Over the past 40 years, hundreds of families have acted on the firm belief that homeschooling provided the best educational experience for their students. At the same time, many school officials held the equally firm belief that homeschooling was not legal. And when those beliefs clashed, the resulting lawsuits thrust some of those families into the legal spotlight.

These moms and dads weren’t looking to turn their lives into test cases for determining whether certain laws were just, or whether some government procedures and policies violated important rights. But they took up the cause to protect homeschool freedom.

The resulting lawsuits and court cases have benefited the movement: most higher education institutions now recognize homeschool diplomas, employers typically accept home-educated graduates, and more government laws protect homeschooling as a legitimate educational option.

The legal precedent set by the outcomes of these cases means each of these families’ stories has and will continue to positively affect numerous other court decisions, sometimes even decades into the future.

But let’s not forget the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual cost of those initial cases on the families themselves.

For instance:

  • Imagine the stress of appearing in front of a judge and attorneys during a trial.
  • Imagine facing down a child protective services (CPS) investigator who is threatening to take your kids away from you, even though you’ve done nothing wrong.
  • Imagine an experience so stressful—like constant harassment by school and public officials—that you immediately move out of your hometown, because merely being near where the incident happened is triggering.

It’s great to read about the outcomes of the past 40 years’ worth of cases, and their effect today . . . but it’s also important to remember and appreciate how the families involved in these cases were affected back then.

Here are seven cases, out of many over the past several decades, with outcomes that have directly and significantly shaped home education freedom.