Home Schooling Alternatives

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I'm actually amazed at how little support there seems to be here on this board for the option of providing home schooling for autistic or gifted children. Also how much support and confidence there seems to be for the organized special classes within the public school system.
This is alsmot 90 degrees away from what I expected to see posted on this type of site.

There was quite a hyped debate a while back....
IMO depends on the kid, and the school. Living in Scandinavia, my son goes to a school for kids with AS or HFA. The classes are small, and his learning style, strenghts an weaknesses are respected. As a working Mum, I am gratefull he has a school he loves and thrives at. At some point he will have to transfer to the NT world, and I hope we have given him a sturdy platform so things go well.
I'm sorry if your experiences with school were awfull. In some situations homeschooling may be the way to go. In others it is not.

So was I.

My PDD/AS 9 year old son is homeschooling, and there are another dozen or so members here who post about their experiences of homeschooling from time to time. And sometimes I get very excited about it, and the horrors of the school system, but apparently most people can't do it for one reason or another, so that although threads about the miseries of national schooling frequently get me upset I now restrict myself to saying "Have you thought about homeschooling?" rather than any full scale arguments for it. Apparently most parents are both at work, and simply cannot envisage one of them staying home.

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Last edited by ouinon on 02 Jan 2009, 5:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You have a unique situation in that you have what I call an 'alternative' school at your disposal. Here thery are very rare for some unknown reason. I imagine that the environment your child has now will no doubt benefit him later on down the road and this is exactly what I'm trying to understand from posting this thread.
Why do so many American parents subject their special children to substandard schooling.

Did you search carefully? Quite a few parents in this section homeschool or have homeschooled in the past. I am VERY pro-homeschooling. My son wanted to try school this year (grade 6) but it was his choice, not mine. He's in a small private school now and (to my shock and amazement) loves it. He had never been to a "real" school before and is way ahead of his peers in everything except math.

I found the results to show almost the opposite as it seemed most had their children in public school with special ed classes or something similar.

True, many do... but the homeschooling enthusiasts are here too .

That is right. And according to a poll I ran about a year ago it is either because parents are happy/reasonably satisfied with the national school service and what it provides, or are unhappy but both of them, ( if there are two parents in the home ), "have" to go to work.

I got the impression that many, ( but not all ), of the "satisfied" parents believe that school is necessary for the "socialisation" of children, and believe that homeschooling will hold their child back even more. This is unfortunately a widespread belief despite there being no evidence for this at all, if anything the reverse.

It seems that most families now believe that they need/"have" to have two incomes.
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Last edited by ouinon on 02 Jan 2009, 5:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.

That's kind of what I suspected. The 'work' deal and tradeoffs and such. It's to bad more people don't realize that it is not the duration of learning as in so many hours per day but the quality of the learning that is important. Two hours of quality per day can be worth 16 or more hours of the usual stuff at school.

But most working parents still need somewhere to park their children while they are at work, so even if the ( structured ) homeschooling itself takes only two hours a day, one parent has to be at home to "babysit" the rest of each day.

Or are you talking about extra teaching at home in after-school hours, which I think would just make things even worse for AS children?

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After school.
I could get through school but a couple hours before or after would have made all the difference in the world.

It interests me, too.
The schools are a new thing here, too, and we had to fight hard to get them!
I always thought the options were few, but public in Scandinavia, and many, but private in the States - I'm thinking early intervention ect.
As for staying at home - in this country all women work - and it is very, very hard to get by on one income. We pay over 50% tax to pay for all these schools and things! I see it as a common health insurance.... but honestly, I choose to work because I love what I do.

I live in canada, and when my family doctor told my parents years ago that he suspected I had autism , there wasn't much available in the way of education resources for parents. However with my parents non tiring support, and the fact that they put me in a very small private school which had 12-15 students per class, was probably what helped me the most. They both worked, and with them paying the tuition for this school there wasn't much left over. Despite this, they were able to make very fun, we still went away (camping) , and my parents gave me alot of emotional support, and academic support.

Now we have our own children, and although one suffers more severely from autism than the other, she has always wanted to play music and dance, since neither my wife or I have been trained in neither music or dance, well the only way we can afford our mortgage, as well as extra curriculars for her and our other not so afflicted is for both of us to work. We both provide extra care for both, my wife more so than me, but it would not be financially feasible for only one of us to work and tell our less afflicted, extremely musically inclined child that since one of isn't working, in order to stay home with the other child, that there is no room for extras. I guess what I'm really trying to say is we made the decision to do it this, to benefit both of them, and probably alot of other parents do the same, and its not easy deciding what would be best for all

For the older daughter in the later grades we did a combination of some classes at school and some classes online , with the help of us and tutors. Unfortunately when she did this, the online classes were not totally funded by our education system, so we payed 300.00-350.00 per high school course, and then if the subject was something we were not able to teach her, whether we didn't have the skills, or whether we weren't able to teach her that subject in a style that she was able to comprehend, we would also have tutor fees on top of it. Even since my time in high school, the curriculum has changed alot etc etc etc, getting a little long winded, yeah sorry

Creepy you had some nice parents and you seem to have really thought about your own children. I know that it's hard, very hard but someday it will be worth it all.

on the table. Right now my 11 year-old DD liked school up until the past week actually. I have privately thought that maybe I would move her to a private school but it hasn't come up. I want her to be socialized as much as possible. I see when she is away from her peers for an extended length of time it can make her less anxious but also this is not the "real" world. Right now she is not bullied but bullies herself really, as far as I know. Next year she starts middle school and I know it will be really tough. When I asked her how she would feel about me home schooling her she was adamant that I do not do that. She said she would miss her three good, and only three friends she has. I dont' really know what the future holds. Right now we are in the process of diagnosis. What did you like so much about homeschooling and who did it if you don't mind me asking? Did you go on for secondary education or college? How do American colleges view homeschooled children?? Do you have any information? I feel like homeschooling would be a monumentaul but probably worthwhile task for me to take on as a mother if I need to. What in your opinion were the benefits? What were the losses in your opinion? Why do you think, besides the less bullying, are the advantages for having a child homeschooled? Thank you so much ! Lucy (Sorry there is probably alot of typos I am typing fast and in the dark!)