Homeschooling Is Hard, But Not That Hard!

Homeschooling is hard, but then, so is parenting. If you are even close to being a decent parent, you are already doing most of the things a homeschooler does. If you are brave enough to take the plunge, it’s likely you will find that homeschooling fine-tunes your parenting skills, helps you understand how your children think and strengthens your relationship with them. Most homeschoolers who stick it out for a year or two find themselves on the other side of the fence: Sending their children to a traditional school seems like the harder education option.

 If you have a child in a traditional school, the likelihood is that you are already spending as much time or more than the typical homeschool parent spends on educating a child. How can that be? A child in a typical school has to be readied for school every morning, then there’s transport, homework after-school, extra-curricular activities, etc., not to mention all the stress caused by doing these things when the child is tired and overstimulated. I know, I know! If you’ve been educated in the traditional school setting, you probably envision teaching as 6 hours a day of standing in front of a classroom lecturing, with an additional 1-3 hours making lesson plans and grading papers.

Education doesn’t have to be that hard. A traditional school requires 6-8 hours a day including homework and extra-curricular activities, but only an average of 20% of this time is actually spent learning. The rest is spent on organizational and disciplinary matters.  It takes much less time to teach a few children than a class of 20 or 30. The typical homeschool student spends 1-3 hours on schoolwork a day and the typical homeschool parent is only actively engaged in the educational process for a fraction of that time.

“But!” you protest, “Even if it doesn’t take that much time, I don’t know enough to teach my kids everything they need to know!” YOU DON’T HAVE TO! Teaching in traditional schools is based on experts dispensing their knowledge to the unlearned. It is rooted in a time when there was no internet and even books and paper were in short supply. Knowledge was passed from person to person through parents or mentors. If there wasn’t someone knowledgeable about a subject near, learning it was unlikely. Our current school system is an outgrowth of the apprenticeship or college model that followed parental education for most children. We’ve expanded and expanded it until even pre-schoolers are often expected to learn in a manner that worked well for older teens in ages past.

A parent today, who is homeschooling, doesn’t have to be an expert in anything because her role is to help her children learn how to seek out and learn what they need and want to know. There are a multitude of sources of games, books, articles, documentaries, and educational materials out there that can be accessed to help you and your children learn what you need and want to know. The only requirement for a homeschool parent to be a good teacher is the desire to learn what you need to in order to help your child learn! If you do a good job, the likelihood is that your kids will take off on their own and learn about all sorts of things that you have no clue about.

Then there’s the matter of money. Traditional schools spend thousands of dollars every year per student. But homeschooling can cost as much or as little as you choose to spend. The average cost per student/year for homeschoolers is around $500, but many, many families whittle that down to less than they would spend on school fees by using libraries and the internet. Personally, I spent less than $50/year teaching all three of my kids. They did as well or better than their public school counterparts. I also had to work full-time outside the home for many of those years, but my kids can all read, write, and figure out complicated math problems well enough to do their jobs excellently.

Homeschooling, like parenting, will grow you up! It will take a little more self-discipline, a little more organization, and a little more patience, but all those are things we all need anyway. What better way to develop them than loving on your kids? You will learn how your kids think, what motivates them, what makes their eyes shine … in ways you never would if they go to a traditional school. Not only that, but you aren’t going to have to deal with all the negative socialization that comes with the structure of a traditional school. All the studies point to the fact that adults who were homeschooled for more than 1 year not only do better academically, but they have better self-esteem, are better suited for college, have better employment records, better marriages, and are more likely to be successful entrepreneurs!  It’s worth the effort!

Homeschooling takes a major paradigm shift. It’s a shift away from the rigid industrialized education model back to the home-based parental model that dominated education until 150 years ago. It’s a shift toward a more personal, individual educational model that fits your child instead of forcing your child to fit the system.  It will take a while, a year … maybe even three, but once it’s made, you, like many other homeschoolers will look at the traditional school model and think, “That’s just too hard!”