Why Homeschool?
“Ha?” (Mock horror expression) “Why?”

“You know what?” (With a know-it-all air) “Your child will have socialization issues.”

(Silence) Then, “What’s homeschool?”

We get different reactions when we tell people, especially parents, that we are going to homeschool our child.  But here are the primary reasons why we decided to homeschool our son. The list as to why we now want to homeschool our son has grown quite long during our research, and especially after we talked to parents who also homeschooled their children. These reasons are mentioned in my blogs “Why Homeschool?” and “Studies on Homeschooling“. Here, however, I will talk about the initial reasons why we considered homeschooling RD.

1. Logistics
The decision to homeschool our child did not come upon a whim. Before we ever thought of homeschool, we were bringing our four children to school. However, our three older kids eventually graduated from high school and went off to college in another city. We live around 30 kilometers from the nearest town where the schools are, and it was actually no big deal when we were bringing the four of them there. Now that our family’s topology had changed, it became increasingly difficult and impractical for us to be ferrying our son everyday to and from school in the morning and in the afternoon – that’s 120 kilometers in all, every day for five (5) days! Two (2) weeks into this process, and we decided this wasn’t working for us. Instead of us being able to do stuff we’d planned for a day, our day revolved around the times when our son would have to go to school and when he’d have to come home. It was always a struggle to think about who was available to bring him to school or pick him up.

2. Stressed-Out Child
Our son is currently attending Grade 1, and has to stay in school all day.  By the time he gets into the car, a few minutes into the ride home, he’s already sound asleep. As a result, he sleeps late at night – having already slept on the way home. It is a constant struggle to have to wake him up at 6am in the morning to take a shower, eat breakfast and get ready for school. As a result, we have a cranky, crying little boy being forced to go to school. Plus, it takes 30 minutes to get to his school, more if there are a lot of cars on the road. During the ride to town, RD falls asleep again, and so he has to be woken up and the vicious cycle of crying starts again. This was always the case for the last three years he had attended Nursery, Kindergarten I and then Kindergarten II. We hated that we were putting such pressure on him.

The decision to homeschool our son was not taken lightly. We studied all the pros and cons through communications or conversations with homeschool parents, through books, and through research in the internet. The pros far outweighed the cons (and were even irrelevant at this point) that there never was any doubt in our minds that homeschooling was the best option for us.

Suggested Readings:http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/metro/view/20070805-80625/Beginner%92s_guide_to_homeschooling