Imagine a four-year-old learning trigonometry through a shadow of brick on the road that we generally encounter in ICSE Class 10 or CBSE Classes 11 and 12 or children learning binary numbers by stringing coloured beads into bracelets.

It is not a usual thing to see that an 11-year-old is an avid reader and takes part in a national literature festival that requires him to read 30 books in three months, and his mother fondly calls her the ‘Enid Blyton girl’. Then there are nine-year-olds who are learning Bharatnatyam, shuttling, gymnastics and crocheting and balancing academics at the same time. There are also five-year-olds already learning additional languages, excited about electromagnets and solving cube squares up to 100 instead of being fascinated by Spider-Man, dumper trucks, or dolls.

These are not regular school-going children. There are no uniforms, no timetables pinned to the wall, no rush to pack and unpack school bags. They belong to a growing homeschooling cohort, one that is steadily finding ground across Delhi’s living rooms and terraces.

What binds them isn’t a syllabus but a shared rhythm that is shaped by curiosity, not completion. More than 500 such families, part of a growing network across Delhi, Noida and Gurugram, have chosen this deliberately. Some never enrolled their children in formal schools. Others stepped away after the pandemic, uneasy with a system, and some of them surprisingly had decided to homeschool their kid when they were pregnant.

The ecosystem

Families across Delhi, NCR echoed a similar rhythm emerged—learning that spills beyond structure, guided more by curiosity than curriculum.

As one of the parents in South Delhi, Faiqa, who has been home schooling her daughter for the past four years now and runs a small community set up at her own place, said, “Here the learning doesn’t wait for a grade to ‘allow’ it. Algebra can arrive at six, literature at eleven, or language at five, whenever the child is ready to reach for it…”

Meanwhile Jasvinder Singh, a Noida-based educator and an architect by profession who has been home-schooling his son for the past eight years and administering the several home-schooler groups in Delhi, Noida and Gurugram for the past four years, has also been offering counselling and guidance to parents seeking help to start with home-schooling a kid.

Sharing his experience, Jasvinder Singh said, “I had started homeschooling my son when he was three, and now he is 11. We didn’t send him to school. It was a personal choice, and now it has become his choice too. He learns new things every day without worrying that he will be tested for that the next day or in the next class.

I have also realised that the syllabus any class prescribes can be done in four months straight. It really doesn’t require 200 working days of school every year with over 100 holidays. My son would be in 7th grade now, and in the first half of the year, he has almost done reading all his books.

And it is not like he was only reading and studying; he got an opportunity to do a lot more. He participates in several games; he is learning a new language at the British Council; he attends workshops; he has a good peer group.”

“Now in Noida and Delhi, we have a lot of good schools supporting the homeschoolers, like Prakriti Noida. There are several groups formed under which 500-plus families are associated, and I counsel them. In Delhi alone, there are 22 such groups made category-wise—varying on interest, activity, age, region, particular society, etc.,” said Javinder.

He added that the largest number of families opting for homeschooling in Delhi belonged to the 3–7 years age group, mostly parents who chose homeschooling for their children after the Covid pandemic. According to him, more than 150 families were currently associated with their network under the 3–7 age category, while 57 families belonged to the 8–13-year group.

He shared that they had collaborated with some schools to support this ecosystem and had also hired subject-wise teachers to guide teenagers individually. In his locality in Noida’s Sector 34, he said, 11 families had come together to homeschool their children collectively.

Talking about differences in a child’s behaviour who is homeschooled, Jasvinder said, “Yes, initially, my son was hesitant to sit in a disciplined language class at a British school. It took him some time to adjust. The school-going children have fixed ways of dealing with things, but here they are doing things without a schedule, so things differ, but things do change for the better with time, learning and age.”

Community and choices

Meanwhile, in South Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area, at Thokar number 8, we happened to meet a mother of a four-year-old daughter, Faiqa, who has made a small setup at her home to accommodate seven to eight homeschool kids. She said, “When I initiated having a setup, about 20 families came forward, but now we are only five such parents who are homeschooling our kids. My reasons for homeschooling my daughter were purely my choice. I knew the capabilities of my daughter and was confident enough that I could give her more exposure than a school can provide.”

“I believe to start with homeschooling, the parents need to ask some primary questions to themselves—can you carry on this journey for long? What after they turn seven? Can you be consistent enough to be there with them all the time despite your responsibilities, and do you have enough stamina to push yourself to be prepared every day and create new activities and outings for them,” said Faiqa.

“I have a Montessori setup at home with not any fancy resources but some good stationery and adequate books we collected from Daryaganj and made a library for children. We have kids between 3 and 6 years of age. We have kept some basic Cambridge books to start with, and we try to teach them maths and science through practical understanding.”

She further said, “We give them free play in mud while we recite Quran verses from behind, and they keep repeating after us. We take them to several workshops which are held individually on themes like animals, butterflies, water, trees, etc. We have even admitted our maid’s kid also, such that children know how to connect with each other with empathy.”

Another mother, Atiya, from Okhla, said, “Homeschooling a kid is a difficult task, and you have to be up throughout the day without giving up, without thinking about your ‘me-time’, disciplining yourself just for your kid.”

Arshima, an educator and a mother of two who lives in Noida, followed Fitra Education during homeschooling her kids for two years but had to discontinue because it had become difficult to homeschool her kids in isolation. “I had a very different approach to education.

I wanted to teach them life sciences from different experiences such that it nurtures them spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and socially so that they grow grounded, curious and connected with the creator of this universe. But I had to put them in school because I was not able to give them a social circle and any peer group by homeschooling them in isolation,” she added.

Unlearning the normal

Natasha Badhwar, visiting faculty at Ashoka University, a filmmaker and an author of ‘My daughters’ mum’, mother of three who has also homeschooled her kids post-Covid, said, ‘I call it unschooling because homeschooling doesn’t mean schooling at home. It is a lifestyle decision. I managed to do it with the help of the community, which is picking up this concept with an interest and dropping the idea of strict school attendance and a set pattern of planned reading. Here we are giving our children a mind to decide and develop their own interest in a particular subject, and that too at an early stage and not necessarily after class 10 when the kids are asked, “Which subject will you pick up?”

“Now there are a lot of boards also supporting such children – NIOS, Cambridge Board, IGCSE...”

Some US-returned parents in Bengaluru have been successfully homeschooling their kids for the past nine years now and have been running a small centre for other homeschooling kids at their house.

Anaha, who was into aviation finance in the US, and her husband, teaching Indian philosophy at Harvard University, returned to India a decade ago with her kids, and for the past nine years straight, she has been homeschooling her kids.

“My daughter went to a preschool in the US, and I was heading a co-op-based community there also because I always believed in community learning instead of formal schooling. It is wrong to think that school is for learning and home is where you relax. Learning never ends at any stage. With this approach, school becomes a burden for them. However, with an experience of homeschooling, my kids take it as a threat when they are told they will be sent to schools because they have regular school-going friends who share about the stress of exams, homework and projects.”

Talking about the socialising factor, Anaha said, “Socialising comes harder; learning comes easy. I try my best to form certain groups and take them out for social networking, but my children feel happier when they are with their books. My daughter is reading a 300-page book in a day. In Bengaluru, we are associated with several groups of families whoare home schooling their kids.”

There is a non-profit initiative called Swashikshan for homeschooling children, parents, guardians and friends. The members of this association include homeschoolers residing in India, irrespective of nationality and homeschoolers of Indian origin, irrespective of location. One of the members, Supriya, said that this association was formed in 2012 and now close to 300 people are its members.

“Every year, we have an annual meet at different places where veteran homeschoolers come and hold voluntary sessions. This annual meet also features a small stall by the name ‘Daryadil dukaan’ where children can keep what they wish to give off—like the things they are bored with and they want to donate—so with this, there is a lot of emotional and empathetic learning,” she said.

Mothers who made it possible

Supriya left her career as a technical writer and lactation counsellor to homeschool her daughter after returning from the US in 2019, when the child was four years old.

“I introduced Montessori learning from the beginning — from flipping dosas and chopping vegetables to Bharatanatyam, shuttling, crocheting and gyming. She has become skilled at many things, not under pressure or competition, but purely out of interest because homeschooling gives children the freedom to explore at their own pace,” she said.

According to Supriya, homeschooling also allows children to discover concepts through multiple methods rather than one fixed approach. “A child is not forced to learn multiplication through a single rule. They explore CBSE, ICSE and even IB books and eventually understand it in the way that works best for them,” she added.

However, not all parents were able to sustain homeschooling. Some eventually chose to send their children back to formal schools, citing practical challenges.

Swati Khatri, a Noida-based parent, said her family had experimented with homeschooling during the pandemic and had even built a small community around it. “But after six months, I realised it wasn’t working. Homeschooling requires one parent to be consistently available, and if your child needs discipline and structured attention, it becomes difficult to manage alongside work and other responsibilities,” she said.

And often, just out of frame, there is a mother who has quietly restructured her own life around this choice. Careers in aviation, counselling, and corporate offices are put on hold or left behind not out of compulsion but conviction. In many of these homes, she is no longer just a parent but the entire ecosystem around the child: a teacher mapping out lessons, a friend listening in, a critic pushing them further, a facilitator finding resources, and a constant presence through it all.

As Supriya added, “If anything, the work is more demanding than a conventional full-time job. There are no fixed hours and no clear boundaries between school and home or work and rest. The day stretches with the child’s curiosity unpredictable, immersive, and often exhausting. Unlike a system where children are handed over to schools for most of the day, here the responsibility doesn’t pause. It deepens.”

This story is reported by Ifrah Mufti