WOW, thank you so much for the flood of replies! I got busy and didn't have time to respond to this post earlier, but my goodness. Y'all are literally the most helpful bunch of homeschool people I've ever seen! I really appreciate everybody taking the time to respond to me... I've been having such a hard time getting in touch with people (many homeschool groups seem to be pretty closed off to outsiders, and my network largely consists of people who have already finished homeschooling), you don't even know how amazing this is. 😂I'm super grateful. I've learned more from this one thread than from everyone and everywhere else I've looked (including the six or seven real-life conversations I've had so far). Yeah, I very much doubt that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. However, even helping just some people have a better starting point would be a massive win in my book. This is great info! I'll definitely be checking them out to see what I can find. Thank you LMD! 🙂 Yes! I should have done that at the beginning, but earlier in my research I was more afraid of accidentally causing bias in my research. At this point, I've realized that it's not actually causing any problems at all. I am a software developer / entrepreneur. My wife and I are actually thinking about starting a company to help homeschoolers somehow (including near-future us! lol). There are a ton of different ideas and theories that we have / had, so I wanted to find some way to actually learn from parents who are actively homeschooling right now where we could help the most. My wife and I were both homeschooled, and plan on homeschooling our kids (including our first, who we are expecting in July and who really kicked off this whole line of thought), but I quickly discovered that DOING homeschooling is very much not the same as BEING homeschooled. The biggest problem that everybody has mentioned consistently is picking curriculum, so we are digging more into that with the questionnaire above to learn a bit more about how many people actually have that problem, or if it was just coming from the few people that I happened to talk to. We aren't trying to describe a solution yet, as I want to be sure we understand the problem first. As Einstein said – "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about it and 5 minutes solving it." LOL I love this juxtaposition!!! That's great. ClemsonDana your whole post is fantastic and SO useful, thank you 🙏 I'm buying a copy of Well-Trained Mind for my own personal reference, for sure.

Wow – yeah, super helpful. Of course, this is something I should have known b/c that's what my mom did with me growing up, but somehow I never connected the dots to that's how everybody does it. It's slowly dawning on me that BEING homeschooled is not the same as DOING homeschool. What my mom experienced and what I experienced are two very different things, lol. Yeah, I'm starting to understand why that's the case. There are a TON of different variables and everybody's situation is different. Thanks so much for sharing, both of you. Do you think it might be better to live interview people (on a Zoom call or something) to get some of those more nuanced answers?

Hey everyone! My wife and I (who were both homeschooled and plan on homeschooling) are trying to come up with a way to simplify the process of choosing curriculum for ourselves and others. In the process, we came up with this short list of questions to help us in our research: https://forms.gle/VKEPagzdMtBx2WKbA If you could take 30 seconds and answer them that would be so appreciated. I'm excited to share what we learn! (To be 100% clear, we are NOT selling or promoting anything. This is purely for our own personal research purposes!) Thanks, Elliot & Alena BTW, here are the questions from the survey. I'm not sure they're the right questions to be asking, so please offer suggestions as to how they could be better: How old is your child? 4-11 11-14 14+ How satisfied are you with their current curriculum? Answer from 1 to 6: 1 being "need something new" and 6 being "totally happy" Please explain why you chose the number above. How did you find their current curriculum? Blog (such as Cathy Duffy's Guidebook) Personal recommendation Google / internet searches Magazine or subscription Facebook group Other How was the process of finding and deciding on which curriculum to use? Answer from 1 to 6: 1 being "need something new" and 6 being "totally happy" Please explain why you chose the number above. Do you have any additional comments you'd like to share?

Thank you both for the responses! I'll follow all of your advice. 🙂

Hey everyone! My wife and I (who were both homeschooled and plan on homeschooling) are trying to come up with a way to simplify the process of choosing curriculum for ourselves and others. In the process, we came up with this short list of questions to help us in our research: https://forms.gle/VKEPagzdMtBx2WKbA If you could take 30 seconds and answer them that would be so appreciated. I'm excited to share what we learn! (To be 100% clear, we are NOT selling or promoting anything. This is purely for our own personal research purposes!) Thanks, Elliot & Alena