Once unconventional, homeschooling has become newly fashionable, says Stevens.
In the beginning, your kids need you—a lot. They’re attached to your
hip, all the time. It might be a month. It might be five years. Then
suddenly you are expected to send them off to school for seven hours a
day, where they’ll have to cope with life in ways they never had to
before. You no longer control what they learn, or how, or with whom.
Unless you decide, like an emerging
population of parents in cities across the country, to forgo that
age-old rite of passage entirely.
When
Tera and Eric Schreiber’s oldest child was about to start kindergarten,
the couple toured the high-achieving public elementary school a block
away from their home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood near the
University of Washington. It was “a great neighborhood school,” Tera
says. They also applied to a private school, and Daisy was accepted. But
in the end they chose a third path: no school at all.
Eric, 38, is a manager at Microsoft.
Tera, 39, had already traded a career as a lawyer for one as a
nonprofit executive, which allowed her more time with her kids. But
“more” turned into “all” when she decided that instead of working, she
would homeschool her daughters: Daisy, now 9; Ginger, 7; and Violet, 4.
