Homeschooling

To homeschool well is an all encompassing lifestyle and full time job. My stepdaughter was homeschooled half heartedly and it really damaged her life. You can look online and there's loads of kids talking about how their parents educationally neglected them in homeschool and how it set them behind in life for years. But kids whose parents fully commit and homeschool with research, effort, consistency (and honestly some luck) have statistically better outcomes in employability and other metrics of success than public school kids.

There are choices other than traditional homeschooling. My daughter has been doing homeschooling since she was in Kindergarten and has thrived and I worked from home. They have online courses that you can build off of. These worked great for her through 3rd grade. But this school year she wanted something more interactive with her peers so we went with Optima academy online. They have a live class option and an at your pace option. We chose the live classes. She loves it.

If you want to hear some of the negative things I went through I’m always open to talking about it! I was homeschooled my entire life and got 0 education. Totally screwed over and neglected as another comment said. I know there is a right way to do it but you really have to use ALL the tools and resources available for your kids.

It can definitely be taxing, not so much the schooling part, for me right now, bc my teen attends an online academy by choice, he didn’t want to go back after the covid shutdowns. The 1st year was tough to navigate until I found a fitting school that is only homeschool in the sense that we don’t pay for accredited, he still gets the same extract courses & is graded the same way, but this way he gets to work as fast(or slow) as he wants, I’ll just have to create his diploma for him, he’s 16 & has the credits now, according to our state standards, but he’s sticking around to stack up more AP, even though originally he was gonna start taking CC classes at 16, but he’s taking his sweet time getting his DL & we just can’t take him back & forth during the day. His brother is 4, he’s not as receptive to me as his primary teacher, so I might be sending him off until he’s old enough to choose, my oldest always had a choice, but this one is my wild child & behaves better in groups. 😂

Was really hard on my end. The kids didn't listen ( I only tried for 2 of my boys half assed at most cause when you actually look into there's a TON of stuff you need to cover, I wasn't able to do this ) . it wasn't the best idea, we tried cause my kids get bullied and absolutely hate school ...were still trying to get them back into PS and it's been tough ...they still don't wanna go!

It's definitely challenging, like others have said. I only tried it for a short while then a change in our circumstances just made it too difficult for me and the toll it was taking and I returned my stepdaughter back to school. BUT, on later reflection, I do believe that small reset was probably quite good in the sense that it gave her a chance to go back and plug a few gaps she had in her educational foundation, at the base level, to which she could then further build off. She seemed to do a lot better afterwards, could just be a coincidence.. We did find a good little home-schooling community and I'm sure it can be done well, but holy hell, such a lot of work to do it correctly. Definitely take advantage of the community and support resources if you decide to go down that path. 🫶