Our Top 10 Reasons for Homeschooling

I would like to preface this post with this.  Some of this is tongue-in-cheek, some of it is heartfelt, and none of it is meant to look down on anyone who chooses not to homeschool (or can't).  I don't believe that there is only one right way to educate your kids, but I do believe that it is good and right to recognize and celebrate the ways your family benefits from the choice you make. 

Our Top 10 Reasons for Homeschooling

1. Letting them be little for longer.  I will never forget the day I was shopping with my seven-year-old, and she had one of her baby dolls with her.  The cashier commented on how nice, and how uncommon, it was to see a girl her age still playing with dolls.  She was seven.
2. If you enroll your children in the local school instead, you will have to have them all up, dressed, fed, and either outside for the bus or dropped off on time, every weekday morning, with all of their books and supplies.  (I do wonder sometimes how some people manage that.)
3. No longer being able to schedule extracurriculars during the day, but having to fight for after-school and evening time slots.  (It was a gift being able to schedule all of our music lessons and outings during school hours!)
4. School is expensive!  Our friends spent more per year to send their kids to public school than we ever spent on homeschooling.  Bus fees, school fees, hot lunch fees, field trip fees, band fees, club fees, drama fees, school supplies from a specific list, indoor shoes, outdoor shoes, new clothes, gym clothes... 
5. If you are already homeschooling and you stop, you will have to come up with how to answer comments like, "I knew that wouldn't work out," or, "Oh good, now your kids can be normal!"
6. Avoiding drama.  I hear a lot of stories from the kids I tutor, and the amount of bullying, conflict, stress, and anxiety that the second-graders share with me is really sad.
7. Fewer sick days.  We still had plenty of them because we were involved with many outside activities and naturally picked things up, but we never had to suffer through the weeks of back-to-back illness that plagued all of the families around us.  And being able to take more time to rest probably helped us get through those illnesses faster. 
8. Choice.  We got to choose what to read, where to study, who to spend time with, when to schedule our learning time, and whether to even do academics on a given day.  Some days are just better spent walking through a museum, or going to the beach, or baking, or playing Minecraft with friends. 
9. Field trips!  It has genuinely been fun to plan regular outings, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends, visiting everything from local banks to emergency services to farms to bakeries.  We also intentionally scheduled volunteering at least one day per week, whether at an animal shelter or a church program or a seniors' residence, and that has become a mindset as they have grown.
10. Influence. Which is really reason #1.  When my kids were very small, I read a blog post that said, "If you genuinely want to be the primary influence in your kids' lives, you can't send them away for 8 hours a day, five days a week."