Certainly a benefit of home schooling is the flexibility and control it gives the parent with their child’s education; both academically and morally. One of the biggest reasons for the constant rise in homeschooling is the continual failure of the public schools to provide the attention to detail in their academic studies.
As a parent you are a recipient of the benefit of homeschooling wherein you are the parent, the teacher, and the administrator of your child’s educational track.
Once you begin to consider the benefits of homeschooling, you should also keep in mind some of the basic challenges and opportunities as well.
First, I can’t begin to tell you the amount of time commitment homeschooling requires. Remember you will wear many hats in your child’s educational programming… and still have to put on your parent’s hat at the end of the day and many times work on their homework with them and enrichment activities in the evenings. You must have a high level of energy and endurance as a homeschooling parent. And this may sound strange, but you really must love to be around your kids every waking hour of the day. This is a big commitment of your time and life. Talk together as a family about home schooling. Talk honestly. Talk to other families that are fully entrenched in home schooling. To put it simply the freedom of home schooling comes with major commitment of your time.
Home school resources and home school information: Resources and information about homeschooling are vast. The internet and online sources are abundant. Your local library can be a real gem for books and videos on the subject of home schooling. Before you commit, take the time to research.
Home Schooling Financial Considerations: Home schooling parents use many resources and are quite creative with their resources. Some can be rather expensive and some are free. Once you begin making contacts with other homeschooling parents, many times you can borrow and even swap homeschooling materials to help defray the actual costs. Again, resources are vast and don’t forget about your public library. Even if you don’t have
Also, in many cases, when parents decide to homeschool it means giving up or severely cutting back on one of the two salaries. Be sure to crunch the numbers with your spouse and get started mapping out a family budget. The job of a homeschooling parent can be stressful, don’t add unnecessary financial stress to your day as well.
Legal Considerations For Home Schooling: Home schooling is legal in all 50 states. Some state’s requirements are quite simple and some are not. A good way to get started investigating your area in to go to our web page that has an overview of all the state’s various homeschooling laws and regs.
College Considerations For Home Schooling: You may be looking down the road a bit and wondering about homeschooling and college ramifications. I would simply suggest that you make contact with any universities you may be looking at, and get a head start on what their academic and testing requirements are. Today, with the growing number of homeschool families, colleges are becoming more and more receptive to homeschooled kids and are offering a wide variety of opportunities.
I can unequivocally vouch for the fact that there is a definite benefit to home schooling. It’s a wonderful journey as long as you don’t go into with blinders. Make it a family decision and a family commitment.
