Time for Family
Home schoolers have the most important resource of all: time.
As homeschooling families you enjoy the most valuable resource of all: time. If all has gone well, you’ve finished the year’s curriculum, assessed growth and achievement, and tied all the loose ends on the school year. So, I’d like to take a few moments during the lull of summer to overview what some of the research says about the way homeschool families use their time. Then, let me make a few suggestions for making the most of this invaluable resource—time!
First, homeschool families, not surprisingly, invest in the greatest investment of all—family. An overwhelming 97 percent of homeschool parents are married couple families, compared to 72 percent of families with at least one child enrolled in schools nationwide.1 They have more children, 62 percent having three children or more, compared to 89 percent of public/private schooling families nationwide having two or fewer children.2 And homeschool parents also bring into the family a strong education background. Homeschool parents have more formal education than the general population. While slightly less than half the general population attended or graduated from college, almost 88% of homeschooling parents continued their education after high school. 3
Second, homeschool kids spend their time in radically different ways than their schooling counterparts. In a study of fourth graders, 0.1percent of children watched six hours or more of television per day, compared to 19 percent of schooled kids.4
Additionally, homeschool students rarely watch more than three hours of television per day; nearly 40 percent of the students nationwide watch that much television. Computer use also varies widely. Twenty percent of fourth grade homeschoolers use the computer every day, and only 9.9 pecent of nationwide fourth-graders use the computer every day.5 Homeschool parents teach their children how to invest their time.
Those are a lot of numbers, but what they tell us is that homeschool families are making the right investment of their time. The results are higher achieving students. In fact, one study compared grade equivalent score comparisons for homeschool students and the nation: by eighth grade, homeschool students’ median scores are almost four grade equivalents above their public/private school peers.6 These are powerful statistics of the superior effect of a home school education.
1 Bruno and Curry, 1997, Table 19
2 National Date: US Census (1997a, Table 77)
3 National Data: U.S. Census (1996; Table 8)
4 National Data: NAEP Math 1997
5 National Date: Snyder and Wirt, 1998, Indicator 3
6 EPAA Vol. 7 No. 8 Rudner: Home School Students, 1998
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