Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?
I was homeschooled from 5th grade on.
The reasons people have for homeschooling their kids varies widely, from hyper-religious to anti-establishmentism to the-schools-here-suck. The types of kids people have also vary widely. So my experience is not necessarily reflective of what your kids&#x27; experience might be. That said, here&#x27;s my story:<p>My options were home schooling or a Christian school affiliated with my parents&#x27; church. I chose to be home schooled. My mother is high school educated, not a teacher, and frankly weak on most subjects. But she loves to dig in and research options, so she did a reasonable job of finding curriculums for standard things like math. I always had a strong thirst for knowledge of certain subjects, so she left me to my own devices on those things (this was pre-internet so I think this was an especially bad strategy. How&#x27;s a kid with no money going to find the best resources to learn about these things that would normally be classes?).
In general, I have always loved learning, so I was relatively easy to homeschool. By 8th grade I was scoring at the 12th grade level, 99th percentile on the CAT across the board.
I had more free time than my peers and more flexibility in my schedule. Field trips were a breeze. By high school I was taking community college classes and tutoring the adults, which was extremely helpful to have those credits when I went to college - I got to skip some intro courses and had the flexibility to take a year off of school when financial hardship hit.<p>So far it sounds great, but I would not really recommend it. If you don&#x27;t have access to quality schools for your kid, you should move if you can afford it at all. There were a few major issues:
- Social isolation. I had little access to kids my own age, mostly my parents&#x27; friends&#x27; kids, who were, frankly, shitheads. (Not that the Christian school was better. All but one girl in what would have been my class graduated pregnant or with a child, and therefore married or engaged to be, shotgun style) 
- College Admissions. I was enrolled in an online high school program at an accredited school (the first one!), but even with the transcript + 4.0 GPA in a year&#x27;s worth of community college credits, colleges were deeply skeptical about homeschooling and made me jump through extra hoops. I&#x27;m fairly certain my top choice rejected me because of this.
- Misinformation &amp; bias. I know this is an issue in school too, and my alternative option of a religious school would not have been much better, but I had to unlearn so so much of what I was taught
- Extracurriculars. Opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities are extremely limited. Many things are associated with a school and not open to non-students.<p>It&#x27;s also worth noting that while I did relatively well in this setup, I have siblings who were also home schooled and never finished high school or got their GED.<p>If you do go down this path:
- Have a strategy for how to socialize your kids beyond &quot;well, some of my friends have kids&quot;
- Find good curriculum
- Have a strategy ready for when a kid does not want to learn something 
- Make sure you or your spouse will have a lot of free time to supervise
- Enroll them in a program that will get them a HS transcript from an accredited school.
- Find ways to expose them to extracurricular activities of their choosing, beyond your own interests.