Is homeschooling right for me?
Manisha Snoyer is the co-founder of Modulo.app, a new project to support and empower parents interested in playing a more active role in their child’s education.
You’re considering homeschooling — maybe the idea excites you or perhaps it’s a last resort idea. But you’ve got a few big questions: Will my child make friends? Will my child learn? Am I going to have to put up a blackboard in my kitchen and sit with my child all day teaching them math? Let’s find out.
The reasons to consider homeschooling
Ever since I was a child, I knew that if I had a child one day, the most important thing for me would be that my child loved learning. I knew that if they loved to learn and were free to learn and explore the world at their own pace, all the rest would follow. But if they hated school, it would all fall apart.
Finding a decent education isn’t always an easy win for a US parent. Social anxiety, bullying, racism, sexism, school violence, standardized testing, special needs, overcrowded classrooms, the elimination of arts and science programs are just a few of the big concerns for many American parents. Parents with gifted children may find that their children’s interest in learning is waning and they are not able to reach their full potential in a classroom setting.
Special needs
1 in 6 children are diagnosed with dyslexia. It is estimated 5–7% have dyscalculia. About 1 in 59 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) And may others suffer from sensory processing disorders. And we struggle mightily to accommodate the vast differences in learning styles and social needs in our classrooms.
Remote and flexible work
As more parents are adopting a flexible (and sometime remote) work schedule, the 8–3pm school schedule has become increasingly less convenient and helpful for covering childcare needs- and parents are searching for alternative ways to educate their children and spend more quality time as a family when they’re not at work.
The homeschooling myth
When the average parent considers homeschooling, the mental image that most often pops into mind is a parent spending all day with their child at a table in the kitchen drilling math exercises and helping them memorize history facts.
The new homeschooler: secular, savvy, innovative
In fact, this is very far from the reality of the homeschooler today. Increasing number of families are traveling the world with their children, using innovative online curricula, encouraging them to pursue their own interests with fascinating hands-on multi-disciplinary projects and collaborating with other parents and local experts to share skills and research innovative ways of teaching.
The biggest concern many parents have when considering homeschooling is that their child won’t make friends. This is actually the easiest myth to dispel after 20 minutes with a homeschool meetup group. Homeschoolers are highly social. And with 2.2 million US children homeschooling, almost every big city has several diverse, inclusive, very welcoming, secular homeschool meetup groups that go on field trips, share skills and resources. And if there isn’t one in your smaller town, it’s relatively simple to get one started by hosting a meetup yourself and posting it to the local parent group.
With the opportunity to mix and mingle with children of all ages, homeschooling provides a much more healthy and enriching social atmosphere than a traditional classroom setting. More village-like than the typical parent group, homeschool groups often share childcare and support each other in other ways. They often include a really fascinating, diverse mix of people who have really innovative ideas about learning and are excited to share them. With lots of talent in the group, you can enjoy free classes from other parents ranging from coding to woodworking to theater. To find a group near you, it’s as simple as joining a nationwide group like SEA homeschoolers and asking if there is a group (or other homeschoolers) in your city.
Learning should also not be a big concern for a parent considering this path. Due to the prevalence of MOOCS (Massive Open Online courses), your child can learn any subject online in a way that is ideally tailored to their learning style and can accommodate any special needs.
In this day and age, with so much information available online, the role of the teacher has changed a lot. While teachers used to have to store a lot of information in their heads and pass this information into kids’ heads, now with all information available on the internet, they can be facilitators of finding knowledge, rather than the “delivery guys” of knowledge. In a classroom setting, most of the teacher’s job is managing behavior and unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of extra time to customize learning.
Some parents considering homeschooling are concerned that they don’t have formal teaching training. But your advantage as a parent is that you can customize learning to ideally fit your child’s needs and there are limitless tools to support you, including teachers and learning specialists. There are entire apps and websites like Khan Academy your children can use on their own without help to learn any subject. Likewise, there are a myriad of assessment tools available to ensure your child is at (or beyond) their grade level in all subjects. Children learn so much faster 1–1 than in a big classroom setting where the main concern of the teacher (who is generally very gifted, passionate and extremely well educated) is often keeping everyone at grade level, rather than helping gifted students advance or customizing learning to each child’s learning style and interests. This is in fact the biggest frustration of many brilliant teachers who enter the profession with the most noble intentions and best ideas and leave frustrated by how little wiggle room they have to make a real difference. Find more curriculum, assessment tools and learn about mastery learning here.
Do I have to spend all day alone with my kid?
This is probably the biggest and most valid concern about homeschooling (and early childhood too, by the way), but I can address this as well.Most homeschoolers spend 20 minutes/day to 2 hours a day teaching their children academic skills. If your child is self-directed, it might be none. As a result homeschoolers are performing 30% higher than their peers nationally on tests. Because the parents are using 1–1 instruction, children need much less time studying than they do in a typical classroom setting.
In terms of the rest of the day, a lot depends on your child. Different techniques parents use to resolve this problem involve swapping days with other parents, starting a co-op, enrolling ina hybrid school, homeschool resource center or a forest school and giving their children lots of time to play and learn independently. You can also hire a teacher or babysitter or share childcare with other families.
The key thing here to know is that this is a childcare problem, not a learning problem — and you might ask yourself how well school is solving this problem to begin with. Is the 5 am or 6 am wake up call for school where you frantically get your kid ready, drop them off or put them on a bus until you have to pick them up at 2:30 or send them to aftercare solving this problem better for you than customizing your own childcare schedule to ideally suit your family’s needs?
And then, there are the parents who really like hanging with their kids, who want to spend more time with them than just a quick dinner, bath and bed, to enjoy this precious childhood, teach them what they know, the values they care about, enjoy the moments and not feel rushed and who are excited and able to make more time for this. It’s not always easy with two working parents, but it is possible and increasing number of families are choosing remote and flexible work to do just that.
If you’re interested in learning more about this path and seeing if it could be a good fit for your family, I strongly encourage you to check out some of the big homeschool groups like SEA or World Schoolers and feel free to be in touch. You can find my contact information on modulo.app.
