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Recently I saw yet another homeschool magazine article about the courtship vs. dating dispute. It kind of made me chuckle because this couple in the middle of the photo above is the latest pair of newlyweds in our family. They met at tech school, discovered that one of the things they had in common was that they were homeschooled, were friends for a couple of years and then starting dating. And now we have a new son-in-law!
My husband and I had nothing to do with these two meeting up except that we prayed all these years for our children and, if God intended for them to get married, their future spouses. We trusted God to bring them together, just as He brought us together back in the 1970s.
So that’s how I weigh in on the courtship vs. dating argument…Oh, one more thing. I’ve heard a few parents say they’d hate to think of who their parents would have set them up with had they used the courtship model. Well, I know who mine would have set me up with. My father met a wealthy young man who was looking for a wife. Dad wanted one of his four daughters to marry this guy, but none of us could stand him. Some time later, my husband and I even double-dated with him and my sister-in-law but she didn’t like him either. For all his bucks, his personality was somewhat obnoxious.
I still say we can trust God to bring the right people together at the right time!
I’d never heard of Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box, a novel so promising that its movie rights were sold six months’ prior to its publication. But apparently he’s the son of well-known novelist Stephen King. He chose to use his first and middle names as his pen name so that he could break into writing without riding on his father’s coat tails (or his mother’s—she’s writer Tabitha King). His younger brother is also a writer, and his older sister is at work on a non-fiction book. So, how did they all end up to be writers? According to an article I read:
The King children’s interest in books and writing took root early on. “It sounds very Victorian, but we would sit around and read aloud nightly, in the living room or on the porch,” Hill recalled. “This was something we kept on doing until I was in high school, at least.”
This is a good lesson for those of us homeschooling parents who think our older children and teens are too old for read-aloud family time: it obviously worked for the King family!
Originally posted 3/17/07
Recently we had a terrible tragedy in our area. Nine people, eight of them teenagers and the ninth a 23-year-old adult who was driving (and was allegedly drunk), were packed into a car that crashed in the middle of the night, killing four of the teens. A fifth died a few days later.
It turned out these kids were out looking for fun…at 2 in the morning. A local reporter who is the father of five children has written several columns about this terrible event. In the first, he suggested that parents need to crack down on their kids, and that there’s no need for them to be out at that hour. In a second column, he shared a message he received from a 19-year-old reader, who said kids are out running around in the middle of the night because they’re bored, and because today’s adults won’t provide them with places where they can hang out with their friends. He goes so far as to blame today’s adults for the accident.
Obviously the accident was the fault of the driver, not adults who won’t let them go tobogganing (an example the 19-year-old uses). But the point he makes about there being “NOTHING to do” says more about some of today’s youth than anything we adults could say about them.
At 19, I was in college and working to pay for college. So was my husband. My father was in the Air Force at 19, my mother was in nursing school, my father-in-law was in college and my mother-in-law was working as a secretary and planning her wedding. We were all too busy to need to be entertained.
Isn’t it ironic that with all the entertainment we have available in today’s world, there are young people who demand to be given something to do? What has made these kids think that the world owes them anything, much less entertainment?
This young man also says, “That’s why so many kids do drugs and drink and set things on fire etc.; they’re all just bored!” Being bored is no excuse for doing those things, and in a world where there is so much work to be done, there is no excuse for being bored.
Originally posted 3/5/07
(I try not to invade my adult children’s privacy too much, so please forgive the vagueness of this post.)
One of my children, the one who most ignored what I taught them about money, is now (finally) watching what they spend and trying to keep their expenses down. You can’t imagine how happy this makes me.
You see, as a homeschooling parent, I got used to quick (if not instant) results. For instance, I could tell how my kids were doing in math by the percentage of problems they got right. If the percentage was low, we’d work harder on math and soon the percentage would go up. Victory!
But what I’ve forgotten in the years since my children grew up is something I proclaim to younger homeschooling parents all the time: readiness! How well I remember that my kids learned to read when they were ready. Starting before they were ready only resulted in frustration.
So while it’s good that I taught my kids how to live debt-free while they were teens, the problem is that I expected them all to live that way from day one. One of them did, but the others have been learning slowly as they needed to learn, as their readiness developed. I’m just beginning to understand that readiness is a concept that applies to adults as well as children.
I need to remember this when my adult children make mistakes that fly in the face of what they were taught. Apparently they weren’t ready for that particular lesson when we were homeschooling. Now that they’ve reached a point where the lesson actually applies to their life, I guess I just need to be available in case they ask for help…and be happy that they finally did learn the lesson.