Parents decide to educate their children at home for a wide variety of reasons. Yet all who make a decision to homeschool face questions and concerns at the outset. Sometimes taking that first step is the hardest. What roadblocks have kept you from making the decision to educate your children at home? By addressing some of the common homeschooling issues your roadblocks will become pebbles under your feet!
Cost
How much does it cost to educate your children at home? How much do you want to budget? Sure, you can spend the cost of private school tuition per year in homeschooling expenses. But you can just as easily spend very little. An expensive curriculum will not guarantee “success.”
Higher Education
Worried that your children will have a hard time getting into college if you homeschool? Fear not! Homeschoolers are not only being accepted into the colleges of their choice, their acceptance rate by desirable colleges and universities exceeds that of the general public.
Qualifications
Do you love your children with all of your heart? Are you willing to put the needs of your children before your own, including their educational needs? Then you’re qualified!
Socialization
As more and more parents choose to homeschool, the concerns by critics over this issue have been largely laid to rest.
Time
There are parents, who because of their circumstances, find it difficult to squeeze one more hour out of a day. However, it is very easy to overestimate the amount of time it takes to educate our children at home.
Further Reading
Answering the Critics
As homeschoolers, we all face a certain amount of criticism. When you swim against the tide you tend to develop a hard shell. Sometimes it may seem that a really smart comeback would be handy. Responding “Nanny-nanny-poo-poo! I’m right; you’re wrong!” might make you feel better but the long-term benefits are dubious.
Why Homeschool
More answers from the archives.
Additional Resources
100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids
Pretty much everything is covered here — “from fostering creativity and freedom to providing impressive educational outcomes.” Fee.org.
Homeschooling: A Growing Option in American Education
Brief look at homeschool outcomes from The Heritage Foundation.
How Homeschooling Has Benefited My Life
Written by a homeschool graduate, outlines the benefits of homeschooling including basic life skills, an edge in the workforce, a godly foundation, and time and space to develop skills in an advanced way. “So instead of asking myself, ‘How has homeschooling benefited my life?’ I prefer to ask myself, ‘How hasn’t homeschooling benefited my life?’”
How Homeschooling Has Benefited My Life
Another homeschool graduate from the Wuehler family, this time Hannah. “Homeschooling has given me the time to pursue my own interests in both hobbies and education. I love to read about history, practical how-to’s on a plethora of interests, factual and historical trivia, and all of the mystery and classic books on our extensive home library shelves. I technically might have received an “education,” however inferior, if I had attended public schools, but I have to think, What would I rather be: a child succeeding at a test covering information I may not remember or succeeding at life? Personally, I like succeeding at life!”
Schooling Was for the Industrial Era, Unschooling is for the Future
We probably need to agree on a definition of unschooling. But the point is a very important one: we are in an imagination and passion driven age — a gig economy — where we need to learn to think for ourselves. “The bells and buzzers signaling when students could come and go, the tedium of the work, the straight lines and emphasis on conformity and compliance, the rows of young people sitting passively at desks while obeying their teachers, the teachers obeying the principal, and so on—all of this was designed for factory-style efficiency and order.”
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