doing their best in a world that rarely acknowledges how hard that is. If there is dignity in this work (and there is), then it deserves systems that honor that dignity rather than erode it.Parents are not failing. The structure around them has been failing them for longer than anyone wants to admit. Lyra exists to offer a shape that fits the life parents are trying to build, and a structure that finally rises to meet the intentions they bring to each day.My children still ask questions that stop me mid-task. A small curiosity tossed out casually — usually while someone is offering me stuffing from our ottoman as “sheep’s wool” in exchange for wood blocks. And every time it happens, I’m reminded of that morning in our apartment, when something clicked for them, and for me. Many parents are waiting for something to ‘click.’ Often, what clicks isn’t a method, but the relief of realizing the chaos was never the child.