Have over 50 cumulative years of homeschooling my kids under my belt. My kids are way more socialized than their peers. Can publicly speak without fear or hesitation. Look adults in the eye when speaking. My buddy visited for a week once and called my youngest, “extremely socially adept.” Public school is like nothing else people ever go through again in life (closest thing might be prison, if they had age segregated prisons). Not sure why anyone thinks that’s good preparation for social interaction.
Great article! Thank you. My wife and I have our boys in Catholic school but have been looking at alternative options. We have noticed that as our oldest son (9) is getting older the 7 hours of being told what to do is impacting him. My wife volunteered yesterday and just really did not recognize our son at the school lunchroom and realized it is time to make a change. I remember lunchrooms being a bit rowdy when I was a kid, but this one was fairly quiet and each child sat at the lunch table. If their voices started to raise a little, the lunch lady would come out and announce over a loud speaker that the kids need to quiet down.
I came up though the traditional education system and I have really been red pilled by the things I have read about the poor design of schools and how they impact our kids. I have joined Educating Young Heros run by Matt Beaudreau and am trying to lear more about home education.
We are looking at some home schooling options but are interested in learning more about pods and co-ops. We have been trying to research in our area but the list of options is endless. What would be a good resource to filter the list and find pods and co-ops we can trust?
The wife and I decided to try unschooling because of some health stuff. Anyways, 1 year later and basically not formally teaching our son a 2nd grade curriculum he just took a placement test that put him passing 3rd grade.
Sure it’s a superficial test but it’s also encouraging that even with health stuff our son is still being educated.
Note, my wife and I are both readers and we read everyday to our kids and use every opportunity in regular life to educate.
I don’t recommend this method but if being a life long learner is your lifestyle then your kids might just come along for the ride.
We’ve been homeschooling our son for 2 years after the Covid insanity. I jumped in head first and started a co-op with 30 like-minded parents that meets once a week at a church for very low rent and overhead. The parents are the teachers in a wide range of topics — this trimester includes 20+ classes in art, music, cooking, gardening, CrossFit, science, team building, and even masonry! Kids are in mixed ages classes and have 4 classes every Thursday. We bring in different professionals for demonstrations/lectures and take field trips. It’s on the parents to come up with interesting course offerings and I’m always impressed with what they come up with.
There’s many online and traditional book curriculums options now that fills in the rest. I found this website helpful when researching options: https://cathyduffyreviews.com/
My son is also in a “forest school” called Timbernook which is a world-wide program of unstructured outside play. When asked what his favorite part of school is, he says he likes the variety of each day. Now that I’ve seen this style of education, I don’t know if I could ever go back to regular school.
Question: How much "friend time" do you think kids need?
Background: Our 8-yr old daughter is a student at a hybrid classical school where she's in class 2 days, homeschooled 3 days using their curriculum. It's a great school but getting too expensive for us (especially in light of our 3-yr old son getting closer to school age), so we're thinking about fully homeschooling next year. But, my wife, who is an introvert, is worried about giving up hours of her time for playdates (as she thinks she must) so our daughter can build friendships.
If you have several children "socialization" is built-in to the process anyway. Ours get along great overall, and get to develop a wide-ranging kinship with their siblings who they see and share life with all day most days. We are homebodies more than most, but live very rural so going to a regular coop would be too time-disruptive for my wife. Most of the public school kids I know aren't as conversational with adults as my children.
I have been meaning to become a subscriber for some time, but this post motivated me to pull the trigger!
We just decided to homeschool our 8 year old starting this fall (she's currently in 2nd grade at a fantastic Classical Christian school 6 minutes from our home, which we have loved). I was homeschooled for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade in rural NC, and hated it. We went to our small church twice a week, 4H once a month, and spent the rest of the time at home. I was a social kid, and felt very isolated. I was biased against homeschooling for most of my life.
I was a model student and employee my entire life. Eventually went to law school and got married to a wonderful man from a higher station in life. We always assumed we'd send our kids to the best, most elite school we could afford.
Until we did just that for our 3 year old (at the time), and saw all of the radical woke nonsense being pushed (this was even before Rufo & DeAnglio were household names). At the time, we were political and religious normies, but what we witnessed was disturbing enough to send us to a private, conservative Classical Christian school.
About this time, I started to become more interested in the homeschool movement, and I realized how different it was from when I was young. Several close friends & family members joined the movement, and it became an actual possibility.
The thing holding me back the most was how much we loved our classical christian school. While I didn't like my kids being gone all day, and I could quibble with details on the curriculum, the community, and overall direction of the curriculum was hard to beat. I judged senior thesis projects for the past 3 years, and the graduates of this school are impressive. They are reading C.S. Lewis and learning latin as part of the curriculum. Very much a Hillsdale College type of place. Community wise, it attracts most conservative leaning professionals within a 25 mile radius. Half of the parents in my kindergartners class are medical doctors, all of which support medical freedom and horrified by the trans kids movement.
However, my oldest struggled in the classroom setting. Her grades are excellent, but her ability to focus and stay on task turned into a big problem. Her teachers & school administrators have been excellent & very transparent - she requires a lot more direction than her peers. And we see it at home. Her younger sister can already follow multi-step instructions (go upstairs, clean you room, get dressed). She cannot. She requires more micro-management even at home than her younger sister.
She cannot reliably follow multi-step instructions without me standing over her.
The school said they were concerned about her meeting the expectations in 3rd grade. But her academic grades were excellent.
We had her evaluated and she was diagnosed with ADHD. The entire process was very eye-opening. The psychological evaluation was an IQ test which identified that she was of superior intellect (top 93%) but had a "pretty significant" focus disorder. The old-school psychologist was confident that her IQ would be several points higher if we medicated her. He recommended strongly against repeating a grade.
The decision to homeschool was pretty much made for us.
I visited a few co-ops, but have so far decided to do our own thing for now. She's in many activities, and I want to take the year to figure out how best to educate her.
Her school has been fantastic and so supportive - they didn't even try to convince me otherwise, and even offered their entire curriculum as a support. They offered for her to come to recess, lunch, field trips and other activities, and even to come in for tutoring or evaluations if need be.
We are so blessed, and the situation could not have worked out better.
I have no idea what our homeschool journey will look like, but I'm so excited to begin.
Mike, i hear you brother! our first is 5 1/2 yo, went to an fully outdoor nature school 2 days a week this year. Going to an outdoors Emilio Reggio style / CM school in the Fall for kindergarten 27 kids mixed ages up to 3rd grade with 4 passionate teachers - thankfully the weather allows us to do this as we are in Florida Just for the contrast visited the local public school this week, it's brand new, very highly rated but yikes!!! Its an institution, teacher faces were devoid of that spark of life, we were talked down to, and the kindergarten was proud that each kids station had a laptop with headphones that they use a few times a day... Oh, breakfast and lunch are provided, lunch starts at 945! I was prepared to be underwhelmed just not completely 100% let down. ...
Thanks for this post. I appreciate your wife for making recommendations in the comments!
I think if a family is considering and on the fence about homeschool, they should read Hold Onto Your Kids (you often mention this book and it definitely swayed our family’s decision!). Eye-opening to say the least, and it helped my husband and I come to realize that peer-orientated socialization is not at all ideal. Social skills are learned through an adult modeling such behavior.
We have a preschool-aged daughter and our methodology is simple. We take her everywhere, and that creates an infinite amount of learning opportunities. We walk and talk to different places. She orders her own food and pays for things. We sit down and read constantly. We create theories about the world that make sense to only us and she uses her imagination to answer her own question. If there’s nothing to do, she finds something to do. When learning is child led, then little to no issues arise.
It’s funny—since we decided to homeschool, I often take note of who is at the local park and when. I would chat up the other parents and get the feelers out. This is how I met our previous homeschool playgroup. If the kids are a little older and with their parents in the middle of the day during “school hours”, they most likely homeschool. Though my family and I have since moved, our group would meet on a regular basis and play and we’d all have lunch and snacks at the park. The kids ranged in age, from 3 to 8. It was great because the other moms had a similar parenting philosophy to mine and we could share resources while the kids played with one another. I’m hoping to find something like this in our new town now!
We have three under four years. Our oldest has been spelling and sounding out letter/words starting at 2.5 while the middle is way less verbal in comparison. When/how do you formally ‘start’? How do you manage having multiple kids at different ages or levels (w/ or w/o a pod)? I really appreciate the specific follows you recommended - I expect to be aiming my autism that direction shortly
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I’ve seen the village, so I think we’ll go our own way.
Are the other parents in the pod taking on teaching responsibilities or do all the families collectively pay to hire a teacher/multiple teachers or tudors for the kids?
"she felt like she was robbed of a real education by going to public school. She felt it was utilitarian. You do what you need to do to get good grades. It’s formulaic. Study the material, take a test, get a good grade for Baba, then forget it all to repeat the process for the next subject."
story of my life.
thank you for this! all obviously true, but apparently still needs to be said these days. I couldn't believe that twitter thread about how you need to send your kids to modern school for socialization.
i don't want to be banned, so here's my question: what age do you start your kids? i'm way more laid back from what i've researched into homeschooling, don't plan to start anything formal til age 7 (though again, with homeschooling, the lines between formal and informal blur - so much reading and exploring going on already), but then you go to a homeschool convention and some people are doing stuff super early and it stresses me out... what's y'alls approach?
Also, for those reading this, never ever drug your kids to fit into their 'normie' classroom! There are a million different ways of schooling out there, don't feel trapped in the historical accident of the one your country happens to prefer at this brief moment in time...
What has been your biggest challenge in homeschooling? Or maybe what’s something that’s not obvious on the outside that you wished you knew beforehand? My youngest is two so I’m starting my research now. Thanks!
Have over 50 cumulative years of homeschooling my kids under my belt. My kids are way more socialized than their peers. Can publicly speak without fear or hesitation. Look adults in the eye when speaking. My buddy visited for a week once and called my youngest, “extremely socially adept.” Public school is like nothing else people ever go through again in life (closest thing might be prison, if they had age segregated prisons). Not sure why anyone thinks that’s good preparation for social interaction.
Homeschooled kids aren’t sick because most of them are not vaccinated. You forgot to point that out.
Cerno,
Great article! Thank you. My wife and I have our boys in Catholic school but have been looking at alternative options. We have noticed that as our oldest son (9) is getting older the 7 hours of being told what to do is impacting him. My wife volunteered yesterday and just really did not recognize our son at the school lunchroom and realized it is time to make a change. I remember lunchrooms being a bit rowdy when I was a kid, but this one was fairly quiet and each child sat at the lunch table. If their voices started to raise a little, the lunch lady would come out and announce over a loud speaker that the kids need to quiet down.
I came up though the traditional education system and I have really been red pilled by the things I have read about the poor design of schools and how they impact our kids. I have joined Educating Young Heros run by Matt Beaudreau and am trying to lear more about home education.
We are looking at some home schooling options but are interested in learning more about pods and co-ops. We have been trying to research in our area but the list of options is endless. What would be a good resource to filter the list and find pods and co-ops we can trust?
Chris
The wife and I decided to try unschooling because of some health stuff. Anyways, 1 year later and basically not formally teaching our son a 2nd grade curriculum he just took a placement test that put him passing 3rd grade.
Sure it’s a superficial test but it’s also encouraging that even with health stuff our son is still being educated.
Note, my wife and I are both readers and we read everyday to our kids and use every opportunity in regular life to educate.
I don’t recommend this method but if being a life long learner is your lifestyle then your kids might just come along for the ride.
We’ve been homeschooling our son for 2 years after the Covid insanity. I jumped in head first and started a co-op with 30 like-minded parents that meets once a week at a church for very low rent and overhead. The parents are the teachers in a wide range of topics — this trimester includes 20+ classes in art, music, cooking, gardening, CrossFit, science, team building, and even masonry! Kids are in mixed ages classes and have 4 classes every Thursday. We bring in different professionals for demonstrations/lectures and take field trips. It’s on the parents to come up with interesting course offerings and I’m always impressed with what they come up with.
There’s many online and traditional book curriculums options now that fills in the rest. I found this website helpful when researching options: https://cathyduffyreviews.com/
My son is also in a “forest school” called Timbernook which is a world-wide program of unstructured outside play. When asked what his favorite part of school is, he says he likes the variety of each day. Now that I’ve seen this style of education, I don’t know if I could ever go back to regular school.
Question: How much "friend time" do you think kids need?
Background: Our 8-yr old daughter is a student at a hybrid classical school where she's in class 2 days, homeschooled 3 days using their curriculum. It's a great school but getting too expensive for us (especially in light of our 3-yr old son getting closer to school age), so we're thinking about fully homeschooling next year. But, my wife, who is an introvert, is worried about giving up hours of her time for playdates (as she thinks she must) so our daughter can build friendships.
If you have several children "socialization" is built-in to the process anyway. Ours get along great overall, and get to develop a wide-ranging kinship with their siblings who they see and share life with all day most days. We are homebodies more than most, but live very rural so going to a regular coop would be too time-disruptive for my wife. Most of the public school kids I know aren't as conversational with adults as my children.
I have been meaning to become a subscriber for some time, but this post motivated me to pull the trigger!
We just decided to homeschool our 8 year old starting this fall (she's currently in 2nd grade at a fantastic Classical Christian school 6 minutes from our home, which we have loved). I was homeschooled for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade in rural NC, and hated it. We went to our small church twice a week, 4H once a month, and spent the rest of the time at home. I was a social kid, and felt very isolated. I was biased against homeschooling for most of my life.
I was a model student and employee my entire life. Eventually went to law school and got married to a wonderful man from a higher station in life. We always assumed we'd send our kids to the best, most elite school we could afford.
Until we did just that for our 3 year old (at the time), and saw all of the radical woke nonsense being pushed (this was even before Rufo & DeAnglio were household names). At the time, we were political and religious normies, but what we witnessed was disturbing enough to send us to a private, conservative Classical Christian school.
About this time, I started to become more interested in the homeschool movement, and I realized how different it was from when I was young. Several close friends & family members joined the movement, and it became an actual possibility.
The thing holding me back the most was how much we loved our classical christian school. While I didn't like my kids being gone all day, and I could quibble with details on the curriculum, the community, and overall direction of the curriculum was hard to beat. I judged senior thesis projects for the past 3 years, and the graduates of this school are impressive. They are reading C.S. Lewis and learning latin as part of the curriculum. Very much a Hillsdale College type of place. Community wise, it attracts most conservative leaning professionals within a 25 mile radius. Half of the parents in my kindergartners class are medical doctors, all of which support medical freedom and horrified by the trans kids movement.
However, my oldest struggled in the classroom setting. Her grades are excellent, but her ability to focus and stay on task turned into a big problem. Her teachers & school administrators have been excellent & very transparent - she requires a lot more direction than her peers. And we see it at home. Her younger sister can already follow multi-step instructions (go upstairs, clean you room, get dressed). She cannot. She requires more micro-management even at home than her younger sister.
She cannot reliably follow multi-step instructions without me standing over her.
The school said they were concerned about her meeting the expectations in 3rd grade. But her academic grades were excellent.
We had her evaluated and she was diagnosed with ADHD. The entire process was very eye-opening. The psychological evaluation was an IQ test which identified that she was of superior intellect (top 93%) but had a "pretty significant" focus disorder. The old-school psychologist was confident that her IQ would be several points higher if we medicated her. He recommended strongly against repeating a grade.
The decision to homeschool was pretty much made for us.
I visited a few co-ops, but have so far decided to do our own thing for now. She's in many activities, and I want to take the year to figure out how best to educate her.
Her school has been fantastic and so supportive - they didn't even try to convince me otherwise, and even offered their entire curriculum as a support. They offered for her to come to recess, lunch, field trips and other activities, and even to come in for tutoring or evaluations if need be.
We are so blessed, and the situation could not have worked out better.
I have no idea what our homeschool journey will look like, but I'm so excited to begin.
Mike, i hear you brother! our first is 5 1/2 yo, went to an fully outdoor nature school 2 days a week this year. Going to an outdoors Emilio Reggio style / CM school in the Fall for kindergarten 27 kids mixed ages up to 3rd grade with 4 passionate teachers - thankfully the weather allows us to do this as we are in Florida Just for the contrast visited the local public school this week, it's brand new, very highly rated but yikes!!! Its an institution, teacher faces were devoid of that spark of life, we were talked down to, and the kindergarten was proud that each kids station had a laptop with headphones that they use a few times a day... Oh, breakfast and lunch are provided, lunch starts at 945! I was prepared to be underwhelmed just not completely 100% let down. ...
Thanks for this post. I appreciate your wife for making recommendations in the comments!
I think if a family is considering and on the fence about homeschool, they should read Hold Onto Your Kids (you often mention this book and it definitely swayed our family’s decision!). Eye-opening to say the least, and it helped my husband and I come to realize that peer-orientated socialization is not at all ideal. Social skills are learned through an adult modeling such behavior.
We have a preschool-aged daughter and our methodology is simple. We take her everywhere, and that creates an infinite amount of learning opportunities. We walk and talk to different places. She orders her own food and pays for things. We sit down and read constantly. We create theories about the world that make sense to only us and she uses her imagination to answer her own question. If there’s nothing to do, she finds something to do. When learning is child led, then little to no issues arise.
It’s funny—since we decided to homeschool, I often take note of who is at the local park and when. I would chat up the other parents and get the feelers out. This is how I met our previous homeschool playgroup. If the kids are a little older and with their parents in the middle of the day during “school hours”, they most likely homeschool. Though my family and I have since moved, our group would meet on a regular basis and play and we’d all have lunch and snacks at the park. The kids ranged in age, from 3 to 8. It was great because the other moms had a similar parenting philosophy to mine and we could share resources while the kids played with one another. I’m hoping to find something like this in our new town now!
Is it possible to homeschool kids and still work full time? What would you suggest for single parents who are interested in homeschooling?
Has anyone found any helpful resources for finding a pod in your area? Is homeschooling even possible with two working parents?
We have three under four years. Our oldest has been spelling and sounding out letter/words starting at 2.5 while the middle is way less verbal in comparison. When/how do you formally ‘start’? How do you manage having multiple kids at different ages or levels (w/ or w/o a pod)? I really appreciate the specific follows you recommended - I expect to be aiming my autism that direction shortly
They say it takes a village to raise a child. I’ve seen the village, so I think we’ll go our own way.
Are the other parents in the pod taking on teaching responsibilities or do all the families collectively pay to hire a teacher/multiple teachers or tudors for the kids?
"she felt like she was robbed of a real education by going to public school. She felt it was utilitarian. You do what you need to do to get good grades. It’s formulaic. Study the material, take a test, get a good grade for Baba, then forget it all to repeat the process for the next subject."
story of my life.
thank you for this! all obviously true, but apparently still needs to be said these days. I couldn't believe that twitter thread about how you need to send your kids to modern school for socialization.
i don't want to be banned, so here's my question: what age do you start your kids? i'm way more laid back from what i've researched into homeschooling, don't plan to start anything formal til age 7 (though again, with homeschooling, the lines between formal and informal blur - so much reading and exploring going on already), but then you go to a homeschool convention and some people are doing stuff super early and it stresses me out... what's y'alls approach?
Also, for those reading this, never ever drug your kids to fit into their 'normie' classroom! There are a million different ways of schooling out there, don't feel trapped in the historical accident of the one your country happens to prefer at this brief moment in time...
https://gaty.substack.com/p/fore-the-big-golf-controversy-and
What has been your biggest challenge in homeschooling? Or maybe what’s something that’s not obvious on the outside that you wished you knew beforehand? My youngest is two so I’m starting my research now. Thanks!