HK School Confessions Ep. 3: A Mom of Two on Ditching School, DIY Curriculums, and Homeschooling's Dark Side

Welcome to HK School Confessions, where Hong Kong parents say the quiet part out loud about kindergarten schooling in Hong Kong — the money, the politics, the moments that made them question the whole system. Nobody’s named. Everybody’s honest.

Today: a mom of two who pulled both kids out of school entirely, discovered there’s no law in Hong Kong stopping her, and knows another homeschool parent whose 6-year-old still breastfeeds to sleep.

Here’s what she told me.

Why homeschooling?

She didn’t set out to homeschool. Her oldest was doing pre-nursery at a kindergarten she actually liked — the kind of place you tour and think, okay, this could work. Then midway through K2, the school called a meeting and announced it would close within three years due to low enrollment.

That’s when things went sideways fast. Admin turned bad almost overnight. And when she went back to check on the teachers she’d liked from her original tour — the ones who’d actually sold her on the place — every single one had already quit.

She started touring international schools next, thinking that was the obvious next move. It wasn’t academics that put her off. It was the room. Every school she visited had the same demographic walking through the door — same passports, same postcodes, same everything. Not the diverse environment she wanted her kids growing up in.

And swinging the other way, local kindergartens felt like the opposite extreme: rigid, metric-driven learning that might make sense for an older kid, but not for a 4- and 6-year-old who mostly just wanted to play.

Her husband was the one who floated homeschooling. She didn’t take it seriously at first. Then she started asking around in homeschooling circles, and it stopped sounding like a fringe idea.

The school-closes-mid-year, teachers-all-quit scenario is exactly the kind of thing my $68 guide is built to help you screen for before you sign anything — not everyone’s story ends in homeschooling, but everyone deserves to see the warning signs earlier than she did.

Nobody tells you this part is legal

Here’s the thing that surprised her most, and honestly surprised me too: there’s no law in Hong Kong that says you can’t pull your kid out of school. Everyone assumes you need permission, some kind of approval process, a form to file. You don’t.

Especially if you’re an expat and your kid has never been formally enrolled anywhere, the Education Bureau has no real way of knowing you’re homeschooling — unless someone reports you. It’s a different story if you enroll and then pull out later. Do that, and EDB stays on your case for a few years, following up, sending notifications. But if you never enroll in the first place, you’re essentially operating below the radar. Nobody’s watching. Unless you tell them.

What “curriculum” actually looks like, day to day

There’s no set curriculum — she builds it herself, and it’s evolved a lot since they started.

When they first began, it was slow: the older kid doing just one to two days of homeschooling a week, three hours at a time. It ramped up from there once they found their rhythm.

What really amazed me is she has zero background in education — and she actually thinks that’s worked in her favor. No formal training meant no fixed ideas about how learning “should” look, so she came in open-minded to anything that worked.

Here’s the breakdown by subject:

• Math — Life of Fred, plus games she’s found online. She leans on storytelling to make concepts stick rather than drilling worksheets.
• Chinese — outsourced entirely to a hired tutor who runs 1-on-1 lessons.
• English — all her. She taught both kids phonics herself, from scratch. The upside she keeps coming back to: they can skip ahead or slow down whenever they need to, and she gets a real sense of achievement watching it click for them.
• Group learning — a co-op with three other homeschooling families for regular meetups built around themes: dinosaurs one week, ancient Egypt another.

Behind the scenes, she spends about 30 minutes every night prepping — printing worksheets, pulling together the next day’s material, figuring out what she wants to cover more of.

One thing she’ll flag for any parent starting out: don’t panic if your kid seems behind. Her son needed extra time with phonics specifically. She let him take it. He caught up on his own timeline, not anyone else’s.

Don’t burn out

Early on, she went to every single homeschool meetup and event on the calendar, trying to build community fast. It backfired — she ended up drained instead of energized. Her youngest was still a lot to manage in group settings, and if she’s honest, she didn’t always enjoy the meetups themselves.

At one point she genuinely wondered if she wanted to be part of this community at all, and whether her kids would even end up with real friends out of it.

Her advice now, looking back: don’t rush it. If you’re new to a homeschool community, you have permission to ease in slowly instead of front-loading every event. That’s the fastest way to burn out.

But what about peer socialization?

Her kids still see ex-kindergarten friends regularly, the co-op covers group time, and travel adds a different kind of exposure entirely. At this age, she doesn’t think kids need constant same-age peer time — instead they get to interact with people of all ages and walks of life.

Staying flexible

Just because she chose to homeschool her kids now doesn’t mean she’s closing the door on traditional school forever. As kids get older, fewer families will still be homeschooling, which means staying flexible in mindset is part of the deal, not a failure of the plan.

It’s about making the right decision for the right point in time, not making a permanent ideological stand.

The family that made her uncomfortable

Not every homeschool story is a good one, and she’s seen it up close.

In her broader homeschool circle, one family stood out for the wrong reasons. Their 6-year-old was still breastfeeding at bedtime, his teeth were in genuinely rough shape, and he refused to brush them. He seemed unmotivated, visibly bored, and kept saying so, out loud, repeatedly.

There was no curriculum at all — not a loose one, an actual absence of one. At one point, the parents left him by himself at a neighbour’s farm.

The distinction she draws is important: this wasn’t homeschooling for education. It was homeschooling out of distrust of the system — conspiracy beliefs, fear of government, fear of institutions in general, dressed up as a lifestyle choice. It defeats the entire point of what a homeschooling community is supposed to be for. Thankfully, that child isn’t enrolled in a Reggio school.

The real numbers

Excluding travel, she spends about HK$7,000 a month on the two kids combined. That covers books, games, supplements, the private Chinese tutor, pottery classes, Japanese lessons, and summer camp. On top of the money, there’s her own time — that nightly 30 minutes of prep isn’t nothing over a full year.

Travel is where the number jumps. They do slow-travel trips — this year it’s been Kaohsiung and Taipei, with Japan next on the list. A month abroad, all-in — rent, food, activities — runs roughly HK$30,000. Not cheap, but it’s a deliberate trade-off she’s made instead of, say, an expensive local curriculum package or a full-time tutor roster.

The best part

Ask her what she’d never give up and it’s not really about academics at all.

It’s the flexibility to let the kids do what they actually enjoy without being boxed in by a set schedule. That flexibility is what makes the slow-travel habit possible in the first place, and it’s also what lets her get a little creative when a kid gets into something specific.

When her son got into cooking, she didn’t sign him up for a class — she asked a native-English-speaking friend to “adopt” him for a weekend of cooking lessons, purely for the extra English exposure wrapped around something he already loved.

There’s more in that same spirit: parkour lessons with a teacher she trusts, pottery, and — maybe her favorite thing — learning Japanese together as a family, since she’d had some exposure to it before and now they’re picking it up side by side. Her youngest, she says, is picking up characters faster than anyone expected.

No bells, no rush, no worksheets due Monday. Just two kids who actually like learning — and a mom who built the whole thing herself, one night at a time.

Closing thought

Homeschooling isn’t the twist ending to every bad kindergarten experience, and it’s not the plan for most families reading this. But her story is a reminder that the system has more exits than people assume — and that not every “alternative” path is built the same way, or for the same reasons.

If you want more of these, follow along on Instagram — this is part of an ongoing series. And if you want the fuller playbook for navigating the more traditional route, that’s what the full guide walks through, section by section.

One more thing — if you want a break from admissions anxiety, my free newsletter covers the fun part of parenting in this city: what’s on for HK families every weekend, delivered every Friday, zero waitlists involved.