How Does Homeschooling Change Your Family Dynamic?

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The decision to homeschool your children may come from financial concerns, family values, or concerns about local educational options. Whatever reason leads you to teach your children at home, doing so alters the family dynamics, turning one or both parents into educators in their kids’ eyes. It can also lead to increased competition between children, which can become unhealthy if not controlled.

Parent or Educator

Your child may view you as their educator more than their parent if you homeschool them. To use immersive education, some parents overdo their teaching methods, attempting to turn every activity into a teaching moment. Children need a clear boundary between the time spent in school at home with you as their teacher and the larger amount of time with you as their parent.

Money and Access

Some parents turn to at-home education to save money because local private schools provide the highest quality educational options, but charge exorbitant tuition, or due to a lack of high-quality educational institutions. Homeschooling still costs money for educational materials and provides a learning space divided from the living space. In 2018, U.S. homeowners spent an average of $7,560 on home improvements, although not all of those improvements created study space for kids.

Time

Parents may decide to teach their children at home, so they can plan education around health, dental, and vision care. According to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), dental emergencies account for approximately 34 million lost school hours annually. Children who attend school at home don’t miss those hours since their parents can adjust their school day schedule to fit in healthcare appointments.

Family Size and Children’s Age Spread

Consider your family’s size and the age differences of your children. When children attend public or private schools, parents can request that kids of the same age get placed in separate classrooms to provide each with an independent opportunity to excel. In a home-schooling environment, parents lose this option and children of the same age may develop inappropriate competitiveness.

Problems can also arise in a large family with children of many different ages. Each grade level needs customized attention, so a family with a large age spread may find it tough to provide each child with the proper attention. There’s a good reason that schools moved away from the notion of the one-room schoolhouse and transitioned to grade-level educational formats.

Custom Education

Once you cover the state-required essentials, you can add to the curriculum based on each child’s interest. That means you could teach your high schooler interested in computers the open-source code called blockchain that powers Bitcoin and more than 6,000 other cryptocurrencies. This custom curriculum can better prepare them for quick entry into the work world.

Personality Types

Consider your personality type and that of your children. Will having you or your spouse as a teacher cause personality conflicts within your family? Also, learn how each child picks up information best before embarking on homeschooling. Sometimes, when a parent learns visually, they assume their child does, too, but your child may learn best through reading or oral instruction.

Parents Educational Backgrounds

Although most states don’t require parents who home-school to earn a college degree before teaching their children, having a degree can help you. Having graduated from college ensures you’ve completed a variety of core curriculum types at a high level. It prepares you for the materials your child will cover. It also helps you develop the teaching structure you use with your children.

Learning Disabilities

Some learning disabilities are transmitted genetically. A child with a diagnosis of ADHD, for example, typically has a parent who also received a diagnosis of ADHD. This situation can compound learning challenges for the child while frustrating the parents, something that the child also notices.

Confidence of Parents and Children

Children learn from watching their parents and modeling their behaviors. If the teaching parent lacks confidence in their abilities or educational preparedness to teach, the child picks up on this. Your child may develop a similar lack of confidence in their learning abilities.

Organizational and Time Management Skills

Teaching your children at home requires superb organizational and time management skills, plus strict adherence to schedule. If both parents lack time management and organizational skills, take free classes online to learn and master these skills before embarking on an at-home schooling program. Your children will learn to organize and manage their time from you during home-schooling as much as they will learn English, math, social studies, and science.

Home-schooling Isn’t for Everyone

Children benefit from socializing with children their own age, and schools provide an ideal situation for that. In public and private schools, children receive their education from teachers who earned specialty degrees in education. Use home-schooling as a last resort to let your child benefit from proper socialization, professional educators, and high-quality educational materials designed for their age group.