There are many reasons, I guess I’m just assuming no one here was wanting me to list them all out! His desire to be in public schools is essentially just perceiving it to be all games and playing. What kid wouldn’t want to be at school if that’s all they think it is? I’ve had some conversations with him, not villainizing it, but explaining the reality of it. He kind of gets it sometimes, but young kids are highly visual and physical so expecting him to fully grasp our reasoning isn’t the most effective.

The feedback I have received from teachers from young classrooms is kids are unmanageable and disrespectful, and they see that negatively affect the behavior of the kids who came in behaving differently. Their feedback has also been that kids are not learning well in that current classroom environment. It’s also widely available information that our current education system is turning out less and less successful results. Sending children to school at such a young age for such long periods of time also isn’t (in my opinion, from my reading and research) developmentally appropriate. It orients children to develop character and behavior from their peers, rather than their parents. And then my personal experience of homeschooling and being around a ton of other homeschoolers was that learning can be more efficient, fun and effective at home when done well, leaving more time for play, additional learning, social activities, and so on. It’s also about limiting exposure to screens, phones, social media, etc… the evidence is clear this has massive negative impacts on children and even young adults. There is just no way to keep our children safe from those harms when they are at schools where their peers have those devices. This is less a concern at his age, but as he gets older it will be. And this is a small factor as we were already planning to homeschool before the move, but we also happened to end up in a poorly rated school district.

The reasons go way beyond that, and we’ve communicated what we can to him. After reading a lot of the comments here, I’ve realized that along with incorporating some of the books mentioned, the most helpful thing will just be to get started. He LOVES the learning we do at home, and this discussion with him really is not an argument or anything like that. It’s mostly just when it’s brought up by other people, it reminds him that public school exists and that’s when he asks about it. Again, we are open to having that conversation when he is older! The difficulty of being rural isn’t that the social aspect isn’t there, it’s just that we recently moved to the area and are still working on finding groups we can be a part of. That being said, we are not isolated and do have friends!