1) Afterschooling, ( AKA: “helping kids after school”), is **more** work than homeschooling. Why? Because some school homework is redundant and/or stupid, and more time is spent undoing the indoctrination than if it was taught correctly the first time.
It is what it is. Keeping kids out of school is horrendously difficult here. The absolute best you can do is correct the errors and help them advance.
2) Are you admitting that government socialist-entitlement schooling is a baby sitting service? It costs up to a quarter of a million dollars per child for government K-12 schooling in the U.S.. That’s expensive babysitting!
Just saying what we had. 7 years of my wife not earning one thin dime and we nearly drowned. We didn’t but it was close, and we have never owed money in our lives, so no loans to pay off.
3) Often when the second parent goes out to work, it doesn’t bring in that much money. Once the costs of babysitting, travel, taxes, and other expenses associated with working are considered, the second parent is literally working for pennies an hour.
Yes, that is a huge and ongoing problem. The main reason my wife stayed home for seven years is we could not afford her to work. We really couldn’t afford her not to work either, but her not working let us go broke more slowly.
4) Homeschooling gives the family much more flexibility in where they live. Their home purchases are not driven by finding so called “good” schools. This can be a tremendous savings for them.
Again, a good point. We were lucky - good schools in an area we could afford without me doing a 4 hour commute, so I could spend time with the kids of an evening.
5) Finally, I think that once parents have children they should give up the idea of financially getting back to where they were before.
Agree with that totally. Kids come first.
This “good schools” idea should really be closely examined. Why? Because the afterschooling done by good parents, such as you and your wife, is never considered. How do we know that these schools are “good” or not, if the contributions of the parent's afterschooling is **never** studied? Perhaps the so-called “good” school is merely ordinary but it is the parents, and their hard work in the home, that is the real reason these students have high standardized test scores.
Afterschooling has **never** been studied by education professionals. A Stanford professor of education e-mailed me and told me exactly that.
We in the U.S. are literally crushed by school taxes. Really, we are! In some of our states, the amount spent on schooling is more than a quarter of million dollars per child for 13 years of schooling. It is not unusual to have property tax bills of $10,000 or more a year in some states on very ordinary homes. And....Business property taxes passed on to the customer raises the price of everything that we buy and use.
Yet... No one really knows if our schools are teaching anything. It could be that they are merely sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow in the home, serving as testing centers, and providing grading on projects.