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Seeing your child have that pitiable look in the morning when you wake him up to prepare for school always haunts you throughout the day. Many times parents wish to avoid formal schooling for their kids.
Modern parents are embracing home schooling as an alternative to schools for their kids. In some countries, homeschooling is legal and allows parents to educate their kids at home.
You need to know the pros and cons of homeschooling and make an informed decision.
Pros:
1. One-on-one teaching: In homeschooling, the parent can know the child’s capability and understanding of certain subjects and identify subjects the child is weak to allocate more time on them.
2. Control of the curriculum: In homeschooling, you can teach the child what you think is important. You can add simple manners, humanities, religious studies, and others to your curriculum.
3. Flexible: Homeschooling gives you the opportunity to break the morning routine and fix a schedule comfortable for your child. Set a daily schedule and follow it consistently to teach the child discipline.
4. Saves time: There is a lot of time wasted going to and from school, waiting for school bus among other and these can be eliminated if you choose to homeschooling for your child.
5. Learn for knowledge, not grades: In schools, students learn to get good grades and go to the next class. Their competition with other classmates encourages them to do better but in homeschooling, you should encourage the child to learn and acquire more knowledge and implement what learned.
6. Safe learning environment: Homeschooling enables you to secure the safety of your child. You don’t have to worry about bullying, negative influence, sexual assault, and other things when in public schools.
7. Parent-child bonding: Educating your child at home gives you more time to spend with the child and know each other better. This strengthens parent-child relationship and teach them social or public behavior and setting personal boundaries.
8. Focus on the child’s talents: In homeschooling, you can focus attention in areas where the child is interested in and help them nature their talents instead of teaching a whole bunch of subjects.
9. Less pressure to conform: The child will not feel pressured to change and fit within set standards.
10. Less paperwork: You can use various techniques to teach the child. You don’t have to stress them with a lot of assignments, exams, and projects as done by public school-going kids.
Cons:
1. No formal structure: Public schools follow a certain curriculum and the schools are more structured compared to homeschooling which relies on the parent setting up their own structure which sometimes it is difficult to follow.
2. Expensive: If you decide to teach your child at home, you have to put aside your career goals. You have to pay for extra curriculum activities for your child and other resources needed.
3. Limited subjects: In homeschooling, the parents can limit what the child learns and decide to eliminate some subjects. This is not the case with public schools.
4. No socialization: If you homeschool the child, you inhibit the child’s interaction with his age mates. This may make it difficult for the child to socialize with others later on.
5. Fewer friends: Your child will have fewer friends to play with or even invite in birthday parties.
6. Limited access to sports: Homeschooling limits the child from getting into professional sports teams which can help them in higher education levels or even get them to attend universities.
7. Absence of skilled and trained teachers: In homeschooling, parents do not have first-hand experience and most of the time they experiment as they teach various subjects and this limits the quality of education.
8. Lack of support: A lot of times people view homeschooling negatively and people always judge you and question your child understanding.
9. Time cost: You have to spend a lot of time preparing the curriculum, learning materials, assignments and questions with answers.
10. No time apart: Sometimes you need time alone, away from the kids and if you decide to homeschool, you will spend all the time with your child.
