31–40 of 424 posts
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?".
That would probably be a good reason not to homeschool ! Though you could certainly mentor your friends’ kids! I believe we can all take part in educating the next generation whether we are parents or not !
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 o…
Edit: this[0] is not the study but shows something similar
> Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, adopted children become more like their biological parents, and to the same degree as children and parents in control families
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.199...
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.
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'.
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.
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.
We could always--always--tell which kids were the homeschooled kids.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s definitely a problem. And even in the US families can face problems. I know great homeschool families in nys who had social services called on them by a neighbor. And many of the African American teens in our community have been stopped on the streets for “truancy” when they’d legally registered to homeschool.
Why is that a problem?
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 o…
How much can a parent even affect their children? I remember studies of adopted children showing it was little. Edit: this[0] is not the study but shows something similar > Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, adopted children become more like their biological parents, and to the sa…
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.
In my experience, the relationship developed with non-family adults at school is a narrow, one-sided relationship, where non-family adults are authority figures, rather than say, mentors, strangers, or even friends. Having this skill is still important but the one-sidedness can warp a kid's perception of what adults "are", so it's important to develop adult relationships outside of the school setting.
Also, your first sentence seems true to me, but I assume home-schoolers aren't always at home -- they can meet with other groups of home-schooled kids, or join groups related to sports, activities, etc. This, of course, largely depends on the parents.
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 lo…
The only situation in which I'd consider homeschooling my child is if it was in the daily, sustained company of other families and involved parents. Skill-building aside: seeing other kids at the playground once a week doesn't even begin to take the edge off the loneliness.