In some families, homeschooling starts with the first day of school. The child never sees a regular school at all, even once. Other families try public schools and private schools first, find them completely unsatisfactory and switch to homeschooling after a while. Why homeschool? There can be all kinds of difficulties that parents face in the regular school system – there can be religious differences, there can be learning disabilities that the public school system is unable to provide for, and sometimes, some children just don’t take well to the regimented discipline of school. Some parents believe that they design schools not to help children but for the convenience of the administrative officials. Many parents object deeply to the way the No Child Left Behind act pushes schools so much to do something about the bottom 10% of students in any school, that, with limited resources, the schools have no choice but to take funding away from all the other children to bring the bottom 10% a little bit of help. Parents of children who are able to perform well on their own without too much specialized help, hate to see how their children are being denied the resources they deserve.

Parents who aren’t really familiar with everything that can go wrong with raising a child, often take strong objection to any parent choosing to homeschool their child. Why homeschool, they say, when there is a whole established schooling system that seems to be just about right for everyone else? Consider what happens to a child who has a simple problem – like recurrent migraine. In a strictly scheduled school system, there is always one period after the next, and there is no consideration given to how a child may have a hard time learning when he has a splitting headache. If the migraines are a daily occurrence, they can pretty much be torture for the child. If the public school system would only allow a child to sleep a couple of hours in the middle of the day to help with the migraine, the child could get up and function perfectly, afterwards. But there is no room for that kind of personalized scheduling in a public school or even a private school. The only option left to these parents is to homeschool their child.

The homeschooling method isn’t something that can be dismissed. Many children who routinely struggle at regular school suddenly find their groove when they are moved to homeschooling. Not all children are made the same. Not all children should respond to a standard lesson at a standard class in a standard school. And just consider this last argument for why homeschool can be a tremendous success. Studies today indicate how children in their summer holidays, betray a measurable decline in their IQ. Not having any lessons to learn in their summer vacations, they begin to lose whatever intelligence they gained over the year. With homeschooling, one never has to let a child off his lessons that completely for such an extended period of time.