“Why We Chose Homeschooling: What I Learned From Asking Other Parents”
Last spring, I was sitting on a damp park bench while my daughter climbed the same wooden pirate ship she’d conquered a hundred times. A woman I’d met once at a birthday party settled next to me, her son already kicking off his shoes by the sandbox. We made the usual small talk—how the weather was finally warming up, whether the swings were still sticky from morning dew—and then she asked, point-blank, “So, are you guys homeschooling next year, or what?”
I paused, because I wasn’t expecting it. My daughter is in second grade at the local public school, and we’ve never mentioned anything else. But the question didn’t surprise me in the way it might have five years ago. These days, homeschooling is everywhere. It’s in the Facebook groups, the co-op flyers pinned to the library bulletin board, the quiet conversations that start with “We’re actually thinking of pulling them out.”
I told her no, we were staying put. She nodded, then said, “I keep asking everybody. I just don’t know how many people are actually doing it, or if they’re like me—thinking about it.”
That was the first time I realized how many families are living in that in-between space. Not fully homeschooled, not fully committed to traditional school. Just wondering.
Over the next few weeks, I started paying attention. I asked other parents at soccer practice, at the grocery store, at my own daughter’s class birthday party. I wasn’t collecting data for anything official, just trying to understand what was driving the question. And I found that almost everyone had a version of the same story. They hadn’t homeschooled, necessarily. But they’d considered it. They’d had a bad conference with a teacher, or a kid who cried every morning, or a stack of homework that felt pointless. And they’d let the thought circle for a while before deciding to stay.
One dad told me his wife had made a whole spreadsheet. They were comparing curriculum costs, socialization opportunities, and their own patience levels. Another mom said she’d only brought it up once, during a particularly rough December when her kindergartner was coming home with behavior notes every single day. She described sitting in her car after pickup, reading a blog about “unschooling,” and feeling a mix of relief and panic. Then January came, and things settled down, and she never mentioned it again.
The honest part is that most families aren’t making this choice from a place of strong ideology. They’re just tired. They’re trying to solve a problem, and homeschooling looks like a giant lever that might lift everything at once. But when I talk to people who actually homeschool, they always say the same thing: it’s not a solution. It’s a different kind of work.
I remember talking to my neighbor across the street, who homeschools her two boys. She’s been doing it for six years. I asked her once, carefully, how she knew it was the right call. She laughed and said, “I didn’t. I still don’t. Some years I think I’ve ruined them, and then they say something brilliantly weird and I think, okay, maybe not.” She told me about the first month, when she spent every evening printing worksheets and color-coding a schedule that fell apart by 10 a.m. She said the best thing she ever did was stop trying to make it look like school at home.
That phrase stuck with me. Because what I see from the outside, at the park or the library or the co-op gym class, is the polished version. The kids who can talk to adults without shyness. The older siblings helping younger ones. The calm mornings without rushed breakfasts and backpack checks. But my neighbor is honest about the hard parts too—the afternoons when no one wants to do math, the isolation she sometimes feels from other adults, the constant self-doubt about whether she’s covering everything.
So when parents ask me the question, “How many are homeschooled?” I think they’re really asking something else. They’re asking: Does this actually work? And who is it for?
The research is actually pretty steady. Most studies show homeschooled kids do fine academically, and their social skills are no worse than their peers—though the social picture is different. They spend more time with mixed-age groups and adults, and less time in a single-age peer pack. That’s not better or worse, just a different way of growing up. One of the more useful things I’ve read is that the main predictor of homeschooling success isn’t parental education or income. It’s whether the parent wants to be home with their kids for the majority of the day. Not whether they think they should want to, but whether they actually enjoy it.
That’s a hard thing to know about yourself ahead of time. I admit, I don’t. My daughter is currently thriving in her classroom. Her teacher sends home these little notes—“Maya helped a friend sort blocks today” or “She volunteered to read aloud twice.” I read them and feel relief. But there was a week in February when she came home every day with the same lost look, complaining that nobody played with her at recess. I remember lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, and whispering to my husband, “What if we just tried it for a year?” He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “I can’t work from home tomorrow. Can you?” And that was the end of that thought.
Practicality matters more than we admit. Homeschooling costs money—not just for curriculum, but for the lost income or the reduced work hours. It also costs mental energy. You have to be willing to plan mornings, organize outings, and sit through a child’s frustration when they don’t understand something that seems obvious to you. One mother I spoke with compared it to running a small, very demanding nonprofit with a board of one.
But the most interesting thing she told me was about the question itself. She said people always ask, “How many are homeschooled?” as if there were one number, one stable answer. But really, the number changes every month. Families do it for a year, then go back. Others start in middle school. Some are doing a hybrid model—three days at home, two days at a program. She said she’d stopped worrying about whether she was officially “a homeschooler” and just started thinking of it as what they were doing right now.
I like that. Because I think the real issue everyone is circling around is not which educational setting is best. It’s that parenting involves a constant, low-level calculation of risk and fit. You never know for sure. You can only make a guess based on your own limits, your child’s personality, and what you can actually pull off on a Tuesday morning.
So if you’re reading this and you’re one of the ones who has asked yourself that question—whether out loud or only in your head—you’re not alone, and you’re not a bad parent for asking it. The answer isn’t a statistic. It’s a conversation you keep having with yourself, in the car line or the kitchen, weighing the trade-offs that never feel fully resolved.
As for us, my daughter is still in public school. I’m still walking her to the bus stop, still ironing a school polo on Sunday nights, still checking her backpack for lost library books. And I still don’t know if that’s the right choice ten years from now. But the other day, she came home and told me about a friend who was being homeschooled starting next week. She said, “They get to learn at home. That seems kind of cool.” Then she asked, “Can I stay home tomorrow? I’m tired.” I laughed and told her, “Probably not.” She shrugged and went to find her snacks. The question is still out there. I think it always will be.
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