Why did we choose to stay at home?

My husband has always wanted to home school our children. I hadn’t been so sure. After all, I had gone through public school and I turned out okay. My oldest daughter was bored out of her mind in kindergarten where her favorite subjects were lunch, recess, and PE. She needed to be able to move at her own pace and the one size fits all method used in most schools just wasn’t engaging her mind which started out much further ahead than her classmates. My youngest daughter had never liked being separated from us to go to daycare where many parenting decisions were made for me and when I complained, I was assured that the best interest of my child was in mind. What about my decisions as a parent? Didn’t they count? The answer was “no”. Not as long as I was allowing someone else to raise my children. One day after much prayer and Bible reading, we decided that I needed to be at home.


Even with two part time jobs and finding myself extremely ill for the next year, I found a lot of benefits to being at home with my two daughters who were 3 and 6 at the time. My children became much calmer and more helpful around the house. They would copy me as I did laundry and cleaned the house. Eventually, they were listening to me the first time I asked them to do something. It occurred to me that it hadn’t been good for them to have two teachers at school, two parents, and at times church members and grandparents telling them what to do. All of these people had different outlooks on life and my daughters were completely confused as to how they should behave in front of whom. On top of that, they were just worn out from all of the shuffling around we’d been doing in the years past. I loved being at home and snuggling with my girls even as I worked and I’ve found that they have more confidence now that they are always with people who truly love them.