One of the best things about summer is that it reminds us that educating our children is not just up to us.
You’ll see this when you watch your child at the beach. I get to do this a lot because we’re blessed to have a beach a few blocks from our house. We can spend a lot of time there during the two warm months that comprise summer in northeast Wisconsin.
At the beach, my son takes his shovel and bucket and creates mountains, castles, roads, levees….he just lets his imagination loose and he has a ball. I don’t have to participate at all. In fact, now that he’s older, he prefers that I butt out! He has his own ideas.
When I watch him problem-solve after the tide takes down part of a wall of his castle, or when stray toddlers march through his masterpiece, leaving destruction in their wake, I’m reminded yet again that he’s capable of learning all on his own. He not only fixes the problem, but makes the project even better in the process.
Now, this particular son is 16 and developmentally delayed, but I saw the same thing in my older children when they were young, and I’m sure you see it in yours. God enables everyone to learn. While we homeschooling parents work hard to make a good learning environment for our children, it’s not up to us to make things happen. God has already taken care of that part.
This knowledge can be very freeing, if you’re a conscientious mom who wants to make sure her children learn what they need to know. This summer, give your children a bucket and a magnifying glass and take them to a pond so they can inspect the pond water for living creatures. Hand them a package of colored chalk and let them loose on the driveway or sidewalk. Don’t get involved in what they’re doing. Just watch, and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s exciting when you teach your children how to read or do math and then watch them do so successfully as part of their schoolwork. But to me, the really thrilling part is seeing them sprawled out on the floor with a stack of library books, reading for pleasure, or calculating on a piece of paper how many weeks’ worth of allowance it takes to buy a certain much-wanted toy. Using what they’ve learned in “school” to help them in their daily lives is what counts, as far as I’m concerned.
With my older kids, those “thrilling parts” came fairly early, probably when they were six or seven at the latest. But with our youngest, I found that he could learn to parrot back to me what I taught him, but he just didn’t seem to take the initiative to use those skills in real life…..until the past few years.
I first noticed it with video games. He began to figure out in his head how many more levels he needed to get to, or how many more of something he needed to catch. We know this because he mumbles these things (or shouts them if the game is going really well) as he plays.
Then he began pausing his favorite movies as the credits ran in order to write down the names of his favorite characters and the actors who played them. This only works when there are photos or footage with the credits, of course, but he knows just which movies have those and enjoys making long lists of the characters in them….with carefully printed letters.
This past year he began writing items down on the grocery list as we ran low on them. Now, I’m not sure how old my other kids were when I finally got them to do that with any kind of regularity. But at 16, Josh is a growing young man, and he’s hungry a lot of the time. Food has become pretty important to him. So I now find “orange pop” and “applesauce” and “Swiss rolls” neatly printed on the grocery list we keep on the refrigerator door.
And just in case I don’t buy enough of those things, he makes sure to put a quantity after the items (one day I saw “Cheetos-7″) on there. Every time I pass the fridge and see his careful printing on the list, I just have to chuckle. I’ve waited a long time to see him putting his learning into use, and I get a big kick out of it.
Without his crutch teleprompter, President Obama is forced to speak his own mind, giving us a rare peek into his thoughts and personal character. Probably not a good idea, as evidenced by his appearance on Jay Leno’s show last night:
Nice. I have a wonderful son with Down syndrome, so I’m more than willing to point out that President Obama has a deep character flaw, as does anyone who makes fun of the developmentally disabled.
This past weekend we celebrated our son’s 16th birthday. While all of our children’s birthdays are special, his are a yearly reminder of God’s goodness in caring for him when he was a critically ill newborn. Back when he lay in his isolette with tubes taped to him and monitor leads stuck on him, we didn’t know that he would become the healthy, strong and happy young man he is today. So we celebrate!
I wish we could have known back then that he would be ok. I also wish we could have known that having a baby with disabilities is not the trauma it looks like at first.
It was 16 years ago yesterday that a doctor we’d never seen before interrupted our celebratory hospital dinner (champagne, steak, éclairs) to bluntly tell us that our son had suddenly begun having trouble breathing, his heart wasn’t working right, he would have to be transferred to a larger hospital, and oh, by the way, we think he might have Down syndrome.
Great bedside manner, that guy. It was like being hit by a ton of bricks. At first, we chose to deal with the health issues rather than the spare chromosome and what it meant, because the health issues were more pressing. But once our son began to stabilize, we had to face the fact that he was quite different from his siblings in some important and unchangeable ways.
Like most parents with a special needs child, we discovered that there’s a grief process you go through when you have a child with disabilities. You have to accept that he won’t be president, won’t be a scholar, and in the case of Down syndrome, won’t get to raise a child of his own someday.
But once you learn to stop focusing on the things he won’t do, you can begin to celebrate the things he does. You learn about them as they happen. He brings joy to your family, he works hard to master every little step of development, he teaches his siblings about love and sacrifice, and he’s used by God to strengthen your faith. I hope I don’t come across as a goody-two-shoes when I say that he is actually a great blessing. I wish we could have known that when we got his diagnosis, but at least we know it now.
He’s a lot of fun as well as an occasional source of frustration. That makes him just like his siblings. Yes, I worry about his future, especially when I read terrible things like this. But I also worry about our older children: our daughter living alone in a large city, our son traveling all over the country on business (and out of the country on mission trips), and our younger daughter, who is just reaching the age where she must make some important decisions about her future. Parenting has exponentially increased my prayer life!
And that’s a good thing. God uses parenting to grow us and to make us into the people he wants us to become. The tools he uses for this are our children, who happen to be a blessing in their own right.
That’s just one reason why their birthdays are so special. In the case of our youngest, we also celebrate the fact that he’s made it through so many challenges and is still here with us. For that, we are grateful!
Early on, I discovered that my older three children learned the things that interested them much more easily than the subjects they didn’t care so much about.
For one, writing came easily while math was a much slower process. For another, vacuuming the living room properly (i.e. in more than 30 seconds) was far too difficult, while learning to design a Web site based on a much-loved hobby was fast and easy. For yet another, reading Shakespeare was a piece of cake while reading history from a textbook was torture.
Then there’s #4. He’s the one with Down syndrome, and homeschooling him has been a much slower process all the way around. He’s had a particularly hard time with reading. We continue to review words that he learned years ago; if we don’t, he forgets them. I got kind of depressed the other day when he blanked out on “is” and “find,” because they’re easy and he’d known them for a long time, up until then.
However, my husband discovered something that same day which reminded me that dsds15 can easily remember the words that mean something to him. He loves video games and movies, and one of his favorite subjects in both categories is “X-Men.” He especially likes to pause the game whenever it displays a character so he can write down the character’s name. He will often print long lists of these characters as he plays.
My husband took one of these lists and asked my son to read the names on it. These are names like Professor Xavier, Mystique, Magneto…..15 or 20 of them on a page. And he could read every name we pointed to! That stinker…..like his older siblings, if something interests him, he has a much easier time with it.
Now that our son is not a little boy anymore, we’ve been getting him involved in useful projects that require him to work with his hands.
A few weeks before Christmas, my husband asked dsds15 if he’d like to make his gifts for family members in the workshop. Of course, he got a big yes, because what boy doesn’t like working with his dad?
The project my husband chose was a pencil holder (plans) made of pine, a soft and pretty wood that’s easy to work with, which is especially important if you’re new to woodworking. The two of them spent several afternoons working on six pencil boxes, which turned out very well. The recipients were quite pleased, and our son was so proud!
In difficult economic times, working with your hands is quite the skill to have, making a person more self-sufficient as well as more useful on the job. I think we homeschoolers need to make sure our kids can work with their hands so they’re prepared for whatever our economic future holds.
I was pretty fortunate. I fell in love with my son from the time I learned he had been conceived, and when I found out (eighteen hours after his birth) that he had Down syndrome, I loved him even more. But it doesn’t work that way for everyone.
One mom I knew felt she couldn’t cope with raising a child with Ds, and wanted to give her new baby up for adoption. But her husband refused, saying there was no way he was giving up his first son (there were already two daughters). That family has thrived since then, more than ten years ago….Mom just had a case of fear of the unknown, I think.
But then there is this gal, who blames a lack of support from her family and friends for her reluctance to raise her baby with Down syndrome. But as I’ve written before, God looks out for his precious ones. In this case, He sent an angel named Alex Bell.
A rural area of Australia badly needs doctors. A German doctor and his family fall in love with Australia while on vacation and soon move to that rural area, where he becomes the only internist available to 54,000 people. Everyone is happy UNTIL…..the doctor and his family apply for resident status and are turned down by the Australian government.
The locals protest this refusal, and people across the country chime in, but so far, the Australian government has not relented.
Their reason for turning down the good doctor’s request for residency? His teenage son has Down syndrome and is likely (according to the Australian government) to be a drain on its health care and education systems.
Good grief! In a world where we regularly hear about male teens overdosing on drugs, transmitting social diseases, getting girls pregnant, and knifing or shooting each other (all the while running up plenty of hospital bills), the Australian government blocks the residency of one young man whose risk of health problems is a little higher than the average teenager?
I never had much use for concepts like “Homecoming Queen,” thinking them all part of the school hype. But after reading this article, I’m softening my stance
