You think you want to homeschool? I congratulate you on your choice. In my completely biased opinion, it is superior to the public education system because it’s simply a natural extension of what you’ve already been doing for years as a parent. The only difference is that you’re teaching them about history, math, and science instead of life skills. You’re already a teacher, so go teach. But first, a few pieces of advice.

Homeschooling is having a moment. The number of homeschooled students in the United States grew by 300,000 between 2007 and 2012, and now make up about 3 percent of the school-aged population. According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics, parents chose to homeschool their children for many reasons. The most common was concern about the school’s environment. Second was a desire to provide moral education, and the third was dissatisfaction with other education options.

Growing parent dissatisfaction with Common Core has already led to an increase in the number of parents who choose to homeschool their children. I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but the small homeschooling community to which our family belongs is already planning to add a number of families next year on top of the growth it experienced last year.

After our oldest daughter was diagnosed with Aspergers, my wife and I decided to homeschool. Although we knew our local school system had some support for her, we believed this would be a better option.

We know our daughter’s strengths and weaknesses, found a curriculum that works, and my wife started homeschooling her. Today, thanks to some budget issues that threatened my former job and opportunities in my wife’s place of employment, I find myself a stay-at-home dad who is the homeschool teacher to his kids. This is not where I planned to be at this point in my life, but I believe in God and, evidently, he had different ideas. So here I am.

You think you want to homeschool? I congratulate you on your choice. In my completely biased opinion, it is superior to the public education system because it’s simply a natural extension of what you’ve already been doing for years as a parent. The only difference is that you’re teaching them about history, math, and science instead of life skills. You’re already a teacher, so go teach.

But first, a few pieces of advice.

1. Find a Curriculum
One of the most tangible signs of homeschooling’s increasing popularity is the variety of curricula available to parents. We use Classical Conversations, which is like a classical liberal arts education for kids, but there are many others, both religious and secular. A simple web search will actually reveal an intimidating number of them, but smother the impulse to shut off the computer and run away.

Don’t spend time forging trails that have already been marked by those who traveled before you.
Choosing a curriculum comes down to a few simple questions: how do your children learn, how much time will it take, and how much will the materials cost? Find one that works for you and resist the temptation to create your own. Parents have been homeschooling for decades, and have used their knowledge to create these learning plans. Don’t spend time forging trails that have already been marked by those who traveled before you. Trust their wisdom, and lean on their experience. It will ease the transition for you, and for the kids.

A good curriculum will help you set a firm agenda, organize your teaching, and be a lifeboat on the days when you don’t feel like teaching, and they don’t feel like learning. More on that later, but fair warning: those days will come.

2. Find a Community
One of the dumbest criticisms of homeschooling is about whether the kids will be “properly socialized.” In many public schools, kids sit near others of their age for hours at a time, being addressed by an adult while also prohibited from speaking with one another. At most, they get maybe an hour of social time with their peers before being put back into the classroom. That’s not socialization, it’s conditioning.

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