Today many parents are opting for homeschooling or unschooling. There are various reasons: either they are not satisfied with schools' teaching programs and believe that they can teach their children much better at home; or they dislike the school environment and seek to provide a better environment at home. Whatever the reason, the fact is that the number of homeschooled children is growing. Parents are making a conscious choice to educate their children at home despite the logistical challenges and extraordinary levels of commitment required.


Homeschooling parents usually decide a program or syllabus they want to use at home and play the role of primary teacher for their children. Today there are many high-quality programs and associated teaching materials available for parents. As a result parents can become very effective teachers, especially for elementary levels. They teach their children through a spectrum of worksheets, books, experiments, projects and fieldtrips.

As their children advance, however, some parents can find themselves struggling to manage the growing complexity of the coursework. They might find themselves challenged by their limitations when trying to explain advanced mathematics topics such as algebra, statistics, geometry, calculus or probability. Likewise, by the ninth grade students begin to learn advanced topics in physics, chemistry and biology. Finally, the expectations for English writing skills in high-school equivalent grades can be beyond some parents' abilities.


Parents seeking to teach advanced grade subjects to their children typically have a limited number of choices: send their children to a school; get an in-home personal tutor; or join a group of homeschooled children to obtain help from other parents sharing in the responsibility. Many homeschooling parents find the idea of enrolling their children in school quite unacceptable. In-home personal tutoring, on the other hand, can be cost-prohibitive for most American parents.

Online tutoring represents an attractive and cost-effective mechanism for homeschooling parents to obtain academic support. Parents can sign up for a regular and convenient schedule of online tutoring classes based on their children's requirements. For instance, a father wanting assistance in teaching algebraic linear equations could sign up his child for 2 classes a week on the subject. Furthermore, he could sit in on the lessons to observe, and even possibly pick up a few teaching tips along the way.

Online tutoring helps parents continue to provide high-quality, personalized education and attention to their children - in their homes, at a time that is convenient for them, and through a very qualified yet affordable tutor. The service is also a boon for homeschooling parents who are constantly looking for ways to improve their children's learning experiences. Leading online tutoring firms such as provide personal attention to students, offer extra practice worksheets (for instance, in math word problems or story problems) through their daily practice program, and can teach complex or difficult-to-explain mathematical concepts.


By Anu Bhave, Founder of tutorNEXT (http://www.tutornext.com)- a one-on-one Math and English online tutoring provider.