The Huge Benefits of Homeschooling Your Kids
In the past, families that went down the unconventional path of homeschooling their children were marked as “odd” and surveyed in a manner similar to that of a historic display in a museum. In fact, I am personally the product of being homeschooled every year of my primary education and it’s never a surprise to me that after people find out I was homeschooled they exclaim, “But you are so normal!”
However, many successful people known around the world for their intelligence and determination all share the same thing in common: they were homeschooled.
During a recent interview with Good Morning America and ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza, Tim Tebow, a former NFL player and winner of the 2007 Heisman Trophy, shared that he was homeschooled by his parents.
“They wanted us to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, but it wasn’t number one,” Tebow told Mendoza. “It wasn’t the most important thing… They wanted to instill love in our hearts, love for God, love for one another. They wanted us to be able to learn a work ethic, a dedication.”
With more non-traditional options and methods of educating now available, the country has seen a rising popularity in homeschooling. These days there are approximately 1.7 million families across the United States going down the homeschooling route for their children, leading the percentage of homeschooled kids to have doubled between 1999 and 2012.
What families across the country have begun to discover is that homeschooling your children can not only provide the ability to add religious values to a child’s daily studies, but also the chance to give the young learners a more well-rounded education. Having the flexibility to choose the curriculum and move the learning to locations not bound by a school has provided parents with the ability to give their children an education that caters to their interests and desires.
If engineering or watercolor artwork is especially enticing to a child, why not encourage that curiosity from a young age by expanding on that area of learning? This is the goal that many homeschooling parents are seeking to accomplish for their children.
Of course, homeschooling does not come without its challenges. Many families have found that joining a learning co-op or sending their child to a traditional school part-time helps to alleviate the issue of needing peer interaction. These forms of homeschooling can also provide parents with support from other families walking the same educational path – from lesson plans to curriculum and researching the very same subjects that they are teaching to their young pupils.
Being a former homeschooler myself I completely believe that the greatest lesson I learned was how to be disciplined with my work in any setting and that if something was truly interesting to me, I should pursue learning that subject with wild abandon. This has led me as an adult to always be successful in any job and has given me a very wide-range across many fields of study.
Tim Tebow said it best in his interview: “You can be homeschooled and you can be the cool kid and you can break the trends and you can show that yeah, you’re different – but in a good way.”