Homeschooling comes with many advantages for kids and parents. Every family has their own reasons for choosing to take their children’s education into their own hands. I’ve collected the most popular benefits of homeschooling to help you see why most families are opting to teach their children at home.

1. A Custom Tailored Education
One of the benefits to homeschooling that can truly make a huge difference in helping you child reach their potential is the opportunity to create a custom tailored education. Every child is unique and a teacher with a class of twenty or thirty student will never be able to tailor a lesson specifically to one student’s interests or needs. Your child may be naturally brilliant with numbers but may need extra help with composing sentences. Homeschooling allows you to offer your child more help where they need it and more space for independent learning in their areas of strength. This is an invaluable benefit to homeschooling that can help push your child higher than they ever could reach in a classroom environment.

Most children learn better when they feel motivated and each child is motivated in different ways and by different things. No one knows your child better than you. You know best what kind of environment is most conducive to your child’s learning and you can create that environment for your child. Some children prefer to learn through hands on experiments. Others love to read and ask questions. If you homeschool your child, you can create a curriculum that fits your child’s way of learning. This is one of the most valuable benefits to homeschooling.

2. Providing a Comfortable and Positive Environment
Most children learn best in settings where they feel comfortable. As hard as teachers and school administrators try, they can never create a school free of peer pressure and negative competition. No classroom can feel safer and more comfortable than a loving home. Although a desk and chair usually make a good place for learning, there may be some lessons that are best learned while you and your child sit comfortably on the family room sofa. One of the loveliest benefits to homeschooling is that you can curl up on the sofa with your child, read poetry or tell tall tales and consider that your English lesson for the day. Moments like this may create a lifelong love for poetry or story telling in your child like no classroom lesson can.

Every public and even private school struggles with incompetent teachers, bullies, gangs, drugs and other forms of negative peer pressure. One of the most important benefits to homeschooling is being able to shield your children from these types of negative and damaging influences. As a homeschooling parent you gain much more control over the environment your chid grows up in. When it comes to the benefits to homeschooling, I’m sure this is one that tops the list for many parents.

3. Flexibilty and Freedom
One of the things I loved best about the idea of homeschooling my children was the flexibility is would bring to our lives. My ten year old daughter is naturally curious and loves to challenge me with questions like, how can something as heavy as an airplane fly? Or why do worms only come out when it rains?

By homeschooling, not only can I incorporate my daughter’s curiosities into the lesson plans, I can take the lessons outside and let her discover the answers for herself. If she asks about butterflies, I can take her to the butterfly conservatory. If she asks about King Tut, I can take her to the museum. This is one of the benefits of homeschooling that kids love most.

Another reason why flexibility tops my list of the benefits to homeschooling is that I love to travel. Homeschooling my children allows me to offer them the education they need wherever I am. Another one of the great benefits to homeschooling is that when our family is going through particularly stressful times such as weddings, funerals or moves, homeschooling becomes an even bigger blessing. We can take a few weeks off school whenever we need to without missing important work.

Not only does the school year not have to be regimented, but neither does the school day. I’ve never been a morning person and as a homeschooling parent, I have the option to allow myself to sleep in and start the school day at 10 instead of 8 in the morning. I’m sure you can see why I believe that flexibility is one of the top three benefits to homeschooling.

Even though there are many benefits to homeschooling, I cannot tell you that it is easy. Ultimately, it is must be a labour of love. We can make lists of all the wonderful benefits to homeschooling but at the end of the day parents know that the most wonderful benefit to homeschooling is knowing that you will always be there when your child needs you to answer a question, offer a challenge or simply hold them in your arms.