Erin Napier had a confession to make before she explained anything else: she used to think homeschooling was strange.
The 40-year-old Home Town star posted a detailed “day in the life” video to Instagram on April 19, walking her followers through exactly how she and husband Ben Napier educate their daughters, Helen, 8, and Mae, 4, out of their Laurel, Mississippi home. The post quickly sparked a wider conversation about what modern homeschooling actually looks like for a working family.
The timing matters. Homeschooling has moved well beyond its fringe reputation, and celebrity families choosing it over traditional schooling are increasingly willing to explain their reasoning publicly. For Erin, the shift from skeptic to advocate came gradually, rooted in real relationships rather than ideology.
From Skeptic To Advocate
Erin did not arrive at homeschooling with conviction. In her Instagram post, she addressed the stigma directly. “Some people think homeschooling is weird. I did too when I was young,” she said in the April 19 video.
What changed her mind was proximity to families who were doing it well. “Around the time Helen was born, we met some homeschoolers who were so remarkable, so mature, so communicative, and interested in learning, it made us realize we wanted whatever that was,” Erin shared in her Instagram video.
That observation, that the children themselves were the most persuasive argument, is a thread that runs through the entire post. Erin and Ben are not presenting homeschooling as a philosophical stance so much as a practical choice that has produced results they can see every day.
How the Daily Schedule Actually Works
The logistics of schooling two children while simultaneously filming multiple HGTV productions, Home Town, Home Town Takeover, and Home Town: Inn This Together, are genuinely complicated, and Erin does not gloss over them.
Before any lessons begin, the household runs through a full set of morning responsibilities: dishes, laundry, feeding the dogs, and garden care, with four-year-old Mae assigned to watering duty each day.
Fitting school into a production schedule requires negotiation and flexibility. “Our team generously carves out 2 or more hours from our filming day to teach the girls 3 of those days, sometimes 4,” Erin wrote in her caption. When construction demands the full day on set, a retired teacher friend steps in to cover those two hours. Sundays are reserved for Erin to plan the coming week’s lessons.
The document she calls the most important tool in their entire homeschool operation is a simple daily schedule sheet. “This is the most important document we use every day,” Erin said in the video, holding up the paper. “I fill out what time school will be because it depends on the filming schedule that day and what extracurriculars we have at that time.”
The Three Part Curriculum: Form, Practice, Expression
Rather than following a single packaged curriculum, the Napiers built their own framework around three pillars. The focus is on reading and narration. Helen reads aloud and then retells what happened, answering logic-based questions about character motivation and historical context.
Practice covers the subjects the girls work on every single day: math, spelling, cursive, grammar, and poetry. Expression asks the girls to apply what they have learned through creative and hands-on work, alongside daily chores, exercise, and reading for pleasure.
Ben and Erin divide the teaching based on their own strengths and backgrounds. Ben, who holds a history degree with a minor in English and previously worked as a youth pastor, leads daily instruction in history, Bible, and math.
While he works with one daughter, Erin takes the other, Mae, through phonics and simple arithmetic. Then they switch: Erin teaches Helen grammar, spelling, poetry, cursive, etiquette, art, and science, and the two girls join together for classic literature read-alouds, with Helen narrating back what happened and fielding questions that require genuine reasoning.
Social Life, Extracurriculars, And Real World Learning
One of the most common concerns about homeschooling is socialization, and Erin addresses it head-on by describing a schedule that is anything but isolated. Helen and Mae participate in gymnastics, piano, track, tennis, ballet, and art class, with Erin noting the girls see between 12 and 20 friends for roughly an hour every day through group extracurriculars. French lessons are also part of the mix.
Editor’s note: All four of my children are homeschooled, and their social activities reflect those of Erin and Ben’s children. Their weeks are filled with playdates, “park days” with many other homeschooled children, and other in-person activities that, in many cases, give them more socialization time than children attending a more rigid public school.
Beyond structured activities, the girls shadow their parents on set, visit the family’s veterinarian, go horseback riding, and attend museum trips and zoo courses.
Hands-on life skills have also found their way into the curriculum: Erin’s parents recently taught the girls canning, and Ben’s mother is next in line to teach them sewing. “They go horseback riding or to museums or homeschool courses at the zoo,” Erin shared in the video. “They pick the vegetables they grew in the garden, and last week, they learned canning from my parents. I plan to have Ben’s mom teach them sewing soon.”
Homeschool-specific events, reading fairs, science fairs, and organized field trips round out the social calendar. “There are even homeschool reading fairs and science fairs and field trips to be part of,” Erin said in the video. “We hope to do this for as long as it serves the girls, and someday send them to high school. It has been the best season of our lives as a family that I thank God for every night.”
This Is Not Their First Time Saying It Out Loud
The April 19 post is the most detailed public accounting the Napiers have given of their homeschool setup, but it is not the first time they have mentioned it. In a previous conversation with People, Ben addressed the assumption that they must have hired outside help.
“We started homeschooling. The kids. And we’re doing it. [Every time] when we say it, people are like, ‘Oh, did you hire a tutor?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re the tutors,'” Ben told People. Erin, in that same conversation, connected homeschooling to a broader desire to protect her children from screen culture.
“They’ve never had devices, they’ve never held phones or tablets or iPads. We’re trying to live like it’s our childhood again,” she told People.
Why This Conversation Resonates Beyond Celebrity
Erin Napier is not the only parent rethinking traditional schooling. Families across the country have turned to homeschooling for a wide range of reasons, from scheduling flexibility to learning differences. A USA Today report on parents who homeschool children with learning differences found that flexibility and the ability to tailor instruction to a child’s individual pace are among the most cited benefits, even as the logistical and financial demands can be significant.
One Florida mother profiled in that report pulled both of her children from traditional school after her daughter was diagnosed as profoundly dyslexic, describing the previous school experience as nearly traumatic.
What the Napier story adds to that conversation is a visible, detailed example of how a working family with a demanding production schedule can build a structured, enriching homeschool program, not by stepping away from their careers, but by integrating education into the rhythm of their professional lives.
What This Signals For Families Considering The Same Path
What stands out about Erin’s post is how practical it is. There is no manifesto here, no argument that traditional schools are failing children. Instead, she is showing her work: the daily schedule sheet, the subject split, the retired teacher friend on standby, and the extracurriculars that keep the girls connected to peers.
For parents who have wondered whether homeschooling could fit around a demanding career, the Napier family’s approach offers a genuinely detailed blueprint — one built on flexibility, community, and a willingness to ask for help when the filming day runs long.
Erin has made it clear that this is not a permanent declaration. The plan, as she has stated, is to homeschool for as long as it genuinely serves Helen and Mae, with high school in a traditional setting still on the horizon. That kind of open-ended, child-centered framing may be the most useful thing she shared.
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