“Twoin- with all due respect, you are only seeing one piece of the puzzle on your neighbors.”
They aren’t neighbors, they are friends I have known since our kids were in the NICU together - literally since the day our oldest children were born. I know the medical problems; we’ve shared everything and have other friends whose kids needed even more services. our kids share similar problems since they shared the same medical issues, not exactly the same but we’ve traded successful approaches to problems and things that didn’t work. Their oldest three kids didn’t show any signs of special needs when they were younger (and the twins weren’t preemies), but at about age 13 issues really became more obvious. My kids actually had IEPs and therapies, and theirs didn’t. This family actually did send their son, who is now about 13, to public school for pre school because he needed services, but were always going to switch him back to homeschooling. They started homeschooling their daughter at age 4 and never considered anything else and at the time, she was doing well, learning, curious, and very social. I considered our kids very much peers socially, theirs ahead academically, mine physically (and when you compare preemies, the physical is as important as the academic). It was as the years went on that I saw so many changes and just didn’t think the kids were thriving. The parents don’t disagree with me and see the problems, we just disagree as to the fix. Another friend from this same group went the public school with lots of services and IEPs and 504 plans, plus a therapeutic school for 2 years. It wasn’t perfect, but I can’t even imagine her daughter being homeschooled.
Homeschooling is the best choice for some kids and some families, but not all. I don’t think it worked very well for these kids, but maybe it wouldn’t have been any different if they’d gone to public school, or private school. They haven’t been bounced around in the school system because they were never in it. They live in a very good district, but didn’t take advantage of any of the services or special classes or activities offered by the district. The parents don’t want ‘authority’ in their lives.
In this case, I think the parents chose homeschooling because it worked best for the mother’s lifestyle. She didn’t like taking the younger guy to pre school, to being on that schedule, and she admitted it. I didn’t like taking my kids to IEP appointments and school based therapies either, it’s not fun. Did all my choices work out for my kids? NO. I wish I had a ‘do over’ for several choices. I found the educational choices much harder to make than any medical decisions for my kids (including college search and selection). I looked at three or four choices for kindergarten, all fairly different (including at least partially homeschooling them), and agonized over the decision, made it, and thought “well, I’m done for at least 9 years.” Hahaha, the joke was on me. I had to make a decision every year, made some I regretted. For high school we sent a year looking for a good school (kids coming from 2 different middle schools, two very different kids academically), looked at an IB program, a school of the arts, magnet programs, moving to a new school district (like moving across the street), and finally settled on the school we were zoned for for both of them. A month before they started high school, we moved to a new state, so all that searching was for nothing.