Choosing to Homeschool - How Do You Know?

"How did you know homeschooling was right for Chico?"

This has to be in the top five questions I get about homeschooling. It's not surprising that people would find our choice a bit mystifying. After all, school attendance is taken for granted as a rite of childhood. It was our plan for C, once upon a time.

The answer is different for every family. For ours, it came down to four facts.

We were afraid for his safety
C had spent the first five years of his life either in the care of his parents or a trusted aunt who had been his nanny since he was three months old. We could count on one hand the number of injuries he'd had. Once he started school, it was one thing after another. He came home with bite marks and scratches. There were bruises on his neck, legs, and arms. There were goose eggs and cut lips, and more days than not he was crying when I picked him up If these had been the result of roughhousing or mishaps with the playground equipment, it might have made at least a little sense. But when I'd ask, it was always put down to something he'd done... banged his head, or scratched himself... thrown himself into furniture or onto the floor hard enough to bruise. These were behaviors that we never saw at home. After months of this,we found these explanations harder, and ultimately impossible, to believe.

The stress of school was impacting his health
Chico has a condition called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. He nearly lost his life at a month old, has taken medication 3-4 times a day every day since then, and will do so for the rest of his life. Physical stress like fever, prolonged illness and injury require a special treatment protocol to ensure his survival. Mental and emotional distress are not quite so easily managed. We saw our boy going from generally happy to listless, withdrawn, and flat out angry most evenings. He was so beaten up from surviving the school day that he had no energy for enjoying what he'd previously loved.

He wasn't learning at school
We left C in his school program for as long as we did because we didn't know there could be another path for him. Our expectation that our child would go to school was only compounded by his Autism diagnosis. Surely it was in his best interest to be where the professionals could help him... right?  As time went on, we realized that the skills he had were the skills we had taught him. He made literally zero gains during his two years in school. And looking back, I can see why. The kid was using every single spoon he possessed just to get through the day. There was nothing left for new skill building. 

Once we learned the (partial) truth about his school days, we could not turn a blind eye
Chico spent two years in the public school system. The first was in a classroom for children with delays. The second was in a pilot program for children with Autism. Neither year was very successful in terms of academics, but there were a few happy days in his first year.

At the end of his second year, when it was time to organize a plan for how / where he would move on, I received some disturbing news about the practices of his school program. Our son was being subjected to treatment that we considered abusive, and we could no longer entrust his care to that system. To leave him in the program would have been meant granting them our approval, and we simply could not.

We could figure out an alternative path for academics. We could not send him back and risk his spirit being broken.

That's how we knew.