Home schooling can adversely affect a child's social development. When you decide to teach your kids at home, you should know that even if they have a lot of siblings, they are missing out on gaining important social skills from the school environment. In a traditional school setting, children interact with peers their own age, which teaches them valuable life skills, such as sharing, making conversation, making friends and compromising. While you can try to teach this at home, it often is not as effective as in the classroom. With home schooling, children often do not get the chance to develop a group of friends with whom they can play and relax when school hours are over.
Deciding to home-school your children can be a burden on your family's time because it is not easy to develop an entire curriculum on your own. Keep in mind that your local school is filled with teachers who have spent years training and developing their lesson plans on a variety of subjects, and you will be expected to fill in for all of them. Aside from the hours that it should take you to prepare your lessons, you will also have to commit to being home for the majority of the day. There are national requirements for home schooling, so you may be expected to keep to normal school hours even within the privacy of your own home.
By taking on the project of home schooling, you are committing yourself to a full-time, unpaid job. If this is something that your family can afford, it might not be a problem, but the job entails a lot of work for its lack of compensation. Home schooling also involves the purchase of class curricula, books and materials needed for teaching your children. This includes basic materials like paper, pencils, crayons and scissors, but it also includes things like text books, microscopes, videos and other items needed for lessons.
When you send your children off to school, even if you go to work afterward, you have some time to yourself. Whether you have the rest of the morning to yourself or simply the drive to the office, you get a few minutes to unwind and relax in silence. If you home-school your children, you never get a break from them and likewise, they never get a break from you. This can cause tension in your relationship and turn relatively small issues into big deals.
Although home schooling consistently gains in popularity every year, according to sources like the U.S. Department of Education, it is by no means the typical route of education. Anything that is done that is outside what society considers "normal" is sometimes attacked, questioned or ridiculed. Even if you think that you are strong enough to handle the negative feedback, you must take your children into consideration as well. Ask yourself these questions: Do they feel strongly enough about home schooling to defend themselves? Is it fair to make them do that? These are some of the issues families should address before initiating home schooling.