“…aren’t they going to be weird?”
“How will they make friends?”
“Do you even know how to teach calculus?”
Aside from the surprised look on their face, this is usually the first response when you tell someone you’re going to homeschool your kids. Everyone always wonders if homeschooled kids are going to be weird and antisocial.
To be fair, so much of how we perceive the world is through our own lens, and since most of us only ever knew the public school system, my wife and I included, we kind of thought the same things before we began looking into it.
I do believe that homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but if you’re considering it, I encourage you to keep digging. My wife and I still question it sometimes (which is totally normal), but the further we get into it, the more confident we feel about our decision.
So why are we homeschooling?
If you read my post, “The system is broken…“, you probably have a good understanding as to where I stand on the traditional path we’re told to follow in order to achieve success in life. And like the famous quote says, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. So why send my kids to have a similar experience (if not worse given the degradation in the effectiveness of public schools) and expect them to avoid the same pitfalls?
To be honest, there’s no one, clear-cut, definitive reason for why we’re homeschooling our kids – but there are many reasons why we’re excited about it.
Without even knowing, perhaps the seed was planted after we pulled out of our daycare plan with our first child, at six months old. We were doing what we thought we were supposed to be doing. Have a kid, take some time out of work, line up daycare, and then get back to our life as it was.
It just felt wrong.
Who are these strangers that we’re supposed to be entrusting with the most precious thing either of us have ever experienced in our lives? Why do they get the privilege of spending their time with our child while we go sit behind a desk and work all day.
And I think that’s really the crux of it.
My wife and I saw being parents as a privilege.
Our lives had changed when we started a family, and we didn’t want it to go back to the way it was.
There were certainly some factors that helped us make the decision along the way.
We weren’t making a ton of money – we didn’t have these golden handcuff-type jobs where the money was too good to walk away from. My wife’s salary was pretty much going to just pay for daycare. Of course if she stayed on, eventually she could earn above what daycare costs, but we also weren’t necessarily attached to our jobs either. We both worked for the same company and enjoyed the people we worked with, but these weren’t our dream job situations.
So my wife left work, and we bailed on daycare.
I returned to the office, enjoying pictures and videos she would send throughout the day, and while I wished I was there with them, it was such a relief to know that our child was safe at home with his mom. There was no daily stress of packing kids up and rushing for drop off. No worries about being late to work and if it was ok to leave early for pick up. No fumbling of schedules as to who’s turn it was, or what meetings popped up at the last second, throwing all the plans off… my wife was home, and our child was happy to be there with her.
And something amazing happened through the years of being home with our children…. my wife really loved being a mom. She would read books on child development and parenting, and learned about all these really cool activities she could do with our kids to help them learn and grow. She would cook delicious, wholesome meals, filled with foods that neither of us ever ate until we were adults. It felt great to know that our kids were truly being taken care of… physically, mentally, and emotionally.
At this point, homeschooling wasn’t even on our radar yet, but we were getting closer to kindergarten for our oldest son. We started paying more attention to what our nieces and nephews were saying about school and how they felt about it. We were listening to other parents discuss the good, the bad, and everything in between with the public schools. And we even had a family friend who worked at the school sharing her experience as well, having raised her own kids (now adults) through the same school system.
Almost all of it gave us pause. I started getting one of those – “what the hell are we doing here?!” pits in my stomach.
Some of what we heard:
- If you send kids to school with healthy food, they won’t eat it.
- The cafeteria food is garbage
- Classrooms are crowded
- Constant disturbances in the classrooms without discipline
- Cell phones in class at disturbingly young age
- Academically, children are more scattered within the same grade levels, meaning the disparity between high-achieving and low-achieving students has widened
- Teaching to the middle due to standardized testing
The worst part of the list above? We’re in a really good school district.
So we started asking ourselves, what’s really the point of sending our kids to school?
Our oldest son was definitely ahead of schedule as far as other kids around his age. He was comfortable talking with adults, always very curious with lots of questions, and loved learning and doing lessons at home. Would school stunt his growth if he was ahead of schedule? Also, we didn’t need to send him somewhere so we could both go back to work, so why not keep him home?
We weren’t interested in raising straight-A students.
We wanted to raise strong, healthy, fun-loving, well-adjusted human beings, with kindness in their hearts and a lifelong love of learning.
Well what about friends? How are they going to meet other kids if they don’t go to school?
My wife and I each have a great group of friends that we made from our grade school days. We feel very fortunate to have stayed close to our friends through all these years. But we have no idea how we would have met people other than through school since it’s all we knew. But these friends of ours have all started having kids relatively around the same time, and through our own friend group, our kids have become really close. They see each other at least once a week and go to the park. We go bowling as families, or go to the arcade. We celebrate holidays together. It’s a lot of fun.
And I realized something… these kids have better friends than I did growing up already.
I think an important thing to realize is that your kids are going to take their cues on how to interact with others from whoever they spend their time with and attach to. If they spend the majority of their time with their parents who are friendly and social, they will learn how to interact in a similar manner. If they spend the majority of their time with a kid who makes the class laugh by making fart sounds (can’t blame him) they’re going to think that’s what you need to do to make friends.
Recently my wife found a really great homeschooling cohort that does weekly meetups. They go on hikes, and read books, and do fun lessons. They get to play at the park and meet other kids in the group. One night I was getting my oldest to bed and he was beaming, telling me all about the friends he made at his science lesson that day. He paused at one point in his story and said something along the lines of, “oh man… we should have gotten his number!”. He was pumped to make a new friend, and he looks forward to seeing him at the meetup each week.
And these meetups are great because the parents are there too. It’s not one teacher to 30 kids, It’s one teacher to 20-30 kids, of all different ages, and at least one of their parents for each of them. Think of how comforting and helpful it is for these young children to navigate learning and making friends with the help of a trusted loved one. If a child is having a particularly tough day, a meltdown doesn’t derail the whole group, the parent will simply help that child and maybe even just call it a day. If children are having a hard time sharing, of course they need to learn how to navigate those situations on their own, but they have someone there to celebrate when they handle it correctly, and a loved one to offer feedback when they don’t. I see these interactions as invaluable in building a strong foundation in children.
This is a long way of saying there are plenty of ways to meet other kids. If they choose to get into team sports or other group activities, there will be even more opportunities as well. And don’t forget, going to public school doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to come out a charismatic, social butterfly. Plenty of kids I went to school with wanted nothing to do with the other students.
One of my favorite things that I’m seeing right now is that my kids are becoming really great friends with each other too. Instead of my oldest going off for a whole day without his brothers, making completely new friends and starting his own life that doesn’t involve them – they get to do this together. My oldest is still meeting other kids and making friends, but they’re doing it as a family, and I’m very interested to see how close my boys stay together through the years because of this.
But one of my biggest hopes for homeschooling, is that my kids will be able to really find their passion in life. Homeschooling allows for the flexibility to lean into something they take a real interest in. There will be no bell to tell them that music time is over, or the book they’re reading needs to go away. If outside play is what they want to do for that whole day, we have the flexibility to do it.
I don’t want them to think that a 9-5 desk job is the goal in life. It’s can certainly be a means to an end, and even a great way to make some money, but there is so much more life to be had out there.
Parents will talk about all the great moments that will be missed if their kids don’t attend school, but when I think of all the opportunities to explore the world outside of the classroom, while everyone is stuck behind a desk, to me – it doesn’t even compare.
Have you thought about homeschooling? What are some of the things holding you back?
For those that either are homeschooling or were homeschooled themselves, is there any advice you would share?
