If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

Social needs. Children need to learn how to be in relationship with others, it is the most fundamental need we have and is so important for the future of our planet.

If I were to homeschool, it isn't about the learning, that is easy, it is about providing an environment where children can learn to co-exist with others. That can still be done with homeschool, but it will need to be intentional with daily activities that involve being in relationship with others, in physical form.

I was homeschooled and I credit much of my success in life to it. It taught me to think logically, taught me to honor my parents, taught me the value of tradition, morality, spirituality. It taught me the value of hard work, of loyalty, of kindness. It kept me out of vices that many of my public-schooled friends and peers got pulled into.

In my experience, homeschooling can create well-rounded, upright people at a ratio above traditional schooling. It insulates kids from many of the extreme elements and moores of society. Homeschooling is an excellent tool to pass on values from one generation to the next.

Lack of socialization is indeed a problem. Homeschooling parents need to make a big effort to get their kids in homeschooling groups and co-ops, youth sports, etc.

I have three kids myself now, but we send our them to private school rather than homeschool. What stops us from homeschooling is, my wife didn't feel like she had the skills to homeschool. She's not a teacher and feels she doesn't have the patience for it.

In my experience, both direct and indirect, homeschooling has the effect of concentrating a parent’s influence on their children’s lives / brain development / psychology, etc.

Take that, and think about it, before you start. If you have unexamined issues like anger problems, fixations, avoidances, fears - those will have an impact on your child, and a bigger impact if you homeschool your child - purely on the basis of much more time spent together.

If you’re going to do it, i would strongly encourage you to start therapy asap. Because the more of those things you crack open and deal with, the less your child will have to deal with the consequences of them.

The school system has a ton of problems. So does home schooling. There is no magic bullet. Just choices.

Homeschooling was detrimental to my own social development as a child, and that of my (many) siblings. Adjusting to college life made me nearly suicidal with hopelessness that I'd ever catch up either academically or socially, and none of my other siblings managed to successfully complete it. We're all doing much better now, but none of us would ever consider putting our own children through that kind of isolation long-term.

Now I'm part of an ex-homeschooler support group where most of us had a similar story. In my own case, the "homeschooling" was a political choice by parents who were deeply paranoid about the US government. They lacked the education to even understand what all we were missing and relied on a popular curriculum program to guide them without any supplemental counseling or outside tutoring.

Academically I'm sure some more educated parents could do better and understand they need to get information from a variety of sources, but socially it would be very difficult to replicate the opportunities that school provides most kids.

Our kids are 11 and 6 and we've always homeschooled them. As a secular homeschooling family, our headaches aren't related to curriculums or anything academic-related (there are lots of good options and resources out there) but rather the lack of socialization options outside of the home. If your experience is like ours, you'll quickly discover is that most homeschooling families are very religious or pulled their children out of school due to some kind of behavioral issue.

Socialization. Going to school is not only about absorbing academical knowledge. It's about interacting with a broader group of people, learning how to behave, how to avoid common problems, etc. I would not be able to provide this to my kids.

On top of that, the language we speak at home is not the language used by the school, or the rest of the country. There are a million problems that come with this: they would force us to use our language, which they're more comfortable with, they would be learning our broken accents, we're not super familiar with the local language so our ability to teach it would be worse, etc, etc.

What stops me is that the socialization and peer-group relationship skills that are obtained rapidly in a public school context are not replicatable at home. Neither are the skills learned in dealing with non-family adults, independence of task skills away from home, and much else besides in that vein.

I would rather -- and do -- support the public school system in my (medium sized) city.

I was homeschooled in the late 80s / early 90s and I hated it. Though we were part of a homeschool group, we only got together with other families once or twice a week. It was really lonely and I never felt like a normal kid. Ultimately I convinced my parents to send me to public high school and had a great experience.

Watching my own kids thrive in school with lots of friends and social interaction has reaffirmed my thinking that building social skills is as much a part of schooling as the education itself.

School is great. Not all of it obviously, and more for some people than others, but overall the pain and stresses of going to school were hugely outweighed by the fun and adventure of navigating through that system and interacting with all of those different peers and teachers. I wouldn't want to deny any kid those adventures and relationships and that exposure to our culture (for better and for worse). To be fair, I also grew up in a pretty great school system.

I feel the same way about college. I understand the arguments that college is not often worth the excessive cost if you look at it in terms of financial outcomes. But I didn't go to college for financial outcomes. I went because it was going to be (and was) a uniquely amazing adventure that I could never replicate at any other time in my life. I think going to grade school is the same thing.

Nothing can replace acting awkward around your crush in the hall, learning to navigate around the bully, bonding after class with a favorite teacher, enduring the horrors of PE or the excitement of a bomb threat, to name a few nostalgic examples.

I used to do it for my kids and wrote some articles on why and how on my blog here http://nibrahim.net.in/2011/09/06/homeschooling_in_india_par...

I moved towns and my main issues were 1. Lack of a like minded community who were willing to invest time and energy like I was. It's a demanding journey and not one that's easy (or even possible) to do alone. 2. Lack of insight into what the future holds esp. from the POV of higher studies. I can experiment with my own life but was scared of doing it with my kids'.

The main thing stopping us is that we both enjoy our careers and neither of us wants to teach. I think if there was strong evidence that homeschooling conferred significant benefits we would probably make the sacrifice to do it, but based on my research it seems like a wash.

The added factor is that my wife was home schooled, and my view of homeschooling is somewhat tainted by that. The homeschooling community she came from isn't exactly a strong advertisement for homeschooling, but I recognize there are also bad schools out there.

The strongest part of her education seems to have been the co-op classes, but those classes are really just like sending your kids to a private school. At that point I'm not sure why you wouldn't just send your kids to school outside of an ideological commitment to homeschooling.

I get this is targeted at the US, still I'm throwing this out there:

my wife and I (with combined degrees in literature, molecular biology and computer science) would have seriously considered homeschooling. But we live in Germany, and it is absolutely illegal here.

Nothing.

If I have children and they are like me (i.e on the spectrum) then I will homeschool them.

School was by far the worst time of my life and also contributed the least to my success. I succeeded in spite of traditional schooling, mostly due to the great nature of my parents (who unfortunately just didn't have the capacity or economical means to homeschool me.) Enduring my schooling years didn't make me stronger it just left me with deep emotional scars that took years to come to terms with.

My partner has early age teaching experience and we are equipped to school our children if that is how things turn out.

Socialization is definitely a concern but I think it can be adequately addressed through sports, activity groups and extended family.

Of course if my children are normal then maybe none of this will be necessary and a normal school will be what is best for them.

As someone who was homeschooled through 6th grade and then private schooled and considering homeschool for early elementary (I have a 4 year old) I would say my main concern is actually in my wife's ability to maintain a parent/teacher balance right now.

What I mean by this is simply wearing two hats in the household is a tricky business and can be overwhelming especially when our young students have younger siblings that must be cared for. I have enormous respect for my wife but handling these responsibilities is no easy feat!

Of course my kids are very young. I have other concerns beyond elementary, mostly around an increasing need for expertise in sciences/math and properly rigorous testing ensuring mastery over subjects without access to a realistic grade curve.

My personal experience was very good but a bit unrealistic - I was taught to read by my mom who has taught kindergarten for decades. Not everyone has a professional educator as their homeschool teacher!

The amount of effort it would take and the quality of that effort, when I already have a full-time job.

Edit: I have 3 kids, and they all learn in quite different ways. I can't really give one presentation to all 3 on something. The pandemic gave me a little glimpse into what home schooling would be like.

We did remote schooling during covid. Kids don't actually like it. I never thought I'd see the day when my child would wail about not being able to go to school, but that's it.

Also as bad as kids are with learning with teachers, it's usually a lot worse with parents. It's very stressful to, say, teach a child math. I think being in a group of others doing it gives them a little more grit.

I'm 50, live in AZ (where home schooling is very popular) -- I didn't homeschool my kids but many of my friends did. Here's what I have seen:

1) If you are non-religious, the canned curriculum, trade shows, support groups are very few and far between. You will be much more lonely than your religious home-schooling counterparts.

2) As your kids get older, it is harder and harder to give them a proper education. By the time your kids are in middle-school, subjects get harder for a parent (or pairs of parents) to cover in a way that does each subject justice.

In the end, most of my friends who home-schooled eventually sent their kids to middle-school and or high-school... and that timing seemed about right.

Well, it's available resources about building and delivering an effective curricula across subjects and time. I have found a number of homeschooling resources, but the best organized efforts tend to be from religious perspectives (not surprising). We're not religious. My being an atheist and my wife being best described as irreligious (doesn't identify with a religion and puts approximately zero thought into the question) means much of that religious perspective is unwanted and is something I would consider detrimental. That I do seriously consider homeschooling should also make it evident that I reject public schooling as a good option; there are a number of reasons but your question implicitly assumes that to be true so I'll just restate it for others.

We do have relatives that have successfully homeschooled and I have seen groups that do their homeschooling together (homeschooling isn't necessarily about sitting at home by yourselves). So it's resources/support targeted to delivering a well-rounded homeschooled education, it's finding sufficiently like-minded others with whom to share the effort in a small group setting. With sufficient resources I could likely solve the time problem.

Absent that, we're looking at private schools for our kid. We'd probably just do this, but it's not a cheap alternative.

I'd welcome more tools to enable home after-schooling and home summer schooling.

A lot of the after school/summer school in person offerings are pretty expensive and usually pretty sports centric.

Full home schooling I feel could easily burn out even the most hard working parent - as there's little time for getting groceries, etc. done. And lack of socialization in the childs cohort is an issue.

I think more online tools for prepping for science fairs and other academic competitions would be great.

More tools like Khan academy would be great - I'd love it if there were resources that were able to introduce real biology, chemistry, physics prior to high school.

Time.

I also think our 3 kids would struggle with the lack of separation between Teacher and Parent. Similar to how some adults struggle with working at home and separating work and home life appropriately. I know several folks who do it well and love the freedom and flexibility. But I feel it would take a lot of effort to really stay on top of it and not let things slide when it gets tough.

Not going to lie, the "babysitting" aspect of school is very nice too.

Needing to work mostly. I have the skill set to teach and considered becoming an elementary school teacher at one point in my life. I know socialization is a big factor but I feel like that can be accounted for with lots of extra curricular group programs and an active effort to introduce them to kids their own age to make social plans with.

I’m mostly interested because of the fact that private tutoring performs at roughly the 98th percentile compared to classroom teaching. I think that’s a big enough gap that I consider education an unsolved problem. Plenty of kids would be capable of going to university at sixteen instead of nineteen if they got an individually tailored education instead of being put through one-size fits all programs.

I was homeschooled and it was an isolating experience that set me back socially until I finally pleaded with my parents to let me go to public school. It took me a _while_ to catch up to my peers socially and it caused me a least a year of being a social outcast until I learned how to act "normal". Did I learn some topics ahead of other kids? Sure. Was it at all good for my development as a person? Oh god no. 0/10, would not recommend homeschooling.

We home schooled our 4th grade daughter during the pandemic. Was very fun, she was easily able to memorize the periodic table through song, made lots of progress in understanding operators in mathematics, wrote weekly letters to family for class…

She is back in school now because it’s a great school, but if we didn’t have options we would definitely teach at home, there has never been more tools available to make it easy.

Truth is the U.S. economy is entirely built around the assumption that both parents are working full time now so there is less time to be at home to help kids learn, so we send them off to giant prison-looking buildings and hope for the best.

My sister-in-law homeschooled most of her kids. OTOH, she left her full-time job as an elementary school teacher to do that. Right after my kid brother got a new, far-better-paid job, which made that a viable option.

She's still kinda involved with homeschooling. From various comments on what that is like these days (post-1990's), there are a huge number of resources already on the web to support homeschooling.

Honestly, I'm not well balanced enough to home school. I'm afraid taking on primary schooling would cause expectations for my kid to be too high. Also, I feel that socialization with other kids (learning to make/maintain friends), interaction with (other) adults and having a structured routine is more important.

Probably most importantly, I'm fairly confident in the competence in my local public elementary (great teachers and lots of parent volunteers)

I'd would consider co-op, but most groups are too small or unorganized.

Educating someone requires expertise.

Being exposed to different education styles is far better than just having one teacher (the parent).

There's no way for a parent to have sufficient breadth and depth across a range of topics, never mind generic pedagogical expertise.

My wife and I were thinking of homeschooling. Socializing kept us back.

Then we joined a church with an active homeschooling group. The kids meet up multiple times a week, with and without parents. They even take classes together (parents hire tutors for a group of kids, or one parent takes a group of kids for a class).

This has alleviated our fears. I think our daughter will get more socializing here and not just in the classroom. The group regularly (>1 / month) takes field trips, goes on outings, and we're even going camping with them this summer.

So anything you can do to replicate that... would be great

I have one child who thrived learning remotely during the pandemic, and two who did not. No matter what platforms are set up, there are simply some people who work well independently/remotely and some who do not. Same as the rest of us - some of us love remote work, some never want to do it again.

My recommendation is to put some focus into helping parents identify which camp their children fall into before trying it out, to avoid kids crashing and burning as they discover it is not for them.

I was homeschooled and I truly believe it was a major factor to getting me where I am in life. With that said I’ve also seen homeschooling gone very wrong.

I think the major component of it being a great experience is the motivation of the parents for doing homeschooling. Teaching kids at home to intentionally keep them from society and indoctrinate them in some specific ideology, usually religious, can be very damaging, not necessarily because of the religion itself but because sooner or later the kid/adolescent/adult will meet the wider society and have no tools to deal with the diversity found in it. This, btw, doesn’t only happen in homeschooling but is how root of racism/sexism/etc are planted.

In my experience, and what I hope to accomplish when/if I get to homeschool is to create an space where the child can pursue her interests, nourish/encourage curiosity and use it to teach instead of ignoring it an teaching some other boring thing the kid has no interest in as sadly is often done in school just from the fact that a teacher can’t pursued the interest/curiosity of 30 students at the same time in one classroom.

Regarding the social aspect, there’s soccers, orchestra, martial arts, ymca swimming, inviting friends over often, 4h, Boy Scouts, and so many more opportunities to provide a place for the kid to socialize while hopefully minimizing the toxicity usually found in public schools.

This is by no means a critique of public schools, I think is a sad reality of our society that all we can afford for our kids is an assembly line education with very little space for diversity and with one size fits all measurements of success.

We could start with: it's incredibly expensive.

Kids need time and attention and space. Teaching is not compatible with holding down a full-time job, because it is a full-time job. Teaching one or two or three kids is not significantly less work than teaching 20.

I’ve never met someone who was homeschooled past elementary school and thought it was a good idea.

I think homeschooling is often cruel to children. However I think tools to help make it better for those who will choose it anyway are a good thing. Best of luck to you.

I've considered home schooling, but what stopped me was the fact that I suddenly realized I have no children.

On a more serious note, I like how you asked the question with "what's stopping you?".

I think having good curricula to follow would be interesting.

I always found the International Baccalaureate interesting. It seems to be both a more rigorous (academically) and a more flexible (administratively) system than typical public schools: the main demographic I heard who were doing it did so because joining the regular system would have been difficult (because they spent a year abroad, or were travelling with their parents), but they were on average very successful in tertiary education, and they all credited the IB and its rigorous curriculum. Another advantage of the IB is that, despite its unusual structure, it has near universal global recognition, which is important because a recognized high school diploma is a formal requirement in many places.

If you were able to do something like that for distance/home schooling that would be interesting.

Glad to see people building in this space! One thing that would make us more likely to take the leap is a popular online community where 'everyone' goes to organize in-person events and meet kids with similar interests. I think there are enough similar homeschooling-curious families where I live (Silicon Valley), but I just don't know enough of them. If I knew 3x as many interested families, there's a good chance I'd have given homeschooling a try.

It would also be great to have some knowledge base-style articles about how to navigate the bureaucracy, how to get whatever funding is available, etc. I know this varies by jurisdiction, but presumably this could be crowdsourced and validated for many areas.

disclaimer: I think school is mostly inefficient and a waste of time in terms of education.

Yet, I wouldn't take my kids away from school, basically because I remember when I was a kid and meeting kids that had been homeschooled (either later in school, or in activity centers) and they were always weird. I'm wondering how they grew up, and if it was much more difficult for them to acclimate after that, or if it was actually fine. But I feel like the world is a hard place, and the more you delay the reality the harder it'll be for kids. I'd be interested in stats like, for example, rate of suicide amongst homeschooled kids vs non-homeschooled kids.

I was homeschooled my entire life and to this day have terrible issues with socializing. I won’t say that homeschooling is the only cause of that, but it certainly did not help.

Secondly, the relationship between a student and teacher, much like an employee and employer, is a professional relationship. It is completely different from the close personal relationship you want with your parent/child. Inserting yourself as a teacher or “boss” completely throws off this dynamic.

Thirdly, my academic opportunities were severely limited as a result. I had no ap classes, no extracurriculars, no guidance counselor, etc. I didn’t have a teacher that challenged me to achieve more. My mom only has a bachelors, and did not have the knowledge to challenge me in subjects like math past algebra. I eventually took the SATs, the ACTs, and was able to go go university and get a BS in Computer Science. However, I was severely behind in math compared to my peers. I had only taken Algebra 2 in highschool, so in university I had to start with precalc instead of Calc 1. I had no AP credits that I could use to skip gen-eds. Perhaps my parents were just unprepared for homeschooling, but they were definitely worse than a teacher. Although I admit this last point might be specific to my experience.

I'm currently homeschooling three teenagers (since the start of Covid), although one just recently graduated and will be attending University this fall. Ultimately we decided to take the leap to homeschooling because the quality of instruction and curriculum available to us through local or online schools was either not good or not a good fit.

Prior to that the two biggest things stopping us were the assumption that children have to go to an 'official' school in order to get a diploma and go to college, and the challenge in finding good curriculum.

In my opinion, the good resources include Khan Academy, IXL, and Well Trained Mind, or at least that is what has worked for us.

Tools that would make homeschooling easier would be an assignment tracker by class/subject that was easy to use. Khan supports assigning work but it's rather labor intensive to administer. For example if I have assigned tasks in a class for the next eight weeks and the schedule slides by one week then it would be nice to be able to just move all the assignments in that class back one week instead of changing every individual assigned date separately (as Khan Academy currently requires). This could even be something as simple as making a list of assignments available as a spreadsheet.

Logical progression across the units in a class is important. The Khan Academy AP Physics curriculum is a good example of what not to do in that respect.

Any attempt by the instructor/course material at getting the student excited about learning should be avoided/removed.

Grammatical errors, typos, and misspellings should never be present in anything your company makes available to students or parents.

Integrated public schools are now generally recognized as having the biggest impact in reducing racism. Plus the lack of support for public schools would increasingly leave kids with disabilities out of luck. So there’s a moral angle. I’d rather my kid grow up to be non-racist and I could fix any deficiencies in their schooling

Expense. We looked into it when the kids were little but concluded we would need to hire at least one full time teacher (wife and I both work) and therefore would need to aggregate with several other families. At that point you're starting a school and we observed that we were already paying (handsomely) for the public school. That said we did supplement our kids education at the elementary level with a once-a-week science class from a retired teacher we know, and I spent quite a bit of time teaching them Mathematics "properly" up through 9th grade.

I made use of various tools for that, including the same problem setting software the professional teachers used, and of course Messrs Kahn and 3Blue.

Neither one of us can afford to stay at home and earn no income, or are temperamentally suited to such a life even if practical. I would be happy to work from home indefinitely, but I can't interrupt my coding every 20 minutes to answer questions and still get anything done. Town layout as such that even teenagers need parents to drive them everywhere, at least high school campus has library/gym/pool/various clubs.

My advice? Read the book titled "Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State" by Heath Brown so you realize what you're jumping into, eyes open. It probably isn't what you think it is. And it has tremendous regional variation. In particular, get ready for parents who want to very carefully control what their kids are exposed to.

Consider reading "Dumbing Us Down" by John Gatto for anyone who isn't yet convinced about the benefits of homeschooling.

Getting buy-in from your own parents is a giant hurdle, because they need to dedicate a huge portion of their personal time to schooling you. That's not an easy undertaking.

I have not seen any efforts in developing materials that children, once they've decided they want to be homeschooled, can give to their parents to convince them that homeschooling is a good idea.

Not believing in God has really limited my kids access to the social club that is religion, which makes me uncomfortable removing the other major access to kids their own age, school. Atheists/agnostics just aren't as organized in supporting their offspring's social development, probably because they have less kids.

Time management. Work, rising youngest and teach elders is really challenge.

What is more reasonable for me is educate children in smaller group of parents, that want do homeschooling and than have ie one day per week just for teaching a small group of children among our friends. Also this could be more connected to professions of parents.

I'm too old to be homeschooled.

I’ve heard from some that it’s Multifaceted:

* To ensure their values live on

* To take their kids out of a racist environment

* To protect their kids from the high number of sexual assaults from government teachers

* To protect their kids from bullying

* To spend more time with their kids

* Flexibility in scheduling and curriculum

Need for daycare (with busy parents) and socialization (in the absence of neighborhood friends).

When working from home, it is difficult to do serious, thoughtful work when your young children are running and playing around the house.

Well since I am not an American it's not really that common in the Netherlands. Plus as @ElijahLynn mentions: Scocial needs. I read "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do" by Judith Rich Harris (highly recommend doing so before starting with kids). And it contains a nice example of a boy that is home-schooled by two teachers. The kids is brilliant and and 21 becomes the youngest University teacher. He writes a book on model trains that is considered to be the most boring book that exists and he offs himself. At least this is what I remember of the book. I think the example says it all... Edit: I do understand the need for home-schooling with the school shootings and all. Maybe that is why it is not that common in other countries?

I'm surrounded by people homeschooling. The only thing stopping us is the age our kids. First due in a few weeks.

I've been thinking about building tools as needed. It's my dream to work in this space.

I'm curious if there are legal hurdles to doing something between homeschooling and private schooling.

E.g. is it possible for me and a few other neighborhood families hire a private tutor for our kids?

The law: it cannot be done legally in my country.

I homeschooled in 8th grade and I loved it.

- No commute to middle school, which returned me an hour of my day right there.

- No bullying from the soon-to-be dropouts.

- No gross school lunches or having to tote around a smelly lunchbag/box/cooler.

- No carrying a pile of books everywhere because the administration banned bookbags (drugs or weapons or something like that...), and no dealing with the worst students who always had their hands free because they didn't care if they had their books.

- I went as fast as I wanted through my Algebra textbook (doing up to 8 lessons a day.)

- Went to a science class taught every Friday in the next city over with demonstrations of chemistry and physics.

- Played my trombone the homeschool band, we performed at Disney World and local recitals too.

- Made some friends in the homeschool group.

- I disliked the English and History exercises but I did them in weekly batches to get them done. And I read lots of books from the big city's library which was far superior to the school or local city's library that I would have to use later when high school let out.

If I had stuck with the homeschooling system I could have finished my BS at the same time I finished high school by taking all my classes at the local university - but I would have probably not double-majored.

My experience with home-schooling gave me a big insight to my high school experience. I asked for privileges such as staying in classrooms during lunch or pep-rallies to play chess or read, and I usually got them because I was well-behaved, respectful, and demonstrated I could be trusted.

But I also resented the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the public school administration's dictates built around maintaining order due to worst behaving students (for example, I couldn't wear a ball-cap on a bad hair day because the resource officer caught kids hiding drugs in caps - knocking a cap off would start brutal fighting). Compared to that system, homeschooling was a kind of utopia to me.

The only downside was not being around the friends that I grew up with. Fewer birthday parties and such. But there was more hanging out with a much smaller set of friends who were all homeschooling, and making new friends in the local homeschool resource group. I went back to high school in 9th grade on the theory that I missed my friends and wanted to be involved in student government and other clubs. But they weren't as friendly as I remembered, and student government and the other clubs did basically nothing. So I spent my 12th grade year at the local university full time, which gave me the freedom I sorely missed from 8th grade. My only regret was not doing it sooner.

It takes two incomes to survive, that’s why.

Your kids need more than your life experience. They also need to learn how to get along with other kids.

I don't want my child to have zero social skills or experience with the opposite sex. That's literally why I don't do it.

I don't know much about the space but if you're just starting out, I'd pay attention to two interesting companies: 1. https://www.synthesis.com (productizing Elon Musk school) 2. https://primer.com (community for home schooled kids)

I was homeschooled from 5th grade on. The reasons people have for homeschooling their kids varies widely, from hyper-religious to anti-establishmentism to the-schools-here-suck. The types of kids people have also vary widely. So my experience is not necessarily reflective of what your kids' experience might be. That said, here's my story:

My options were home schooling or a Christian school affiliated with my parents' church. I chose to be home schooled. My mother is high school educated, not a teacher, and frankly weak on most subjects. But she loves to dig in and research options, so she did a reasonable job of finding curriculums for standard things like math. I always had a strong thirst for knowledge of certain subjects, so she left me to my own devices on those things (this was pre-internet so I think this was an especially bad strategy. How's a kid with no money going to find the best resources to learn about these things that would normally be classes?). In general, I have always loved learning, so I was relatively easy to homeschool. By 8th grade I was scoring at the 12th grade level, 99th percentile on the CAT across the board. I had more free time than my peers and more flexibility in my schedule. Field trips were a breeze. By high school I was taking community college classes and tutoring the adults, which was extremely helpful to have those credits when I went to college - I got to skip some intro courses and had the flexibility to take a year off of school when financial hardship hit.

So far it sounds great, but I would not really recommend it. If you don't have access to quality schools for your kid, you should move if you can afford it at all. There were a few major issues: - Social isolation. I had little access to kids my own age, mostly my parents' friends' kids, who were, frankly, shitheads. (Not that the Christian school was better. All but one girl in what would have been my class graduated pregnant or with a child, and therefore married or engaged to be, shotgun style) - College Admissions. I was enrolled in an online high school program at an accredited school (the first one!), but even with the transcript + 4.0 GPA in a year's worth of community college credits, colleges were deeply skeptical about homeschooling and made me jump through extra hoops. I'm fairly certain my top choice rejected me because of this. - Misinformation & bias. I know this is an issue in school too, and my alternative option of a religious school would not have been much better, but I had to unlearn so so much of what I was taught - Extracurriculars. Opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities are extremely limited. Many things are associated with a school and not open to non-students.

It's also worth noting that while I did relatively well in this setup, I have siblings who were also home schooled and never finished high school or got their GED.

If you do go down this path: - Have a strategy for how to socialize your kids beyond "well, some of my friends have kids" - Find good curriculum - Have a strategy ready for when a kid does not want to learn something - Make sure you or your spouse will have a lot of free time to supervise - Enroll them in a program that will get them a HS transcript from an accredited school. - Find ways to expose them to extracurricular activities of their choosing, beyond your own interests.

Yes correct

I know you asked for responses from people who are interested in homeschooling and this comment is going to come across as unnecessarily adversarial, but...

Homeschooling is very bad and should be banned in the US, as it already is in many other countries.