A Parent’s Righteous Anger

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Barb

We never sent our youngest son to school because we were already homeschooling our older three kids and didn’t think his having Down syndrome was a good reason not to homeschool him, too. That was our main reasoning. But underlying that logic was our fear that he might be mistreated in school.

When I went to school, the “retarded,” as they were called, were often made fun of and picked on by other students. But it never occurred to me back then that teachers might do that too. Adults were supposed to be above such things; teachers in particular were supposed to care about children and be kind to them.

As a parent, I wasn’t quite so naïve. Yes, there are good teachers out there, but I know from the experiences of some relatives and friends that you take your chances when it comes to your child getting a good teacher vs. a bad one. When your child has mental retardation (and particularly when he has speech delays or apraxia), you lay awake nights worrying that someone might hurt him in school and he wouldn’t even be able to tell you that it happened, much less share his pain so that you could help him recover from it.

So homeschooling our son resolved all sorts of problems for us. But not everyone can homeschool their special needs kids. Take this single dad, for example. His 10-year-old son has autism and as a result has difficulty communicating at times. But he’s normally a sweet kid, so when he started acting out in school, his dad became concerned. Then he sent his boy to school with a recorder in his pocket and soon discovered the ugly truth that his son could not tell him.

My heart breaks for this man and his son, and for all parents of special needs kids who can’t homeschool them. What you will see in this video is righteous anger:

Patience

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Barbara Frank

When people find out that I homeschool my children, they almost always say something along the lines of, “I could never do that. You must be a really patient person.”

Most of the time, I respond that I wasn’t patient when I started (my husband can vouch for that), but that my patience developed over the years. I don’t go into too much detail because I’ve discovered that most of these people don’t really want to know how to become more patient. They’re just grabbing onto the first excuse they can think of to explain why they can’t (read: don’t want to) homeschool their children.

But the question of patience is an interesting one. My mother-in-law has commented many times that she is amazed by my patience with my children. Please don’t be fooled by that; I am not always patient with them. In fact, in certain situations, I have to send myself into time-out so I don’t wring someone’s neck (usually that someone is a teenager). But I do think that I have more patience than I once did, thanks to many years of trying to get my children to understand concepts and ideas because I want to help them learn. It is so rewarding to see the light go on when a challenging idea becomes understandable. That light won’t go on if I’m breathing down my child’s neck.

Early on, when trying to explain a concept to one of my children, I would start asking questions to make them think. But soon I’d find myself clueing them in on the answers right away because I got tired of waiting for them to say the right thing. Of course, they weren’t learning anything when I fed them the answer. The next time the subject came up, I could see that they didn’t know anything more this time than before I’d explained it. The answer wouldn’t make sense to them unless it came from their understanding, not my spoon-feeding method.

So I learned to wait for them to catch on. When they’d ask me a question, I’d answer it, and come back with a few of my own to make them think a little harder. Then instead of coaching them to the correct answers, I just waited. Sooner or later, they’d figure it out.

After we’d been homeschooling for several years, I was given a new opportunity for learning patience: our son Josh was born with Down syndrome. In most areas, it took him far longer to learn things than it had taken his siblings. He didn’t crawl until he was 1, and didn’t start walking until 21 months. He’d been in physical therapy since he was tiny, but I’m not sure whether he would have crawled or walked later without it. What I’ve seen with him is that he will not do something until he is ready, and in this way he is much like his brother and sisters. He is my graduate study in the School of Patience.

For example, he did not become toilet-trained until he was seven. We tried coaxing, training and occasional forcing him to use the toilet starting at age three. We bought him potty books and a video. We even tried bribing him with M&M’S®. But he wasn’t ready yet.

When he was five or six, he started using the toilet once a day or so. When he was successful, he would make the general announcement (“Poo-poo! Poo-poo!”), and cheering and applause would break out from every corner of the house. Still, it would be well over a year before he could go without diapers all the time (and probably two or three years before he stopped demanding M&M’S® after each successful bathroom visit).

What a golden opportunity toilet-training him was for teaching us about patience. Nothing we did spurred him on. But when he figured it out, the triumph was all his.

This concept also holds for children who are not mentally delayed or disabled. For example, when a teenager finally figures out quadratic equations, it’s his victory. Sure, Mom and Dad have answered numerous questions, most more than once, and each was a stone in the path leading up to the day when he figured out the concept. But he’s the one who succeeded in grasping the concept.

Now imagine if each time he’d asked his parents a question, they’d responded with a sigh, or worse, with anger (“How many times do I have to explain this to you?”). That would have discouraged him from asking any more questions, and it would have taken that much longer for him to pick up the concept. Or, he might never have figured it out. How sad if he was just one question away from understanding, but was afraid to ask that question.

Some kids need to ask more questions than others, and that can be very wearing on the homeschooling parents who spend their days coming up with the answers. It’s important for us to remember that each question brings the child closer to the point of understanding. Allowing him to reach that point, no matter how many questions it takes, is something that can’t be done in formal school, because the logistics of teaching a group don’t permit it. That’s one of the reasons homeschooling is so successful: the child can move at his own pace, with the support of an adult who will answer his questions and patiently wait for him to “get it,” so that he can move on. A classroom teacher can’t possibly do that with a roomful of students.

The longer you homeschool, the better you get at patiently answering the same question many times. You also get better at waiting for the answers to questions you’ve asked in order to make your child come to a certain conclusion. Your patience in such matters greatly benefits each of your children.

I wish I could tell you that the patience you develop over years of homeschooling translates into more patience in other areas of your life, but I can’t. Ask my son Peter, who had to keep me calm throughout 90 minutes in line waiting for him to get his ID at college registration ($26,000 a year, and they can only afford one ID machine?). Or you could ask those people who drive in front of me at 10 mph below the speed limit; I’m on them like a cheap suit. I guess it’s going to take more than years of homeschooling to make me into a totally patient person.

(Excerpted from The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling. Learn more about this book HERE.)

The Temptation to Create Mama’s Boys (and Girls)

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Barbara Frank

Apparently there’s a new reality television show in the works called “Mama’s Boys of the Bronx.” It focuses on adult men who still live at home and allow their mothers to coddle them. According to this article,

The show follows the escapades of these men at work, at home or enjoying New York’s nightlife before they come home to their doting moms, who spend their days trying to keep tabs on the partying, dreaming and scheming of their sons.

It’s easy to poke fun at these men, and I’m sure most young women would look at them as poor marriage prospects. I mean, who wants to compete with a guy’s mother for his affection?

That said, I can see how a mom might end up in this position if she isn’t careful. It’s hard to let go of our kids, especially with so many dangers in the world that we hear about every day; it’s natural to want to keep our chicks safely tucked under our wings. Then there’s the fact that raising kids to adulthood means losing control of their lives. That’s how it should be, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

Those of us who homeschooled our kids to adulthood spent many years in control of our kids’ schedules, their meals, their activities…let’s face it, we were in charge of them 24/7. But once they become adults, we have to relinquish that control. (It’s easiest if you start letting go, little by little, when they’re in their early teens, but that still doesn’t make it pain-free for us moms.)

But if we don’t let go, if we spend our days “trying to keep tabs” on them, or even if we just try to weigh in on every decision they make, or prevent them from achieving independence by offering free room and board, free car use, and spending money, what we effectively do is cripple them, emotionally and financially. Doing so also keeps them from enjoying their freedom (hopefully in a God-pleasing way) before they start their own families. So even though it may go against our mama instincts, we need to cut them loose for their own good.

It’s also for our own good. Mothers who spend their time caring for adult children that are perfectly capable of life on their own are crippling themselves. Once the child-rearing years are over, it’s time for these women to go back to other productive pursuits in their lives. Perhaps coddling their adult children helps them avoid the reality that their day-to-day job is over and they need to figure out what’s next.

That’s a scary thought. It requires waiting on God to show us the next thing that “He planned in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). It also means letting go of our desire to control our own lives as we wait for our next assignment. As a recently retired homeschool mom, I struggle with this all the time.

Knowing When to Back Off

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Barbara Frank

Sometimes new homeschooling moms ask me when they should teach their kids to read, or when to sign their children up for music lessons. These moms naturally have a lot of questions, and many of them are “when” questions.

I think one of the most important questions a homeschooling mom can ask is when to back off, because sometimes we moms are so eager to do everything right that we overdo it.

For example, let’s say your child is learning how to subtract fractions, and it’s not going well. You can see that he’s coming close to the point of losing it. You try to explain the concept in a different way but he’s still not getting it. Instead, he’s getting teary-eyed.

No matter what the “experts” say about what grade a child should be in when he learns how to subtract fractions, if you’ve got a child on the edge, you need to back off. He might not tell you this in words, but you know him well enough to see that he’s hit the wall. Trust your knowledge of your child. Take a break from fractions for a while. You can always come back to it later.

Knowing when to back off doesn’t just apply to a child who’s overwhelmed by his schoolwork. Sometimes, we need to back off when our child is enthused about something. Years ago, I recall getting all excited over my kids’ enthusiasm about frogs. It started when they found a frog in the basement window well and requested a container to put it in. I gave them an empty coffee can, and they caught the frog, named it, carried it around in the coffee can, and showed it to their friends. They gave it some grass and learned it wasn’t interested in grass. They put a little water in the can in case it got thirsty. They were really into this frog.

Being a proactive mom who couldn’t wait to capitalize on their newly discovered interest in frogs, I brought home a stack of library books about frogs, expecting them to pore over them in their excitement over their new pet. But they ignored the books. So I had them sit down with me so we could read about frogs. And you know what? That pretty much extinguished their interest in frogs. I didn’t even get a chance to do the art project about frogs that I found in one of the books. In fact, I had to let the poor frog escape from his coffee can after his young captors forgot about him.

Over time I discovered that I had to let my kids learn freely instead of jumping in and turning an interest into a learning experience. This wasn’t easy for me. My own reaction to something new that interests me is to investigate it by reading about it. But I needed to let my kids learn in their own way. I had to learn when to back off.

You can see where we often need to back off even though our intentions are good. But what if it’s not a matter of intentions but instructions? For instance, the guide to the curriculum we’re using has a timetable that’s been tested by the experts. We won’t complete the curriculum by the end of the year unless we stick to the timetable. And yet life keeps intervening, and we fall further and further behind, until it becomes obvious that we’re never going to finish this curriculum in time.

What to do? We could:

institute seven-day-a-week school in order to catch up (that’ll go over well, won’t it?)
cut out something else that the kids are doing to leave more time for the curriculum.
just back off of the curriculum.

You knew I was going to pick #3, didn’t you? Remember, curriculum is meant to serve you; you’re not supposed to serve the curriculum. When you fall behind on a curriculum, something is wrong. The timetable might be too ambitious for your family. You might want to stretch the program over a longer time period, or combine lessons where possible. Or perhaps it’s just not the right curriculum for you and your kids.

It’s OK to admit that, by the way. Yes, I know you spent good money on it, but most of the time, you have no way of knowing how a curriculum will work for your family without actually trying it. Also, the curriculum might have been written for actual schools, which are very different from home schools. Such programs are more appropriate for captive audiences (i.e. schoolrooms) than people having a life.

Whatever the problem is, back off of the curriculum and come up with an alternate plan. Expect that this will often happen to you when you homeschool. If you’re not already a flexible person, you will become one!

Of course, backing off isn’t something that comes naturally to most homeschooling moms. We’re used to being proactive when it comes to our children’s education. But if we can become aware of situations where backing off is the smart thing to do, we’ll see that homeschooling becomes easier for us. And that’s always a good thing!

(Excerpted from Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey (Book 2), just published by Cardamom Publishers. Available HERE for $4.99.)

Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey (Book 2)

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Barbara Frank

I’m delighted to announce that the second eBook in our Stages of Homeschooling series has just been published at Amazon.com. Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey has over 200 pages of encouragement and information for the homeschooling parent with a few years of experience under her (or his) belt. And it’s a bargain at just $4.99! (I think eBooks should cost less than print books, don’t you?)

Here’s what you’ll find in Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey:

Have you got a few years of homeschooling under your belt, and you’re looking for practical information and encouragement from someone who’s lived the homeschooling life?

If your answer is “yes,” then this is the book for you.

Barbara Frank just wrapped up 25 years of homeschooling four children, including one with special needs, and wants to share her experiences with those currently on the homeschool journey. So she’s combined new material with some of her articles and blog posts into a series of four books called Stages of Homeschooling. Enjoying the Journey is the second book of the series.

Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey is divided into eight sections:

“Working with Your Children” (Curriculum and its place in your homeschool, specific ideas for working with your children, and tactics for avoiding homeschool burnout)

“Raising Children You Can Live With 24/7” (An especially important consideration for homeschooling parents)

“Self-Care for the Homeschooling Parent” (How to keep yourself strong for the important job of homeschooling)

“Homeschool Challenges and Issues” (Handling difficulties that might crop up for you personally or for the homeschool community at large)

“Books and Resources I Have Known and Loved (and How to Find Them)”

“Homeschooling and Holidays” (A look at holidays from the vantage point of a homeschooling parent)

“For Girls Only” (A few thoughts for those of you raising daughters)

“Teaching Practical Skills” (Ideas for including this increasingly important topic in your homeschooling plans)

This book will encourage and enlighten you as you homeschool your children. It’s the second book in the Stages of Homeschooling series:

Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings (Book 1)

Stages of Homeschooling: Enjoying the Journey (Book 2)

Stages of Homeschooling: Letting Go (Book 3)–COMING SOON!