If you are like many homeschoolers today, the idea of homeschooling wasn’t on your radar initially. It wasn’t something you imagined you would be good at, and it was certainly not something you always dreamed of doing when you were younger.

But then something happened.

Something painful, or difficult….or maybe something that your school just wasn’t equipped to handle. It could have been a medical condition, or a terrible situation at school. It could be another kid in the class, or worse…a teacher. It might be an injury that caused your student to miss so much school that catching up wasn’t an option…or it could be that you finally reached the point where you thought that even without training, even without a vision, you could provide a better solution than the school system could.

Whatever it is that brought you to homeschooling, you are a homeschooling parent, now. Not where you thought you’d find yourself at this point in your child’s life, but still, better than many of the alternatives.

So, first of all, we’re glad you’re here. Secondly, we’re hoping you stick around long enough to catch a vision.

You see, I am what you’d call a true believer. I believe that in nearly every case (there are exceptions, as there are to every rule), a child will learn more, better, faster when they are taught at home than when they are taught in an intuitional setting…and I don’t want you to follow the school’s system so closely that you miss out on that magic.

You see, there are several things working to your favor here:

1. You know your kids better than anybody else.
2. You know and control everything they eat and and how much they sleep. Many parent’s aren’t around their kids enough to see a connection between certain foods, or certain sleep patterns to know that changing a few things could make a dramatic difference in behavior, mood, attention, etc. Or, if they already want to make those changes, it’s nearly impossible to make dietary changes when your child’s lunch has to fit a certain sized container, be temperature stable, and be able to compete with all the delicious treats that the other kids are eating. I’m not the crunchiest of crunchy Moms, but I’ve heard from enough parents that diet and sleep were huge factors in making homeschooling successful for their families!
3. You can move at whatever pace your student is ready for. No more waiting for No Child to Be Left Behind, etc. If you’ve mastered your material for the day….that’s it! Or if your child is interested in a topic to a degree that’s far beyond their grade level, they can have at it!
4. You don’t have to teach things the 7 different ways that a classroom teacher would in hopes of catching everybody’s learning style. If you understand how your kiddo processes new information, this can go really quickly!
5. You can learn as your kids learn. You’ll be really surprised at how much you missed out on in a government school system. I can’t tell you how many parents tell me every year, “I used to hate Social Studies as a kid…I think they tried to make it boring! Now, it’s our favorite subject. I’ve learned ten times what I ever knew in school.”
6. No drama llama. Countless times a day, I hear parent’s say that they’re done with ‘all the drama’ at the schools. Nor your silly, “Who is friends with who and who are we NOT friends with today” drama. But real, crippling, derailing drama. The kind of drama that makes your kids hate going to school, or makes them despondent in general. They’ve heard horrific things, they’ve seen kids treat other kids terribly. The language, the sexual push, the pornography on cell phones, etc etc etc., Even when your kids aren’t doing any of those things themselves…they’re swimming in the drama that comes with it. And now, you’re free.

So all this to say, take heart that even though you might not have seen this coming, you’re going to be a homeschool Mama and it’s going to be alright! It’s not impossible, and in fact, there are several things going for you that your child’s teacher never had going for them… The most important of which is something that is really first and foremost: love. You love your child deeply, and care about their physical, spiritual, and educational well-being more than anybody else in the world does. No teaching degree, no certification, no standards can touch that.