Does Homeschooling Cause Child Abuse?

No.

Child abuse is caused by un-Godly attitudes towards children and/or anger.

Parents who choose to not love their children do not generally choose to spend twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with them. They will send them off to the free babysitting service we call public school. They would not generally even consider homeschooling.

Lately, there have been some highly publicized cases of parents who claim to homeschool abusing their children. There are several facts that our main stream media generally do not report:

• Most of these families were, technically, “truant from public school.” They were not meeting existing laws on homeschooling already. More regulations, as called for by the media, would have been equally ignored.
• Most of these families were already under investigation by Child Protective Services. If they were “homeschooling” to hide from the government, as the accusation is, then it obviously wasn’t working. In fact, had CPS been doing its job, these cases where the children died would not have ended so tragically (In one case the family had been visited by social workers eleven times and they had even removed the children once but GAVE THEM BACK! In another case the social workers failed to notice the children were starving to death during their FOURTEEN visits!) What more could public school attendance have done? Only enabled teachers to call the same CPS departments…again.

To suggest that homeschooling causes child abuse is to claim that public school prevents it.

This is ludicrous and illogical.

Christopher Klika from the Homeschool Legal Defense did a little math; if you take the rate of parents murdering their children in this country (the most extreme form of child abuse) in the general population and apply it to the homeschool population, there would be around thirty-six homeschool deaths per year. Yet, when he researched the records, he could find less than thirty-six cases over the last twenty years put together. These numbers suggest homeschoolers may not abuse AS OFTEN.

To illustrate it another way, let’s follow the “some people claiming to homeschool have abused their children so let’s increase regulation” logic:

When a woman in our area recently shot and killed herself and her husband and severely wounded her handicapped son, we should have immediately enacted more regulations controlling or even outlawing

• marriage, 
• handicapped children, 
• Mobil homes, or 
• public schools. (All of her children were in public school. She chose to shoot the one who would have been a burden to his grandparents to raise.) 

There was as much cause and effect between any of these things in her life as between homeschooling and the sad cases of abuse the media tells us about.
Unfortunately, these things happen no matter where children receive their education.

Sad to say, homeschooling is not immune from sick people and evil jerks anymore than any other part of the population.

Sad, but true.