A Christian Author’s Guide to the Homeschool Market

For many authors, the homeschool market seems like the promised land. This is a market that buys millions of Christian books every year.

It looks to many authors the way China looks to many international businesses: “Wow, China has a billion customers. If we could reach just 1% of them with our product, we’d be rich!” Those companies then slap Chinese labels on their products, only to watch them fail in the Chinese market. Why? Because China is a different market.

To succeed in selling to a culture, you need to understand that culture.

Why the Homeschool Market Is Important for Christian Authors

It is not uncommon for homeschoolers to walk away from the library with a couple dozen books every few weeks. My homeschool mom has purchased perhaps 4,000 books over the last 20 years — maybe more. She has an entire room in her house dedicated to books, with shelves covering every wall. This is not uncommon; homeschool moms brag about their “book-buying problems.”

More and more homeschool moms are getting into book writing, especially as their children grow up.

My Experience Homeschooling

I am the oldest of five children, and my parents started homeschooling us in 1992. They went on to homeschool for another 26 years, making them “elders” in the community. As a family, we have helped start homeschool speech and debate clubs around Texas.

My first company, Brook Audio, was an audiobook publishing company for the homeschool market. I have traveled around the country attending and speaking at homeschool events and conferences.

My wife was homeschooled all the way through, and her family was also very active in the homeschool community. Her dad served on the board of our local homeschool organization.

While I understand parts of the homeschooling movement, there are hundreds of different homeschool communities around the country, and each one is a little different from the others.

The History of Homeschooling Explains a Lot

To understand the homeschool market, you need to understand the different streams homeschool parents come from. There is no single homeschool market, but rather several separate homeschool markets. In this guide, I’ll focus mostly on psychographic and demographic differences, though there are also many geographic differences to consider. Homeschool communities in suburban California are very different from communities in rural South Carolina.

5 Types of Homeschoolers

Disclaimer

These streams represent how homeschoolers tend to congregate, not how they see themselves. Homeschoolers don’t identify with these streams and would probably not appreciate being “put in a box” like this. These groupings are for marketing purposes only.

Every homeschool family is a unique snowflake, and it won’t be hard to find exceptions to these observations. But as a marketer, I find it very helpful to see how these markets differ from each other. Just because an observation isn’t universally true doesn’t mean it can’t be generally helpful.

All of these streams continue to this day, although some are bigger than others. Also, some families come from more than one stream or have more complex motivations for homeschooling.

Stream 1: Hippie Homeschoolers

In the 1970s, the first wave of homeschoolers were hippies, believe it or not. Their parents didn’t want “the man” indoctrinating their children, or simply couldn’t be bothered to take them to school. A good representation of this early homeschool culture is the bestselling book Possum Living, about a father and daughter who lived “off the grid,” paying no taxes and living on about $1,000 a year.

Hippie Homeschoolers are more likely to use an approach called Unschooling that eschews curriculum in favor of a curiosity-driven education.

This is perhaps the smallest group today. They value independence and eschew traditional morality and mainstream culture — the kind of homeschooler who smokes pot, has purple hair, and spent a few years living in a commune back in the ’90s.

Quick Stats:

• Location: Rural
• Estimated Size: 50,000

Stream 2: Fundamentalist Homeschoolers

It started with sex education in the 1980s. Conservative parents didn’t want their children exposed to sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll in school, so they brought them home. These homeschoolers tend to value morality and character more than education. Like the hippies before them, they were willing to break the law in order to homeschool their children.

I remember the days of hiding from the police as a homeschooler. My family had a cover story — a “name” for our “school” — and we were very careful about what we said to strangers. It’s so different from today, when my siblings proudly proclaim to anyone who asks that they were homeschooled.

The academic benefits are icing on the cake for these parents. They would continue to homeschool even if their children could get a better education at a public school. This stream is the biggest homeschool segment, if for no other reason than that these parents tend to have so many children.

The typical fundamentalist family has four to six children, and it’s not uncommon to see families with double digits. This group also tends to be the poorest, typically living off a single income that is sometimes blue-collar. These homeschoolers also tend to be more rural than the academic homeschoolers.

Quick Stats:

• Location: Both rural and suburban.
• Estimated Size: 1,750,000

Stream 3: Academic Homeschoolers

The 1990s marked a low point in the nation’s view of its public schools. Parents lost confidence in the government school system. Local governments, unsure how to fix their education problems, relaxed laws that discriminated against homeschooling. Remember, this is the decade that led to the drastic “No Child Left Behind” reforms of the early 2000s.

Also in the ’90s, reports started coming in from the first two streams of homeschoolers. Despite their (sometimes) uneducated parents, these students were getting into and excelling at colleges around the country. Universities began to rescind policies that discriminated against homeschooled students, and many soon started actively recruiting them. Remember the hippie girl from Possum Living? She went on to work at NASA as a rocket scientist.

This encouraged academically minded parents in poor school districts to consider homeschooling. In these families, both parents typically have college degrees, with perhaps a few postgraduate degrees as well. This stream is generally wealthier and more suburban — they live in nice neighborhoods and shop at Costco.

This stream also includes parents of savants and geniuses. Parents of “wiz kids” often choose to homeschool to help their child advance at an accelerated pace. These “wiz kids” often get a truncated homeschool experience and typically enter college early.

Academic families tend to see homeschooling as an option, while fundamentalist families tend to see it as a calling. It is not uncommon for academic families to move in and out of private schools.

The Academic Stream tends to be more liberal, more permissive, and less sheltering than the Fundamentalist Stream.

Academic Homeschoolers can be further subdivided into two groups: religious and secular. Just because a parent is homeschooling for academic reasons doesn’t mean the parent isn’t also religious. This is an important distinction to understand.

Fundamentalist Homeschoolers systematically exclude the Secular Academic Stream as much as they can. They do this by requiring parents to sign a statement of faith in order for their children to participate in homeschool activities.

Do you want to:

• Sing in a homeschool choir? Sign a statement of faith.
• Join a homeschool debate team? Sign a statement of faith.
• Play on a homeschool basketball team? Sign a statement of faith.
• Attend a homeschool science co-op? Sign a statement of faith.

This discrimination has created two separate homeschool communities. The Secular Academics tend to stay to themselves.

Religious Academics can float between both communities but tend to join fundamentalist activities, which are bigger and more established. Academic families tend to have only two or three children, while fundamentalist families have four to six. So the fundamentalist homeschool basketball league will typically have more players than the secular league. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as religious academics opt for the fundamentalist programs, making them even bigger.

When I was a student, the big hullabaloo was that one of the local homeschool choirs allowed Mormons to participate. Some fundamentalist parents didn’t want their children singing next to a Mormon and pulled them out of the homeschool choir. It can be hard to find a community as a Mormon or Catholic homeschooler.

Quick Stats:

• Location: Mostly suburban.
• Estimated Size: 1,000,000

Stream 4: Special Needs Homeschoolers

This stream is the photo negative of the Academic Stream. These are parents who bring their children home because of mental, emotional, or physical needs.

These children usually have some sort of:

• Debilitating illness
• Physical, emotional, or mental special need
• Relational challenge (bullying problem, extreme autism, etc.)
• Location challenge (missionary kids living in a remote area of a foreign country)

This stream often doesn’t identify as “homeschoolers.” They still think and act according to public school social norms and often see their time homeschooling as temporary. They typically don’t embrace a homeschool community, choosing instead to stay on the outskirts of the public school community they came from.

Often only the child with a special need is kept home, while the siblings still attend a public or private school. They want to return to that community — you can find these homeschoolers at the local public school football game on Friday nights. This stream is arguably the oldest, since some special-needs children have been kept home for as long as the public school system has existed.

Quick Stats:

• Location: Mostly suburban.
• Estimated Size: 250,000

Stream 5: Second Generation Homeschoolers

Homeschooling has been around long enough that former homeschool students are starting to homeschool their own children. I don’t understand this stream as well, despite the fact that my wife and I plan to homeschool our children. From what I can tell, they’re generally less extreme than their parents. They also tend to be less idealistic and less dogmatic about homeschooling, and are more likely to see it as something with pros and cons rather than an approach that’s superior in every way.

Another difference I’ve noticed with second-generation homeschoolers is that they’re more secure in their homeschooling. I remember my mom being nervous about criticism from our church and extended family when we announced we were going to homeschool. One homeschooling book even recommended doing service projects for your church to help them think more positively about homeschoolers. Second-generation homeschoolers have less to prove, thanks in part to the hard work of the previous generation. Homeschooling is more mainstream now — for them, it’s simply normal. Going to a “regular” school would feel strange.

Quick Stats:

• Location: Mostly suburban.
• Estimated Size: Unknown

The Future of the Homeschooling Community

Homeschool Leadership Shift

The fundamentalist homeschool community is entering a big season of change. Most of the first-generation homeschool leaders have stepped down or will soon do so. These men have guided the homeschool movement for the last 30 years, giving it form and direction. A leadership vacuum is opening at the top of the fundamentalist homeschool movement, and it will be interesting to see who fills it moving forward.

The new leaders who emerge will give new direction to the movement. I don’t know who those leaders will be, but keep an eye on Alex Harris and Brett Harris. Their father, Gregg Harris, is very influential in the community. The Harris brothers have already started challenging the matriarchal homeschool culture with their book Do Hard Things.

New Challenges

Homeschoolers have finally won their legal battles and gained legal protection from most governments, along with acceptance within the academic community. These external battles were the primary challenge for the first generation of homeschool leaders.

The challenge for the second generation of leaders will be more internal — dealing with the sexual predator problem inside the homeschool community, and with disillusioned homeschool graduates who are becoming the biggest opponents of fundamentalist homeschooling.

Mainstreamification

We should also see homeschool communities become more mainstream as University Model private schools and new technology lower the barriers to entry. Homeschool graduates will also start rising to prominence throughout culture, bringing more visibility to the movement.

More Diversity

In the early decades of the homeschool movement, it was mostly white and evangelical. While homeschool leaders accepted people of other ethnicities, they did not accept their cultures. Bill Gothard, for example, was famous for rejecting any music with African influence. As the influence of these voices wanes, more communities and ethnicities are experimenting with homeschooling.

Links:

•  NCFCA.org
• Stoausa.org

Sponsor: Christian Writers Institute

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