I am thinking about home ed but how do you know it's the right decision for your children?

[mammal]

My children are 19 months and 7 months so it's a long way off yet but I am thinking more and more about sending them to school and feel very strongly that I don't want them to go.

DD is due to start in 2012; DS in 2013. They will both have only just turned 4: DD a month earlier; DS a few days before the start of term.

So my reasons for keeping them at home?

I think (barely) 4 is far too young to start full-time formal education. I want them to have more than four years of freedom and time to just 'be' before they enter the education system.

I don't want their education to be structured by SATS, National Curriculum, etc. I would like them to have some freedom to be able to pursue what interests them. I would like their early years to be free from public exams. However, I would like to ensure that they at least keep up with their school-going peers in literacy, maths and science.

I don't want them to be judged at such an early age as good/weak at certain subjects and maybe lose confidence. I just want them to be allowed to enjoy the things they enjoy.

Those are the main reasons for home-edding but I'm not sure if that's enough and i'm not sure how much my thinking about this is clouded by my own wants and needs.

I worry most of all that my children might grow up and deeply resent me for not being given the opportunity to try school. I was bullied at secondary school and wonder if my experiences are clouding how I feel about sending my children to school. I also wonder if I am just not wanting to let my children go, which I'm sure is the accusation that will be levelled at me by some of my extended family.

I am generally a very conservative person so I'm finding this a difficult decision to make, though aware I don't have to decide anything for some time. All our extended family have had conventional educations however and will take a lot of convincing, which is why I'm thinking about this now; if it is something we may do, I'd like to start talking to them casually about it now to give them time to get used to the idea.

Can anyone relate to this and what do you think about reasons for/ worries? Any pointers about things to consider, how to decide and you and your children's experiences?

If you home educate, that doesn't mean you don't ever give them the opportunity to try school, it means you leave it until they want to do it and, if it's going to work for the whole family, they try it...maybe forever, or maybe just for a bit. You're giving them options.

What if they grow up and deeply resent you for sending them to school even though you knew you had another option?

I would suggest that you spend the next year reading, and reading, and reading - books, blogs, websites, this topic on MN - about home education; and also meeting other HEors. Try to build up a bit of a network for yourself and see if the lifestyle looks like something that would suit your family.

I worry all the time that I've made the right decision, despite being 99% certain I have. I first learnt about HE when I was pg with DD1. I did all the above, and now it is just our lifestyle (DD1 is now nearly 7). I love it, they love it. I started out with one reason for HEing (it sounded like fun) and ended up with a million and one .

And ask questions - particularly specific ones - there's a lot to say about HE, and a post in answer to your last questions could go on forever!

I wish I had

More power to your elbow

mammal we are in much the same position as you.

Our main reasoning is an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the mess the govt has made of modern schooling! I know there's a lot of Daily Mail media scaremongering but it feels like every day there's a new reason for DH and I to look at each other and know we are one step closer to choosing to HE.

Academically my main beef is all the teaching-to-the-exam which I have seen in my stepchildren's poor education. Kids are forcefed information which IMHO destroys the love of learning that they are all born with.

There is also the horrendous amount of peer pressure, eeeeek.

Oooh I could rant for a long long time about all this.

I do share your worries too. DCs will go to nursery but more for socialising (and toddler-free time for me TBH) I have no idea if DD would even want to be with me all the time right now!

I worry about what people will say though. Like I'm sure DH's ex will be filling the DSDs' heads with some rubbish about us HEing because I'm too lazy to work... oh dear I seem to have wandered off topic

Still, you've got ages to research it all and this board is a great place to start!

I think you have to think through your reasons and decide whether you think this is the best choice for your children, all things considered. The reasons you list are good ones (IMHO!)

But if you're worried about your motives - think what you would feel if your child decides at age 7 or 10 or whatever that they want to try school. Do you feel happy that they are a confident individual who is capable of making a choice about their education, or resentful that they don't appreciate your effort on their behalf? Think back sooner - they have a chance to spend lots of time with other adults, and without you, through some club or HE group or other - again do you feel happy to have raised a self-confident person who is happy not to be with you 24/7 or do you feel they shouldn't want to do that? If you're ok with those ideas (and I know it takes a stretch of the imagination when they are still so young) then I don't think you need worry too much that you are "not letting them go" by considering HE.

I'm not sure how you ever can decide that anything is the right choice - most of the time actually things are just one of many possible "right" choices - so long as you stay flexible to what you see in your children as they develop, and what they say as they get older, I think you should avoid making "wrong" choices at any rate.

As to family, I think you're right to mention it casually quite early on - if you get the idea into their minds as a possible option, it becomes more "commonplace" before you get to the stage of deciding on it. They may even read up on it and independently see th ebenefits, so you won't necessarily have to convince them that it is viable!

There's a lot of research out there to say that just turned 4 is probably too young to put children into a classroom (even if it is mainly play based learning). So you could take the decision just based on that as a starting point and decide that you're going to review it as time goes on.
It's a really difficult decision to make, just because it's still very unusual. I tormented myself making it, but once it was made it's seemed very natural to be doing what we're doing - really just carrying on with life as we were.
I'd suggest read everything about home ed you can get your hands on. Most of all go to home ed groups. Hopefully they'll be at least one near you. It was so much easier seeing the older children who were home edded and that they were happy, sociable, confident, enthusiastic etc. I think it was important for my son to have non-schooled role models, as there's so much emphasis placed on the 'starting school ritual'. Also v good to speak to lots of different people about their approaches to home ed.
My son who's now 6 thought perhaps he should be going to reception with everyone else, but he was horrified when he realised you have to stay there all day. He loves being home edded now, but says he might decide he wants to go to school some time. I like that it's an optional activity for him.

As someone who EHEed from the start (DC 18 and 15.5), I feel that it is the natural thing to do. You've done it since birth and you can keep on doing it until (if ever) it no longer works for you as a family (like breastfeeding, co-seeping, carrying a DC around, and lots of other things).

As an analogy, if you were vegetarian, you wouldn't give your toddlers meat just so that they have the choice. OTOH, you may not worry if they are given meat in other people's houses.

Another way to look at it is that you are not closing off opportunities. If you send them to school at 4 and it does not work out, you may withdraw them at 8 with some serious issues around learning and, at the very least, being told what to do for 6 hours a day. EHE is much harder to re-establish under those circs with both you and the DC feeling that you "should" be like school and concerned about how to make relationships with other children (see many many noob threads here). OTOH, if you do not send them and you keep them at home until 8, they will enter school as more mature peple who are used to learning independently and with some idea of who they are. They will then be able to make a reasonable comparison between EHE and school.

My DD (18) wanted to try school at Y5 to "see what other children have to put up with". I enrolled her for a term (after serious discussions about what it would mean for the family as a whole and about her responsibilities to go every day for a term, etc.). We deregistered at the end of the term. She then did a 6-month exchange in Germany at 13 and attended school there.

She was autonomously educated from birth and she had no unexpected problems with the Y5 work. We did workbooks and a KS2 SATs paper immediately before she went into Y5, just to see what she could expect. She could read well and the school put her in a Y6 group for maths but she was very slow at writing. The teacher told me he could have a better conversation with her than with any of the others in the class. She did have some social issues (didn't like the unrelenting 6 hours with peers and the playground was a particularly unpleasant experience - after two weeks she came home for lunch, for respite) but I think she has Aspergers' and would have had difficulties anyway. Being EHE gave us time and space to deal with it without making it into a problem.

DS (15.5), OTOH, has always been adamant that he does not want to go to school. He was very reluctant to go to groups without me until he was about 8 and I think school at 4 or 5 would have been a disaster for him. He has never had social problems but he did not read until 8 or 9, so he may well have labelled himself a failure by then had he been in a "forced learning" environment.