A few months later, when two children attacked Anna Pink’s son with sticks in kindergarten, he begged her to stay home. “I didn’t want to force him to go,” says Ms. Pink. She and her husband, who both worked at a startup, thought home-schooling would be better for their son, who is “super sensitive.” But in Germany, where they lived, it is illegal. So they moved to Costa Rica, where home-schooling is illegal for locals, but there’s little oversight for digital nomads.
Now her children, seven and four, do not follow lesson plans; Instead they learn by playing outside, engaging in local activities with other children, and traveling around the world. She thinks it all fosters curiosity and confidence. “We think the school system can’t provide what our society needs in the future,” she says.
Home-schooling has long been associated with quirky parents, awkward kids, and shaky pedagogy. But it is growing rapidly. The numbers were rising before the pandemic; They have since increased in countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada (see chart 1). In the US, 3.2 million children, or 6% of the school-age population, were home-schooled in 2024 – more than double the number in 2019.
As home-schooling has grown, the families adopting it have also changed. Take the United States, where home-schooling, once a trend of the counter-cultural left in the 1970s, became in the 1980s driven by conservatives who denounced schools as “devilish houses.” It is still associated with white evangelical Christians.
But home-schooling parents in the United States these days look roughly the same as the rest of the population, says Angela Watson, head of home-schooling research at Johns Hopkins University. In fact, she says, home-schooling is growing fastest among families of color, many of whom are concerned about discrimination and culturally insensitive curriculum. Perhaps for similar reasons, in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey in 2022–23, a larger percentage of home-school parents identified as LGBT than public or private-school parents. Ms. Watson says most families “mix” types of education: About half of home-schooled children in the US are taught this way for only one to three years.
The reasons for home-schooling are also changing. Parents are now more likely to say that their primary concern is their child’s physical and psychological safety. “Since[my eldest was born]the world has gone a little crazy,” says British mother Rebecca Hardman. She and her husband plan to send their younger son to school once the pandemic lockdown ends. But they started looking at home-schooling as a long-term option. It appears that children in school are more susceptible to peer pressure and the harmful effects of social media. “All these things have changed so rapidly that every moment when I thought, ‘Oh, maybe it’s time’, I would just say, ‘Oh my God, really, what would he be learning?'”
Parents are also worried about rat race. The UN’s World Health Organization survey of 280,000 youth in 44 countries found that the share of 15-year-old girls who feel pressured at school is expected to rise from 54% to 63% between 2018 and 2022. This is of particular concern for children who have learning difficulties, are autistic or suffer from poor mental health. (Of the 126,000 home-educated children in England last autumn, one in six cited mental health as the main reason.) Hanna Lippi, a parent in Slovenia, says traditional education is “rigorous, undesirable, stressful, bureaucratic and frankly unbearable”. She home-schooled her children before the rules tightened in 2024 and is considering moving abroad so she can continue to do so. Because of the focus on academic evaluation, she says, “families are ruined.”
Other parents simply think they can provide a better education. Many consider the national curriculum to be behind the times on everything from race to artificial intelligence – or too limited for a rapidly changing world. Issy Batson, who hosts a popular home-schooling podcast, started home-schooling in New Zealand after working for 20 years in software companies and startups. If his children do not enjoy traditional subjects he rejects them. “Our eldest is a storyteller: he’s a writer, a reader, and a painter, and he’s always been at it. So it’s absolutely crazy to think that we would ever sit down and teach him math. It would seem completely pointless.” Instead he uses online tutorials to teach subjects like coding, which he finds more useful. Schoolchildren have been “trained in a completely different model for a completely different world,” he says.
Rejection by schools worries many people. Some studies conducted by home-schooling proponents show that home-schooled children outperform their peers. But this practice appears to be worse in some other studies that take family background into account.
In 2025, Cardus, a Canadian think-tank, published research that incorporated childhood poverty, whether respondents grew up with both biological parents and whether they were in a religious household. The paper, written by Ms. Watson and Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas, found that American adults who were home-schooled were less likely to work full-time or have household incomes above the median wage. A 2014 study using data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that home-schooled children ages 12 and older were two to three times more likely to report being behind their grade level. And a 2020 meta-analysis by Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither found that home-schoolers perform well on verbal tests, but lag behind in math.
Studies of mental health and social integration also present a mixed picture. Most data is collected through self-reporting, and most home-schooling families say they are well socialized. But the duration of home-schooling matters a lot. The CARDS report found that students taught at home for eight years or more reported the highest levels of optimism and closer social bonds. But those who were taught this way for one to two years had the highest levels of anxiety, and those who were home schooled for three to seven years had the least close social bonds and the lowest life satisfaction (see Chart 2).
One aspect that is difficult to measure is the extent to which children may be isolated and vulnerable to abuse at home. This is the focus of those advocating for greater home-schooling regulation, such as the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a US organization where many employees were home-schooled themselves.
There is no peer-reviewed evidence linking home schooling to higher rates of abuse or neglect. But globally teachers are the most frequent reporters of cases to child-protective services, so reduced contact between students and school staff may lead to abuse going unreported. Some experts are also concerned that abusive parents may withdraw children from school under the pretext of home-schooling. A 2024 study by England’s Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel found that home-schooled children were “less visible” to safeguarding agencies, although it also noted that the majority of home-educated children “lead happy and safe lives”.
Home-schooling rules are very strict in many countries. School attendance is compulsory in places such as China, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain and Türkiye; Discounts are rare. There are strict restrictions on it in some other countries including South Korea and Singapore. This year Britain passed the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which establishes a national register of out-of-school children and provides more local monitoring of home-schooling; Previously parents simply had to ensure that their children received full-time education “appropriate” for their age. And in 2021, after several terror attacks, France passed a law banning home-schooling in exceptional circumstances to combat extremism and protect secular values.
But in other countries the rules have been significantly relaxed. The US, home of home-schooling, has seen waves of regulation, thanks to decades of lobbying by the Home School Legal Defense Association, a conservative group that now operates around the world.
Those who can’t, teach them
In almost all US states, parents can be homeschooled even if they have been convicted of violent or sexual crimes against children. In 42 states there is no minimum eligibility limit for parents’ education. Only eight US states require all home-schooled children to take academic assessments, and 27 have no home-school testing requirements. Eleven states do not even require families to notify districts that they are home-schooling. And some states now subsidize children’s home-schooling, allowing parents to spend taxpayer money on services like tutoring.
In extreme cases a lack of regulatory oversight can enable harmful ideologies to spread unchecked. In 2023, a home-schooling network was revealed in Ohio that connected more than 3,000 white supremacists on social media; Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was the cornerstone of its curriculum. Authorities investigated the group but ultimately found that no laws were broken, as the state’s home-schooling laws do not regulate curriculum content.
Home-schooling may have such stereotypical dangers, but more broadly the practice is gaining support across the ideological spectrum. Ms. Watson noted that American home-school parents were slightly less likely to identify as liberal or moderate than their public-school counterparts in the 2024 survey. Despite mixed findings on performance and social adjustment, parents of all types are now reported to say that they simply want what is best for their children.
