Educating Your Family and Friends About Your Decision to Home-School

While your decision to home school is uniquely your own, it is great if you have the support of your family and friends too. Unfortunately, getting your friends and family on board can sometimes be challenging. For the uninitiated, home schooling can be a new and strange concept, even though we, as a society, have actually been home schooling for centuries. And, despite the current growing popularity of home schooling due to failing schools, limited educational choices, and schoolyard bullying, home education still has a lot of stigma attached.

If your family and friends are not familiar with the many benefits of an education at home, they may bring up every argument and stereotype they've heard to convince you that you should send your child to school.

It is important to remember that most of these concerned interjectors will be people who care about you, and have perhaps not been exposed to the many positives of home schooling. You need to determine why it is that you want to home school your family, and to consider (and answer) the following questions:

"How will your child know how to interact with their peers?" "Why are you afraid of the school system?" "What about socialisation?" "What about the overall school experiences that help children develop into adults?" "What about sports and other activities?" "Are you sure you can teach your child all that they need to learn?" "Teaching is a highly professional skill, can you do it?" "Sounds expensive, how can you manage the books and the cost?" "You're going to quit work? What about your career?"

In many cases, unless your friends and family home schooled themselves, they are going to assume that the "normal" way to educate children, the way that they understand and are familiar with, will be superior. If that is the case, you may experience quite significant pressure to conform to a standard public or private education. By doing your research first, using resources such as the internet, you can put their concerns to rest and help yourself to stand firm.

Rebuttals are simple. Firstly, you can talk about taking control of your child's education. You can also talk about how you want to have the most time you can with you child. As for activities and socialisation, you can address that by showing them the community based activities that your child can participate in.

And if we don't sacrifice for our children who are we going to sacrifice for?

Keeping your lesson plans, curriculum, and other teaching materials at hand is a great way to show that not only are you ready, but you are serious about teaching your child. You can also show them the various options for homeschooling and demonstrate the flexibility and the customisation of education for your child over the "one-size-fits-all" solution at the local public school.

To encourage your family and friends to fully support your position, you may consider including them in the education process. For instance, if they speak a language, or have a specific skill your child might be interested in, ask them if they would consider teaching your child about that topic. Involvement can be an effective tool to get family on board. If they still are not interested, be prepared to move forward without them. The most important thing to remember is that the choice is about you and your children, not your extended family.

Homeschooling is not always easy. Like the rest of life, it has its hard days too. Fortunately, there is plenty of support available, whether it comes from your family, or whether it's from one of the many online and offline homeschooling support groups available. Since the internet became readily available to everyone, homeschooling families have been able to reach out and encourage other similarly inclined families the world over.

Melissa Murdoch has a passion for life span development and education, and believes wholeheartedly that a healthy society begins at home.

For further information on how to get started in homeschooling, please visit http://www.YourHomeschoolCommunity.com.

Decision to Home School

The decision to home school our children was not an easy one to make. To be honest, by the time our children reached school age, I was anticipating having the days to myself to do whatever it was that I wanted to do. The kids would be in school and my husband would be at work, and life would be grand. I dreamed of going back to school myself, and then landing the perfect job. However, something in the back of my brain (which was the Lord speaking to me) kept nagging and saying, "I want you to do hard things, not easy things." My husband and I had never even given homeschooling a thought before. It never crossed our minds, in fact, until we spoke with a dear friend about her homeschooling her children.

Homeschooling our children scared us. What if we made a mistake and they ended up flipping hamburgers at the local McDonald's? What if they lagged behind all the other children we knew academically? What if they became loners and never made a friend? What if I couldn't teach my children the necessary things that they needed to know for college some day? All of these and so many other thoughts came into my brain, including the very loud-speaking fact that I don't have much patience.

Well, the first thing we did before even considering to home school was we prayed and prayed and prayed about it. We wanted to know that we were doing this for all the right reasons and not for prideful reasons. We wanted to make sure that this is what God really wanted for our children and our lives. We just put all our fears aside and gave them to the Lord. And the wonderful thing about that was He gave us a wonderful peace after we did this, and all our plans and decisions to home school from that point forward just fell into place.

With the peace that we felt, we did a lot of research into what materials we would use and how to use them by going online. We even went to a home school convention with tons of vendors and speakers at seminars and learned a tremendous amount about the values of homeschooling. We had a smorgasbord of ideas in front of us; and might I add, we could have easily been overwhelmed if we were not careful. So many books and props were thrown in our direction, so we had to be wise in picking and choosing what we really needed and not just wanted to take home and use. One other thing that helped us was we asked other parents what they used and would recommend, and thankfully, we found one curriculum that was really the right choice for our children. It spelled everything out for them to do day-by-day and was even teacher-friendly for me.

The best advice I can give you in regards to homeschooling your children is to just pray about it. Ask God who knows all what He thinks you should do. Don't home school your children because everyone else you know is doing it; make a wise prayerful decision that's best for your family. Furthermore, homeschooling has not only taught my children the necessary learning tools they need along with godly character-building, but it's also taught me life-building values like patience, love, gentleness, being slow to anger and quick to listen. Homeschooling may have been one of the toughest decisions in our lives that we ever made, but even after five years now, we're still learning that anything is possible with God.

Rachel G. LaChapelle is the website administrator for Baby Diaper Bags and also a stay-at-home mom for 14 years. Please visit her site for all sorts of discount baby items.