Yes, from my experience homeschooled children have MORE time to play, not less. Because the learning can be more intensive as it’s one on one, while at school the speed of learning is at the speed of the slowest student, and children have to wait for the teacher to explain specific problems to them, whereas a parent is more like a private tutor. In my experience being homeschooled for 6 years, I would work for about 3 hours a day, sometimes fewer, and our “holidays” were sometimes 4 months long. And yet I was actually learning so much more efficiently than most kids at regular school. Because learning activities were integrated with normal life. For example, kids at school have “reading time” that’s structured and made into a chore. Studies have shown the percentage of children that don’t enjoy reading, often because they can’t read well, is staggeringly high. Only 40% of adults in America read for pleasure.

At my home, reading was something I did for fun, as a recreational activity. I enjoyed it so much once I ran out of children’s books at home I would devour my dad’s medical textbooks (despite not understanding much of it), cooking books, first aid books, encyclopedias, and stole my mother’s Anne of Green Gables books to read stealthily under the covers when I was supposed to have an afternoon nap. Even today, reading is one of my favourite activities. But when I wasn’t reading, I would be — making treehouses with my brothers, playing with toy knights, building castles out of blocks and Lego, making up stories with my stuffed animals, modelling things out of plasticine, gardening, creating mini-movies etc. Having a lot more “fun” than I wager most kids did at recess.

Indeed when I ended up finally going to school, I was severely bullied initially, and while I ended up going to a great high school, my memories of home school shine like halcyon days, indelibly bound up with the best of my childhood.