Each day most parents send their children to daycare, or preschool, or school. The parents go to work or work in the house, or run errands, or enjoy their day without their children. They function the way they do because their children are not with them. When their children are with them, while it might be enjoyable, it adds a layer of stress to their lives. This is clear from popular quips like "Thank goodness the weekend is only two days long. If I had the kids every day nothing would get done." It's in music "Mom and Dad can hardly wait for school to start again." It's on TV shows and in commercials.

By sending kids to school, the family itself is made into something new. Instead of a unit that functions together and works together to accomplish things or have fun or even survive, it becomes a split squad of parents, who are responsible for the survival of the group, and children, who are dependent on their parents for their very survival. The stress comes in when the two squads are put together. The parents are suddenly unable to preform tasks they see as necessary or even to recreate because the children are there. The children get stressed because they are suddenly in their parents' way.

School creates a situation in which families can no longer work as a team. Instead, they are put in opposition to one another. Their goals are not the same. Their coping skills depend on being apart from each for significant portions of the day.

Home school, while alleviating some of this opposition and stress, still puts parents and children on different teams. Parents are once again responsible for the survival of the group, but instead of the short term survival (until the children are adults) they are now in charge of the children's survival in life because they must teach them the skills necessary to survive and to recreate the family structure in their own lives. It also adds the stress of putting the additional burden of teaching children on the parents.

What if parents and children were all on the same side? What if, instead of work/school days and weekends there were just days? The thing about unschooling is it allows families to connect with each other in ways that school or home school cannot.