Last year alone, more than one million children in the United States chose home-schooling over traditional education. This stunning figure was released according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Home-schooling is a recent development in education. Not long ago, it was considered too radical by many education experts. Nowadays, it is legalized in every state and more than one million children have undergone home-schooling and many more parents are seriously considering home-schooling. The interesting thing was: What prompted such a change? There have been many recent surveys to suggest that parents are getting impatient and fed up with our public schooling system. It is seen as being superficial with no real-life skills being applied and taught. Parents are also concerned about the negative publicity often portrayed in news. Examples are school students taking drugs in schools, abusing fellow students physically and even students bringing guns and knives to schools. Parents are concerned about the negative peer influences that these students have on their children. Home-schooling offers an opportunity to end all that and allows parents to bring up their children in a natural and loving environment. It is especially important in the early years of a child’s development (between three to twelve years old ) as this is the period where they are prone to negative influences and peer pressure and cannot differentiate what is right and what is wrong. Home-schooling helps to protect them from such negative influences. Another benefit of home-schooling is that it is an inevitable bond between the child and the parents. The parents and the child spend more time together forming a unique bond. The bond gets stronger as time passes and later you will find that you can connect with your child better than you never thought before. Parents can also have better control over the kind of moral and religious beliefs that a child should have. Parents can impart their moral values and beliefs to their children easily since they spend more time together. So what is stopping parents from adopting home-schooling? For one thing, home-schooling requires a lot of time and money. For most families, both parents need to be working full-time to support the family. Many home-schooling families are dependent on one parent for the income. The other parent has to devote full-time to home-schooling the child. Therefore in some cases, it is not possible to adopt home-schooling unless you are financially stable. The other interesting phenomenon is that more and more home-schooling support groups are appearing in the neighborhood. They help to guide and support each other. Some home-schooling support groups have even gone online. If you do decide to go home-schooling, find a home-schooling support group in your area.
