Homeschooled Children are as Safe from Caregiver Abuse as Other Children and May Be Generally Safer: A Response to Dills (2022)

After reading Homeschooling and child safety: Are kids safer at home? (Dills, 2022), it was not surprising to find that homeschoolers were as safe from caregiver abuse as students who were under the care of others at school. Even so, some of the author’s conclusions go beyond the data and could lead others to misperceive the findings. the complexities of how child maltreatment is reported, defined, and recorded across states. the and of and the is accurate comparing the rates of child maltreatment before the liberalizing of homeschooling laws to post-liberalization rates, it may be possible to discern a statistically significant connection between the two after controlling for a host of other variables. As summed up in the abstract, Dills found that most of her estimates were not statistically significant. In other words, caregiver maltreatment did not change post-liberalization. important finding. the abstract further stated that “some specifications find a statistically significant increase in child homicide rates in the years following homeschool legislation.” will likely cap-ture the and because it appears in the many lay will not go further. Dills goes on to say that the estimated effects tend to be small and not statistically significant, suggesting little effect on child safety. These results