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So, you don’t want to homeschool. Social isolation, no peers to learn with, no specialist teachers and no serious discipline when it comes to studying are not your idea of the best education for your kids. Add to that the weirdos you’ve met who take this route, and the fact you would be losing half your income, and the idea is not just out of the question, it’s insanity.

Fair enough. Some homeschooling advocates like to argue that homeschooling is suitable for everyone, right now (just as some institutionalized schooling advocates would like to see homeschooling banned today), but I’m not one of them. I’ve been a homeschooling parent, a parent with kids in school, a schoolteacher (in the private system, in England), and been through a fair amount of education myself (comprehensive school, boarding school, Cambridge University). Everything has its pluses and minuses, every child has his or her individual needs, and every family has its own constraints–money, location, work, the other kids. Let’s get rid of the myth right now that parents have a duty to sacrifice anything and everything in their lives for the sake of giving their children The Best Education. Kids do want a house to live, in as well as the chance to go to college. They also want a life outside of school, relationships with you and their siblings, time to pursue their interests, an allowance. Yes, kids even want happy parents. Misery is a kind of semi-absence.

Families making choices about education are, whether they think about it consciously or not, making a whole lot of choices about the rest of their lives at the same time. How much money do we need in order to live well, where do we want to live, what work do mom and dad want to do, how do we feel about vacation daycare, how much should we prioritise interests outside of school, and so on. Not all parents think about all of these things as choices. Often the choice is made for us by the reality of local schooling. Homeschooling parents generally think about all these things, and a few more: what daytime groups and clubs are available that will benefit my child, how is she going to make friends, what transport choices do we have available, how can I build her special interests and talents into her education this year, do I need to buy in tutors or text book courses for math or English or Japanese, how can I find other homeschooled teens in my area interested in performing a Shakespeare play this semester? These choices include curriculum, socializing, complex organization: they are about the family as the center of learning, with a range of different educational possibilities to fit together into its life.

These are all things I personally happen to love doing, and at which I consider myself very skilled. Homeschooling suits me very well, because I am based in the home anyway, and having a home-educated child here is just like having a series of branches reaching outwards in various directions rather than the one big focus of the school down the road. You find them all the things they need, and fit it all together. The advantages are flexibility, tailor-made education for the unique talents of the child, and lots and lots of time. It takes ten minutes to teach a child what would take a whole hour with a class of thirty (I know from experience–it’s the reason parents prefer small class sizes when they can afford them). When you have had the chance to arrange your days according to the abilities and interests of your child, school curricula start to seem very arbitrarily fixed. Our teen finished the algebra course for her school year in just a few weeks–she likes algebra, so why would we hold her back? My dyslexic daughter was a very late reader, but then went into a small local school in England and caught up to their standard very quickly, and now enjoys her bedtime book. The teacher noted that she is good at learning itself. Not having been forced or pushed, when she was ready to read, reading became a pleasure. Some of us start some things later than others. Schools are simply unable to accommodate that.

I could give you a thousand more examples of things homeschooling can do that schools find much more difficult–but the thing is, schools can and do achieve the same sort of things eventually as well. We can perceive constraints and obstacles as impairments to learning, or we can regard them as challenges. I was one of those kids who hated sports. I endured years of blue-legged hockey lessons on the freezing fields of England, and surely this contributed to making me the tough person I am today! On the other hand, our quiet, gentle teenaged daughter found the cliques, "mean girls", and lack of time available for making friends at school very difficult, whereas after a few weeks back at homeschooling she made a better friend with more shared interests than any she met during a year in that school. And she’s happy, and learning, and sleeping better hours, and yesterday her homeschooled theater class did a very successful performance of "The Tempest". It’s lovely to see. But schools do Shakespeare too, and some of us adults also still have best friends we met in school.

Our other three children all currently attend school. We are a blended family, so they all divide their time between us and their other parents, our ex-spouses. School provides excellent childcare and educational support for parents who need to work full-time. You don’t have to be wealthy to homeschool–especially in the United States it is possible to live both comfortably and fairly cheaply, with sufficient hard work and creativity–but you do need some sort of income, and unless things are going extraordinarily badly in school (which sadly can sometimes happen) children need homes with their parents more than they need to be educated in them.

Homeschooling in general has been shown to result in better socialization and academic success than institutional schooling in general: but in my view, those things are of very limited relevance. The question is really whether, all things considered in relation to your own family, the constraints and the unique opportunities offered by school add up to more or less than the constraints and unique opportunities you are capable of offering from within your local community. In the end, you and the school have the same goals. How can you best all thrive? A significant amount of research is needed for a decent comparison, but nothing substitutes for experience. Anyone frustrated with the state system may want to consider the possibility that dealing with it at all is, in fact, a choice. Although good homeschooling families, in my view, don’t just "opt out" of things they dislike, which is a rather negative approach to tackling the problems of life: they actually aim to do better. And they achieve it.

Alice Bachini-Smith is a blogger and former schoolteacher from the UK.  She lives with her husband and family in Texas.