RE: The Debate on whether or not to homeschool - what is best for children?
You will have to do more research on unschooling to grasp it better. I unschool my three elementary children. The thing is that children are ALWAYS learning. Unschooling is a continuation of what they have done up until school age -- they learned to walk and talk without any teacher or curriculum. One funny thought I've read is that if the government told us that our 6-month babies MUST go to crawling/walking/talking school ... before long everybody would believe that children would never learn to crawl, walk or talk without schools or without curriculum.
As for the exhaustion you mention in your post -- that would not be as much of a problem with unschooling. You are probably going to have your children home with you up until school-age, so when the time comes you will know if you like being with your children all day or not. For myself, I could not stand the thought of sending my precious babies to kindergarten when the time came. I am a very "attached" parent and they were very "attached" little children.
Unschooling is something we are definitely looking into in more depth, I just don't understand it fully at this point. I hope to not have to use daycares...been there, done that, not fond of them. Hopefully finances will allow that. Thank you for your insight and input, I enjoy hearing from parents that are going through the experience.
You would probably enjoy this book: "Project Based Homeschooling". It is almost unschooling. There is "structure" but it is the parent who needs to be structured to record and fully help her child in figuring out what their interests are and how to continue to encourage further exploration of those interests and how to facilitate them.
For me, I'm more of a "wing-it" girl. So I LOVED the concepts in this book but never quite implemented them in the structured way presented. I learned a lot though. Have a read! The thing about homeschooling/unschooling is to READ, READ, READ and then grab the concepts that you like and that actually work for you and your family.
http://project-based-homeschooling.com/camp-creek-blog