(Warning: Extreme Sarcasm Ahead!)

With the homeschooling movement growing 15% each year and social acceptance blossoming, some educators are on the offensive. They scream about the “socialization problem” and the lack-of-credentials held by home educators. They demand that higher regulations and restrictions be imposed immediately and that the homeschooling steam train be brought to a screeching halt. To help them out a bit, here are the top 5 reasons why homeschooling is bad. This list is for any parent considering homeschooling as well as those who have been doing it for years. (DISCLAIMER: You’re about to enter an extreme sarcasm zone. Nothing you are about to read should be taken seriously.

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You Have To Spend a Lot of Time With Your Kids
If you don’t enjoy spending time with your kids, homeschooling is not for you. Who in their right mind wants to spend so many hours a day watching their child learn, discover, and grow? Who wants to deal with that same child through every struggle and difficulty? The terror! Outsourcing childcare from the earliest days of life is simply what we do nowadays. School hours are parent time, blissful hours of child-free time in some cases and hectic hours of work-madness in others. Regardless, the fewer hours a day you spend with your children, the higher your sanity levels. So what if you miss those little milestones and memories. It’s not like they grow up too fast or anything.

Your Kids Will Be Smarter Than Their Peers
Survival of the fittest ended with industrialization and equality is the American way. Who gives parents the right to give their child an academic head-up on their competition? If American kids are failing academically, yours should be too. Sure, the Chinese are learning math and English practically from the cradle, but that won’t impact your baby in any way, shape, or form. You don’t want your child to feel un-cool, now do you? It’s not fair to provide your beloved junior with all of your resources. If their peers aren’t learning Latin, French, and physics, yours shouldn’t be either. It’s just not right to make your child stand out to the college admittance officers at that Ivy League School. Imagine how much it’ll hurt your neighbor’s feelings when their slacker-son doesn’t get in as well.

Your Kid Won’ Be Attending Cool Keg Parties
You just don’t see homeschooled teens partying all night at unsupervised, beer-infused keg fests. Those homeschooling parents are simply too involved in their kid’s lives. These helicopter parents are suffocating their children’s growing identity. It takes too much effort to infuse morals in wild pre-teens and teens. These poor kids are probably dragged to church on Sundays too. There should be a law against that. We should just let our kids be kids, no matter what the consequences. They’ll have so many great memories, forever preserved on Facebook for the viewing pleasure of their college admittance officers and future employers.

You Have To Put In A Lot of Time and Effort
We’re all busy. Work is insane, life is crazy, and the primetime hours are packed with delectable television programming. Who wants to spend sacred moments planning lesson plans and researching curriculum? Who wants to maintain a portfolio of their child’s scribble-scrabble, let alone an attendance record? It’s much better to ship our offspring off to school every day and not think twice about it. Who cares if they won’t start learning a foreign language until high school? It’s America. We speak English. Who cares if their math skills are minimal and can’t compete in the world market? That’s what calculators are for. Who really wants to spend the time and effort investing in their child’s future if someone else can do it for them? I’m just saying… “me time” is for me. Sure, my children’s school years are a relatively small percentage of my total life and are pretty important, but I can’t afford to miss this season’s TV lineup!

Your Kids Will Turn Out “Weird”
Now, you don’t want your child to be different, do you? Doesn’t everyone want their teenie-bopper daughter to be boy crazy and name-brand obsessed, living in a techno-world of texting and moral-free, parent-ignoring bliss? Every boy should know the fine arts of wedgie-giving and locker-room potty mouthing. Every young teen should be fluent in the finer-points of sluttiness and human sexuality. Who wouldn’t want their kid smoking pot and skipping class? Who wouldn’t want their kid to experience bullies first-hand and stumble through cliques and peer pressure during their formative years? Depriving your child from these rights-of-teenage passage is simply inhumane.

DISCLAIMER: In case you missed it above, this article in no way reflects the author’s true beliefs about homeschooling. It should be read as a satire.

**This was written by a fellow homeschooling friend, Jennifer. You can visit her blog at http://homeschoolinghelicoptermama.wordpress.com/