LIKE most parents, I had always looked forward to the day when my children would finally enter school.  During those early years of infancy and toddlerhood, when mothering feels like such a full-time job, I would assure myself that I would have a glimpse of my old life back when my sons Jahan and Nirvan – now 5 and 2 – would be in school.

 

And then we decided to homeschool.

 

The decision came to us in a roundabout way. When Jahan was three, and I was pregnant with Nirvan, we enrolled Jahan in a small co-op preschool. But despite being there for over a year, he felt alone and adrift. He missed being home with my husband and me. He just wasn’t ready, and no amount of cajoling or pleading or reassuring on my part was going to change that. More than that, he came home angry and resentful, repeating words and mimicking behavior that astonished us – and not in a good way. I think the breaking point was when he pretended to stab my husband’s leg, yelling, “I’m going to kill you!”

 

It was around this time that we attended a homeschool conference in Woodland Hills, California. I had heard a fair bit about the practice, but always assumed that it was mostly adopted by religiously orthodox families who didn’t want to expose their children to beliefs outside their own, or that it was something done by families in the most rural parts of the country who would otherwise have to walk four miles to get to school.  Still, I went along with an open mind. We sat in on talks and picked up numerous books on the subject.  But the one thing to emerge for me was this: homeschooling could certainly prove a successful alternative for families who felt that the system, for whatever reason, and at whatever level, had failed them.  From preschool to high school, parents clearly wanted to take control of their children’s education.

Lots more of the story,
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