Homeschooling has many benefits including saving money on transportation, school or tuition fees, accessories etc if you were to otherwise send your kids to good catholic schools. On top of these, you get to really monitor your kids and let them grow under your surveillance all the time. However, there are some disadvantages of homeschooling as well that you as a parent should be aware of.
Disadvantages of Homeschooling
Here are my thoughts on the ‘possible’ disadvantages of your ward being home schooled. In most cases, you won’t think them as disadvantages upfront until you are hit by these issues as time progress.
- Social Exposure issues: The biggest disadvantage of homeschooling is that the children don’t get to socialize with a lot of kids of his/her age group. Now, there may be a couple of kids in your neighborhood but that’s no comparison with what a school offers in terms of huge number of friends from all races and ethnicity. It has a major role to play in a child’s social behavior, responsibility and awareness about others around him/her
- No AV room, Gymnasium or Big Library: At home, there’s always a limitation on what facilities can be afforded and made available for kids. Your child may not be able to enjoy his free time in a big Audio-visual room, play instruments or avail one of the many sports facilities like he or she could in a school. Also, no participation in events or school band would mean less of extracurricular activities that could shape him or her into something else in the future
- Responsibility: From parents’ point of view, it is a huge responsibility to help a child educated via the homeschooling route. Parents are kind of solely responsible for everything about education in this case with no help whatsoever expected from other angles. If you get things wrong somewhere, the person to correct the same is you. On the positive side, if you get it right, you can be the proudest parent around
- Time management: You need to be extremely smart in time management if you have a home schooled child. On top of your chores, taking care of other family needs, the education aspects of kids can take toll on your sleep and health if you don’t manage your time pretty well. Needless to say, you have to do that all around the year and not just for a few days or weeks. You need a lot of energy to manage that for several years. Also, most homeschooling advocates usually don’t have time and freedom for themselves
- You need to be a continuous learner: When you teach your kids, you have to first learn what you are going to teach. Many parents may not be good at all subjects and topics that need to be covered in the school curriculum. It’s a major challenge to be good at it first and then transpire
- Tax and monetary benefits: While homeschooling in general should save you money, you may not get tax benefits in all states if you opt for home schooling
- Hassles in the next level: When the child leaves the home school to attend the public school or college, it needs a lot of adjustment. The parents should prepare their kids well for such a transition
The idea behind this article was not to put you down as a homeschooling parent, but some pointers to those who plan to take the home schooling option. Of course, you have to assess yourself these disadvantages with numerous benefits that home schooling approach has. At the end you have to weigh the pros and cons based on your family financial situation, school options that you have nearby and the amount of help available to you.