Category Archives: Home & Family

Homemaking, parenting and special needs

Thoughts for a Bitter Homeschool Mom

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Recently I saw the following comment on a forum where the topic was Common Core:

I pulled my youngest out of school when he came home and told me, with his sweet little lisp, that his teacher said “Africa was in Asia.”

He was in first grade.

Pull your kids OUT! If you think you’re in a “good” school district, think again. Similarly, if you think you’re in a good private school, think again. Please! Both parents don’t need to work — if necessary, downscale. One parent, usually the mother, can easily handle the education of the kids.

Fathers, please heed: As a woman, I destroyed my career for my kids. Any woman who has kids and takes the time to educate them — even if she hires tutors and spends her time driving the little cretins around to various “learning” activities — will sacrifice her future in ways you will never understand. As your career takes off, her career is plummeting. And its not as if she’ll be able to start again where she left off many years ago. It’s over for her. So, please, remember that when your harried wife plunges into despair as she spends her best years (40/50s) trying to rekindle her mind and work-life.

I was completely with the commenter in the first few paragraphs, but that last one blew me away. Wow! She sure sounds bitter and depressed.

And yet I can relate to her. While I’ve never thought of my children as “cretins” (that’s where I began seeing the bitterness in this comment), I understand the despair she feels. Because I’ve been there more than once since I retired from homeschooling three years ago.

If I could, I would remind this woman than homeschooling is not some minor commitment you make in addition to church and Neighborhood Watch and Zumba class. Homeschooling, when done well, will eat up your life. It’s a huge lifestyle choice that requires enormous dedication. And when you’re done homeschooling, the recipients of your efforts leave you (at least if you did it properly so that they’re equipped for independence).

It hurts on a personal level, no question. And it hurts your career aspirations, too. But wasn’t it obvious that the working world would not exactly be pounding on your door once you finished homeschooling? It should have occurred to you that the career thing was not going to be waiting for you during those 20 or 30 years you spent educating your kids.

That said, today we have far more options for work than we had 30 years ago, when I last worked full-time. Thanks to the Internet, you can work from home. You can start selling on eBay, create things and sell them on Etsy, or begin a freelance career in an area that interests you. You can offer your services as a babysitter or tutor and help the newest generation. If you don’t need an income, you can volunteer in your community.

Now that you’re free to spend your day as you see fit, you may become overwhelmed by all the choices you have. And that’s OK. It’s even OK to be bitter, for a little while. But don’t let it become a permanent emotion. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start figuring out who you are at this stage of your life.

Because you were wrong when you said, “It’s over for her.” It is not “over” for any retired homeschooling mom. Personally, I’m just getting (re)started!

 

What’s Worse? Uneducated Homeschool Parents or Negligent Ones?

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At the grocery store checkout counter yesterday, I got to hear the cashier and bagger, both middle-aged women, talk about homeschooling.

These gals were discussing which of their fellow employees were homeschooled. They agreed that most of their homeschooled coworkers seem quite well-socialized and normal. (It’s always a relief when I hear that, because it means I don’t have to give my standard “Just because someone doesn’t wear hip clothes, have a tattooed forehead or have three kids by three baby daddies doesn’t mean they’re not socialized” speech.)

Anyways, the cashier then noted that her sister had chosen to homeschool but made a mess of her kids, that they had turned out very awkward, and stupid to boot, but she thought the stupid part came from her sister, who wasn’t very bright to begin with and clearly had no business homeschooling anyways.

Fortunately our transaction concluded right then, so I didn’t get into a discussion of whether stupid people should be able to homeschool their children. While I believe that every parent has the right to decide where their children will be educated, I understand why people assume that you must be super-smart to homeschool your kids. But they’re wrong, of course, because a highly motivated (though not highly educated) homeschooling parent can learn right alongside their children after they reach the limits of their own education. Case in point: I’ve often noted that I never understood geometric proofs until I had to teach them to my kids. The best I could do was to stay one step ahead of them on that subject; you can imagine their delight whenever I’d forget something and they got to correct me.

So I don’t care whether or not a homeschool parent is a genius. I know that if they’re motivated, they’ll find a way to make sure their child learns what they need to know. If a subject is too complicated for them, they’ll find another way for their child to learn that subject. Heck, I did that too, like when I sent one of my kids to a local college for chemistry class (science wasn’t exactly my strong suit).

Again, as long as a parent is motivated to homeschool, they’ll make sure their child learns what they need to know. I don’t worry about those parents. But I do worry about another kind of parent.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve recently been made aware of a couple of situations where parents are keeping their kids out of school in order to homeschool them, but then just aren’t homeschooling them.

(I’m not talking unschooling; the unschooling parents I’ve known over the years were very concerned about their children’s education and made sure to raise them in a rich learning environment. They just didn’t use formal curriculum, preferring child-led learning instead.)

No, the parents I’m referring to aren’t educating their kids at all. This blows my mind. I’ve never known anyone to do that before (and I’ve met a lot of homeschooling families over the years!) Such parents are:

  • doing a huge disservice to their kids,
  • abdicating their role as parents, and
  • in some cases, breaking the law, because in most states, there are educational requirements for all children.

I have no clue why these negligent parents won’t send their kids to school if they’re not going to bother to educate them at home. But I feel very sorry for their kids, and also for the conscientious homeschooling families who will be tarred with the same brush once outsiders hear about these parenting failures.

The Exception to the Rule

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In my recent posts (see left) about the book Quiet by Susan Cain, which include my thoughts on what we can do for our introverted kids, I have yet to include the exception to the rule of introversion.

Ms. Cain points out that some introverted people who love quiet and prefer not to be in the spotlight are excellent public speakers. How can this be? And how can we help our introverted children gain such a valuable skill?

Citing a much-loved professor who gives wildly popular lectures to large groups of people, Ms. Cain explains that this man is so introverted that when he’s scheduled to give multiple speeches, he spends the intervening moments off by himself so he can regroup. Sometimes this has required that he hide in a washroom stall because there’s nowhere else he can be alone.

How can a man this introverted be able to give such wonderful lectures? Ms. Cain explains that it’s extremely important to him that he share knowledge with his students. His passion for his work helps him override his natural introversion, at least when it comes to teaching.

How can we help our introverted kids learn to do this? After all, being able to speak to a group (of a few people or many) is a useful skill in this world. Even college admission or job interviews sometimes require speaking in front of several people. This might sound easy to the extrovert, but not to the introvert.

Having read this book, I would suggest that, instead of trying to bring your introverted child out of their shell by putting them into lots of group activities, make sure they have access to things that interest them and watch them bloom. Show interest whenever they tell you about something that fascinates them. Give them opportunities to share their discoveries and interests with Grandma and Grandpa when they see them. Every child is fascinated by something; extroverts just make it more obvious.

Ms. Cain’s general recommendations for helping your introverted child include:

  • Letting them be who they are instead of forcing them into an extrovert’s mold.
  • Help them strategize how to handle upcoming social interactions if they need it.
  • Give them time to absorb new situations instead of trying to force acclimation right away.

These are just a few; you’ll learn much more in Ms. Cain’s book, which I highly recommend: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

What of the Extroverted Child?

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In her book Quiet, Susan Cain emphasizes that introverts function better socially with one or two people at a time. In my posts about her book, I’ve noted that I believe that homeschooling can help the introverted child.

I’m not saying that the extroverted child shouldn’t be homeschooled. But if they’re not part of a large family, they’ll need and want more social contact than an introverted child does. It’s likely that they’ll want to be involved in regular group activities, so these are the kids you’ll want to sign up for co-op classes, Awanas, etc. (unlike the introverted child, who shouldn’t be pushed into more social time than they want).

As I read this book, I realized that three of my four adult children are introverts or mostly introverted, while one tends to be more extroverted. While I never sent any of them to school, I’ve often thought that the extrovert would have excelled in school. But our convictions about the primacy of homeschooling kept us from sending that child there. Given that there are other things to consider regarding modern public education, worries and concerns that go far beyond whether a child will be “socialized,” we don’t regret keeping that child home with the others.

But I can see where parents would be wise to identify the extroverts in their families and make sure they have ample social opportunities, just as they’ll want to provide a quiet, accepting atmosphere for their introverts. Volunteer and work opportunities will be more useful and teach more valuable lessons than activities that are purely social in nature. Nevertheless, it’s important that you give your extroverts ample access to a variety of social outlets.

Next week: The Exception to the Rule

 

How Schools Try to Convert Introverts to Extroverts

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In this series of posts on introverts, much of the information comes from a wonderful, thought-provoking book by Susan Cain called Quiet. Last time I discussed how you can tell whether your child is an introvert or an extrovert (I forgot to mention there’s a quiz in the book that gives general insight into identifying introverts), but I noted that it can be a bit harder to make that determination about adults.

That’s because many adults are what Ms. Cain calls “closet extroverts”; they’re introverts who have had to work so hard at fitting in that they appear to be extroverts. She notes that:

Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology…Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of feel we must conform.

Much of this oppressive standard is first impressed upon us in school, where extroverted behavior is expected and rewarded. How well I remember this from my own school experience. For example, we were regularly required to read aloud in front of the class. For some kids, this was no big deal. But for many, it was torture. While it did make me nervous, I was fortunate to have been an early reader, so I usually had no problem reading aloud well enough to avoid jeers. But some of my quieter classmates really suffered, and it breaks my heart even today to think of how often they were teased, how they must have dreaded it and how regularly it occurred.

According to Ms. Cain, today’s schools are more extrovert-oriented than ever. Many have done away with desks and individual study, seating children instead at “pods”: group tables that make it easier to do group activities. But group activities are the extrovert’s métier; how much is an introvert really going to learn in an atmosphere of noise and competitive behavior?

In a similar vein, there’s a huge emphasis on competitive sports and team-building, the thought being that today’s workers need to be team players, so why not start young by teaching kids to be team players. Whether working in teams is as productive as it’s cracked up to be is beside the point; the problem is that introverts tend not to be competitive and prefer to work on their own. It hardly seems fair to use these activities to force them to become someone they’re not.

As always, I’m going to take these observations and say that homeschooling wins again. A supportive home environment promotes learning; for the introverted child, it sounds like the ideal situation.

Next week: What of the Extroverted Child?