Homeschooling is when children’s education is based at home with their parents’ guidance rather than through enrollment in a public school or private school. That said, the insider joke is, “Homeschooling isn’t much like school, and we’re never home.”  That’s because many homeschoolers find emulating classroom approaches to education is not as effective as the home-grown version, and in many places, there are lots of opportunities for homeschooled kids to learn with friends and out in the community.

The many benefits of homeschooling mean more kids and teens than ever are learning at home. Families want the advantages of homeschooling, with the flexibility, academic benefits, efficiency, and opportunities homeschooling can offer. They seek an education and even a lifestyle that’s not based on minimum standards and a one-size-fits-all approach.  

• Academic flexibility. Homeschooling can work whether a child is ahead, behind, strong-willed, creative, challenging, quiet, gifted, or active.
• Parent choice of pace and approach. You’re in charge of the schedule, grade level, learning approach, curriculum, and in most places, even graduation requirements.
• Meeting current needs now. You can prioritize a child’s mental, emotional, behavioral, and physical health.
• Warm family environment.  Family is the best foundation for social development as well as values and faith development.
• Community involvement. There’s generous time for service, community activities, volunteering, and entrepreneurship.
• Efficient learning. A low student-teacher ratio, without wasted time and busy work.
• Meaningful learning. Avoid teaching to the test, testing mania in general, and arbitrary minimal standards.
• Time for the stuff many schools cut. You can make time for play, the outdoors, projects, the arts, and real experiments.
• Getting into college. A great transcript with less stress and burnout.
• Accommodating to special situations. Homeschooling works well for military families, families who travel, and families contending with illness and challenging work schedules.
• Legal acceptance. Homeschooling is a way of meeting compulsory attendance laws in every state in the U.S. and in many countries.

Homeschooling Benefits: More Than Just Academics

There are obvious academic benefits of homeschooling, but potential homeschoolers may not have thought of the many other areas in which families can reap homeschooling benefits, including:

• benefits in mental health
• benefits in social development
• benefits in physical health
• benefits in special circumstances
• and even homeschooling benefits for parents!

Benefits of Homeschooling: Academic

• Customize for your kid. A benefit of homeschooling is the ability to customize homeschooling for all kinds of kids. There are ways to tailor homeschooling for kids who are behind, kids who are gifted or advanced, kids who have ADD/ADHD, and kids who have special needs. You can customize for your child’s learning styles and preferences.
• Choose what works. Another benefit of homeschooling is parental choice in the basic elements of education. You can choose your own curriculum and resources, helping your child learn different subjects or from different viewpoints. You can help your child learn at the level she is ready for rather than being locked into an arbitrary grade level. She could even be at one level for reading and a different level for math. You can homeschool according to a schedule that works best for your child and your family. In most states, parents can even set their own graduation requirements, helping teens prepare for work, a creative life, or college with high school years that make sense for that individual child. You can also even find benefits to starting homeschooling in the high school years.
• Create efficient, effective learning. A benefit of homeschooling is its efficiency and effectiveness. With a low student-teacher ratio, little time is wasted during the day standing in lines or waiting for others to finish. You can choose from a variety of homeschooling styles or approaches. You can help your child with contextual learning or by pursuing passions. Many parents find interest-led learning leads to developing skills and knowledge across all academic areas.  Rather than focusing on weaknesses in a way that can make a child lose confidence, a benefit of homeschooling is strengths-based learning. Parents can build inquiry-based learning into their days, helping kids grow their critical thinking, which is a huge benefit of homeschooling. Yet, you don’t have to have an education degree or be “a teacher” to homeschool well; as the parent, you’re the expert on what your child needs.
• Differentiate from school. Another benefit of homeschooling is that you can take advantage of the fact that homeschooling is different from school. Parents can value individual potential rather than school-based minimum standards, and they can get away from public education’s focus on standardized testing. Parents can also shape homeschooling so that learning is in tune with what we actually know about child development. We know that young children learn best through play, and we know that children develop on their own timetables. Sometimes children benefit from homeschooling with an emphasis on later academics. One of homeschooling’s benefits is that children can continue to build content knowledge even during a lag in skill development. There are so many school things homeschoolers do not have to do, which is a big advantage of homeschooling. Many parents do not use testing or grading, or at least not until the high school years.
• Focus on life skills. Solid preparation for adult life is an additional benefit of homeschooling. Spending more time in a household provides more time for the everything from learning to cook to learning to budget. Parents can make “adulting” part of living and learning.
• Extreme achievement or passion. A teen who is training as an Olympic athlete or dedicated to another all-consuming interest may find a homeschool schedule more compatible with her training and intensity.
• Getting into college. Teens can effectively prep for college with good homeschool transcripts for admission and with less burnout on busy work. Homeschooled students benefit by standing out for college admissions just by having had a different experience, but also because they may have had opportunities to follow their interests in a deep way.
• Preparing for a vocation or entrepreneurship. Teens who want to go directly to work can focus on vocational training, sometimes even starting with informal apprenticeships or mentorships during the high school years. Many teens also gain entrepreneurial experience while they’re young, and they can transfer that business experience to post-high school start-ups.

Benefits of Homeschooling: Mental Health

• Focus on mental health. If a child is struggling with anxiety, social anxiety, depression, or challenges to brain health, a benefit of homeschooling is the opportunity to focus on mental and emotional well-being. Parents can make therapy, coping skills, and medical care the priority, which will then enable the academic growth they hope to see in their child.
• Get out of a bad situation. Sometimes mental health issues may be connected to negative school situations, and an advantage of homeschooling is getting a child out of that bad school situation. This could mean safety from bullies, a reduction in school-induced stress, a new lens on school refusal, and greater self-acceptance and connection to self. A benefit of homeschooling is that you can choose to homeschool short-term to create a better situation for your child.
• Encourage autonomy and independence. Studies show that a huge factor in effective learning is a strong sense of autonomy, and a benefit of homeschooling is cultivating children’s autonomy. Homeschooled kids can help make choices about how and what they want to learn. They can learn around their interests and curiosity and not just for a grade or to please a teacher. In fact, parents can choose to avoid or reduce the emphasis on behavior modification that is so prevalent in schools, helping children to develop intrinsic motivation, a common benefit of homeschooling.
• Immerse children in caring families. One of the classic mental health benefits of homeschooling is just being at home, surrounded by people who care.

Benefits of Homeschooling: Social Development

• Enjoy close family relationships. Growing up in a close family helps build healthy social connections. Parents, grandparents, and other relatives are role models, can impart values, can work through conflicts positively, and can coach behavior.
• Foster less peer dependence. Less early exposure to drugs, alcohol, sexual activity, and bullying.
• Help deal with difference and stereotypes. More acceptance of the nerd factor, families can accept strong girls and sensitive boys, less stigma for kids with learning differences, can avoid attending schools where racial division or prejudice is entrenched.
• Emphasize community involvement. Time for volunteering, voting with mom and dad, and participating in community activities with peers and people of all ages and backgrounds. Homeschooling lets you homeschool the heart and hands as well as the head.
• Build a sense of safety. Parents can take their own steps to keep their children physically safe, and children can feel secure.

Benefits of Homeschooling: Physical Health

• Prioritize moving more. Your child can move more, play outside, spend extra time on things like dance and sports, connect with nature, move while learning academics, and gain confidence with time for skills practice.
• Prioritize sleep. Allow your child and yourself to get more sleep and wake up more naturally. Plan sleep schedules around activities. Adjust to teens’ changing body clocks when they stay up later and sleep later.
• Manage illness. Help a child recover from illness with reasonable expectations, no busy work, and less stress from being told he’s “getting behind.” It’s ok for healing, recovery, and coping to be most important!

Benefits of Homeschooling: Special Life Circumstances

Homeschooling can work to ease the way for families who are:

• In the military. Instead of changing schools frequently due to relocations, you can keep homeschooling no matter how many times you move.
• Experiencing illness of parent, sibling, or grandparent. Sometimes it’s more important to emphasize spending time together than doing lessons. Sometimes families work better when school and medical schedules don’t conflict. Sometimes homeschooling needs to happen in Mom or Dad’s bed.
• Allowing grief to progress naturally. When the most painful circumstances arise, homeschooling can allow a family the time and space to grieve and heal together, in their own unique way.
• Living a unique lifestyle. Some people are roadschooling or boatschooling with the kids; some families have one parent living away or traveling, and kids can join them sometimes. Some parents work shifts or attend college or grad school and are able to spend more time with their children by homeschooling on a schedule that works for them.

Benefits of Homeschooling: for Parents

There are even benefits of homeschooling for parents.

• Continuing education. You can continue learning alongside your child. Learn a foreign language, brush up on algebra, rediscover maps of the world, learn to code, visit museums, and enjoy field trips.
• Sharing your hobbies and interests. You can share your own passions with your kids more than if they were attending school full-time. Hike the Appalachian Trail, study the constellations, share your knowledge of home construction or investing, play music together, work together on political or social causes.
• Saving money. Some aspects of homeschooling can be less expensive than school: fewer expensive school clothes, off-season vacation and travel rates, no public school fees or private school tuition. Some parents spend a lot of money on homeschooling; others homeschool on a budget.
• Freedom from a school schedule. Homeschooling means you’re not tied to the timing of the school bus or school schedule. Plan your homeschooling schedule so it works for your family. You can homeschool at night, on any kind of weekly schedule, or any kind of yearly schedule.
• Personal growth. Because it’s an immersive experience with your children and it’s taking total responsibility for their education, homeschooling can change you. Parents can grow in philosophical, spiritual, or social-emotional ways. Some people find homeschooling can be a source of personal empowerment, a shared journey where you and others recognize the value, labor, and challenge of nurturing children and helping them learn.

Of course, despite all the benefits of homeschooling, there is no homeschool guarantee. Kids are kids, and some kids who go to school have challenges, just as some kids who homeschool have challenges. There are thousands upon thousands of homeschoolers around the world, and their homeschooling experiences and outcomes vary, just as happens with children who are enrolled in schools.

It’s also possible to homeschool poorly, though perceptions of what good homeschooling looks like may be uninformed or inaccurate. One of the advantages of homeschooling that people forget about is that you can quit homeschooling if it doesn’t work for your family.

While homeschooling is not for every family, people from all walks of life in many different circumstances have found ways to incorporate the benefits of homeschooling into their lives.

The yellow legal pad had a line down the middle: the pros and cons of homeschooling were written on opposite sides of the blue-inked vertical line. Not content with that, I flipped to the next page and drew another line down the middle: pros of public school to the left and cons of school to the right.

July is the decision point. 

Are you really going to start homeschooling?

Are you really going to continue homeschooling? Even though it’s time for middle school? Or high school? Or you’re having a baby? Or going back to work? Or moving? Or divorcing?

Are you going to change your homeschool curriculum? Try something more relaxed? More structured? More economical? More hands-on? More interest-led? More standards-based?

Are you going to stop homeschooling and send your child to school?

Pros and Cons of Homeschooling, Public Schooling, New Curriculum . . .

This is the month of hard choices for many parents who are considering the best way to educate their children. Everyone is looking for evidence of the effectiveness of various education strategies, writing out lists of pros and cons—of homeschooling, of specific curriculum, of going to public school, of unschooling.

• Homeschooling provides a more flexible schedule, but school feels like it is more of a sure thing.
• School takes children away from home for a tremendous amount of time, but homeschooling takes a tremendous amount of parental time and energy. Still, from the kids’ point of view, homeschooling is efficient.
• Homeschooling allows for building close family relationships, but school is where people say your kids will make friends.
• Interest-led learning is more engaging to your kids, but traditional homeschool courses so neatly fill those spots on the homeschool transcript.
• Public high school can provide all those great high school experiences, but public high school provides a setting for so many risky high school experiences.

Sometimes the pros and cons of homeschooling don’t talk to us in ways that make decisions clear. We feel muddled, uncertain, gripped by anxiety that we won’t choose well for our children. I get it. I hear from people like Cheryl, who wrote to me asking, “Help! Should I homeschool?”

And, by the way, doing a trial of homeschooling over the summer may or may not be helpful in the decision-making process.

Make the School Choice You Can Get Behind

In her TED Talk “How to Make Hard Choices,” philosopher Ruth Chang says,

Fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It’s a mistake to think (that) in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we’re too stupid to know which. (It’s a mistake to think that) since we’re too stupid to know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they’re hard because there is no best option.

Chang says that people frequently try to compare alternative choices, see them as being on par with one another, and end up choosing what seems like the safest option.

She suggests that when we’re in this situation, a more satisfying option is to make the choice you can get behind.

When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that (kind of person), we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. We become the authors of our own lives. . . . Hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition.

What will you get behind during this decision-making time?

There is no one right answer for every family.

Making a Schooling Change

If you’re leaving homeschooling behind, if you’re leaving public schooling behind, if you’re sculpting a new way of homeschooling because your curriculum is not working, may you not make the decision because of reasons that were brought to you, but because of, as Chang says, “the power to create reasons for yourself.”

Be the author of your own life.

Deschooling is the adjustment period a child goes through when leaving school and beginning homeschooling. To fully benefit from homeschooling, a child has to let go of the private or public school culture as the norm. This is called deschooling, and it is a crucial part of beginning homeschooling after a period of time spent in a classroom.  If you have recently started homeschooling, you may see some challenging or confusing attitudes and behaviors from your child. This is completely normal for a child that is used to a private or public school setting. Our tips for deschooling will make the process much easier for your child (and you!), but helping your child navigate this new definition of school is only part of deschooling.

If your child is struggling or needs help navigating the transition, here are some suggestions that may help:

1. Take it slow. Things may need to slow down for a while as you switch gears, but you’ll build up momentum in time. It takes time to settle into a new way of doing things, especially when the change is a big one. Follow your child’s lead for a while.
2. Celebrate every day! Each day moves you to new possibilities, greater health and healing, and a stronger sense of togetherness as a family. Be thankful together for these wonderful opportunities.
3. Be flexible in your expectations. Home learning almost never looks the way you might have imagined. Each day might be very different from the one before. In trying out new things, you can eliminate what doesn’t work while finding what does. Roll with the unexpected and see where it takes you.
4. Ask your child what matters most to them. Honor the differences and similarities that feel most important to your child as you define a new approach to learning. Ask them what they disliked about their previous situation, and create a more comfortable way of doing things as you move forward.
5. Remember the reasons you opted for home learning. Together with your child, make a list of all of the things that led you to take this journey. On days when you feel at odds with your decision, look at this list to remember and affirm why you made this choice. Some days will undoubtedly be challenging; consider how they compare to the challenges you left behind. Give yourselves tremendous credit for moving in this new direction.
6. Allow your child to help drive the change. Give them as much ownership as possible. Invite your child to list the things that are most important to them to have as a part of their homeschooling experience. Maybe they want to be allowed to sleep as late as they need to each day, or study on the floor instead of at a desk, or choose the order of their subjects each day. Let them help in differentiating this new adventure from their previous experiences.
7. Make comfort a priority. Change is hard! Help buffer that stress with comfort measures. Make room for plenty of rest and relaxation. Comfort may mean something different for each family member, so talk openly about what you need and how you can support each other in getting it.
8. Offer safe space for your child’s feelings. Allow your child to talk frankly about their fears/worries/frustrations. They may be grieving the things they liked about school even as they are relieved to leave behind the things they didn’t like. Listen supportively as they process their feelings.
9. Get support for yourself. Find someone to lean on and process your own feelings with, preferably someone who is open-minded about educational choices and who is not in your household. If you need help finding like-minded support, look on social media for homeschooling groups and lists.
10. Keep your sense of humor! Laugh together as a family. Laugh at your mistakes and misunderstandings. Acknowledge limitations with a wink and a smile. Keep your attitude light and positive, and chances are good that your child will follow your example.
11. Acknowledge all kinds of progress. Celebrate your child’s good effort and positive attitude just as much as a correct answer or a passing test score. Even a more open curiosity about the world and a greater willingness to ask questions is worth celebrating! As your family adjusts and embraces a new rhythm, give yourselves a pat on the back for making it happen.
12. You are the expert on your own child! Even if you’ve never done this sort of thing before, you can trust your instincts about what your child needs. You might consult with others who are experienced and encouraging, and you might seek support in areas where you have more to learn. But you know your child better than anyone else, so let your heart guide you!

What you may not realize is that parents also need to deschool.

Just as your child has preconceptions regarding what school is supposed to look like, so do you. As a new homeschool parent (or even an experienced one with a child that recently started homeschooling), you will also be finding your new homeschool normal, and parental deschooling will help you get out of the school mindset and adjust to homeschooling in this new situation. 

Although the idea of getting ready to start homeschooling can be overwhelming, know that you can do it. Learning takes place all the time, and just as your child learned to walk and talk with you as their teacher, they can continue to learn at home in a relaxed, loving environment.

The most important thing to know about homeschooling is that it is not public school at home. As Rebecca Capuano says in her post about the differences between public school and home education, “It is a completely different way of thinking about education, and a completely different way of approaching education. It is teaching tailored specifically to individual children rather than according to a standardized set of guidelines or curriculum for the masses. And because of this individualization, home education is effective by virtue of the fact that it does not have to look like the public school classroom.”