When Grandparents Don’t Understand

You’re all pumped up about homeschooling, you love seeing your kids learn new things, and you love having the time to learn together. Yet there’s a fly in your ointment—your parents or your in-laws are opposed to what you’re doing.

This hurts. You want them to be happy for your family, to appreciate what you’re doing, and you certainly don’t want them to make trouble for you. Maybe it would help to look at the situation from their point of view.

I’m not saying they’re right…I’m just suggesting you put yourself in their place for a few minutes. Chances are good they’re in their 50s or 60s. That means they started going to school in the 1950s or 1960s. Their memories of school took place in a much different era. Teachers’ biggest concerns back then were kids chewing gum in class and running in the hallways, not bringing guns to class and ducking gang members in the hallways. Many of today’s grandparents picture school as the experience they remember, not the one that exists now.

Your parents or in-laws may also view your choice to homeschool your kids as a criticism of the way you or your spouse were educated. They probably chose to live in an area where there was a decent school, and they believe you got a good education. But to them, your choice of homeschooling may feel like a rejection of your education, and they’re taking it personally.

 Another possibility is that they truly believe the only place a child can learn to read, write and do math is in school. They became parents during an era when so-called experts, like Dr. Benjamin Spock, were almost worshipped as parenting gods. What people like Dr. Spock said was practically gospel to some people back then. Your parents or in-laws may view teachers as experts, but they still see you as their child (or the person their child married). They may like you, but that doesn’t mean they think you have the expertise to teach your kids.

There may be other, more personal, reasons your parents or in-laws would object to you homeschooling your kids; only you would know if that’s the case. But the fact remains that it hurts if they don’t support your decision. That discord may simmer under the surface, or it could result in outright hostility.

In most cases, the solution to this problem is time. As your children grow up to become happy, independent and smart young people, their grandparents will see that they’re doing fine. You can help this along by inviting them to your support group’s Project Night or science fair, sharing your children’s test scores with them, and involving them in field trips as well as projects you work on at home. Remove the mystery of homeschooling so they can see that it really is just a loving and involved family life. People fear what they don’t know; help your parents or in-laws to understand homeschooling, and show them the fruit it bears in your children’s lives so they can understand exactly why you would make such a choice.

(Excerpted from Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings, my new eBook available only at Amazon.com for the Kindle. Learn how to use the free Kindle app on your pc HERE.)

Survival Skills for Kids: Cooking and Gardening

In her book The Prosperous Heart, Julia Cameron shares the story of Richard, an independent graphic designer who blamed his uneven income for causing him to have too much credit card debt. However, an assessment of his situation revealed that the bulk of his debt was due to his daily habit of eating dinner in restaurants:

“I couldn’t believe it was so simple,” he said. “If I ate out only twice a week, I could be out of credit card debt in a year. What I needed were groceries. The price of a salmon fillet at the supermarket was a third of what I had been paying in a restaurant.”

It’s easy for us to react to Richard’s epiphany with “Well, duh!” But the fact is that there’s an entire generation of young people raised on fast food and restaurant meals that don’t have a clue when it comes to preparing food for themselves.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if our economy was booming, and if earning an income high enough to support daily restaurant meals was easy. But the combination of inflation, shrinking incomes and high unemployment has made times difficult for Americans of all ages and especially young people, many of whom give into the ever-present drumbeat of “College! College!” and graduate with considerable student loan debt, along with a college degree that’s not always the golden ticket to jobs it was advertised to be.

When we fail to equip our young people to live self-sufficiently, we handicap them in the best of times, much less the worst. Right now in Greece, highly educated young people are leaving large cities because they can’t find work; instead, they’re trying to eke out an agricultural living in the country on land their grandparents abandoned years ago. Their desperation comes out of necessity, but at least they’re trying. Surely the task is easier for those who were taught to garden and cook.

We could learn from that example and teach our children such survival skills, but U.S. children continue to be fed a diet of useless social experiments masquerading as curriculum. The closest they get to cucumbers is being taught to put condoms on them in Sex Ed. Seems like teaching them to make a fresh cucumber, tomato and onion salad would be a little more appropriate given our dicey economic future.

However, homeschooled children have the opportunity to be taught how to cook and garden by their parents as part of their daily education. These learning activities already occur naturally in the lives of many homeschooled children, and provide them with enough knowledge and experience that they emerge as young adults who can take care of themselves in hard times as well as good times. A bonus is the closeness that develops between parent and child. The lost art of preparing meals together is what once kept families close, and homeschooling families can easily prove it still works.

As for gardening, even modern children (once pulled away from their phones and iPods) enjoy the sight of the seeds they planted later popping up from the soil and quickly morphing into green plants. Once they taste their first fresh tomatoes and green beans, they’re usually hooked on gardening. For many of them, gardening will become a lifelong pleasure as well as a survival skill.

When I homeschooled my children, I could see that including cooking and gardening in our homeschool was fun and educational for them. It was well worth the effort. Remember, the time you spend teaching your children to garden and cook now will eventually result in that many fewer young people trying to feed themselves armed only with maxed-out credit cards later on.

Wanted: Homeschool Reviewers

It’s been a lovely week spent battling strep throat, but I’m back online for a few hours before I stumble back to my sickbed  :0

Right now I’m looking for a few homeschoolers who’d be interested in reviewing my new book, Stages of Homeschooling: Beginnings. Please email me at cardamompublishers at sbcglobal dot net by 2/14/12, and I’ll get you a review copy. Thanks!

Homeschooling and Weight Loss…or Not

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but I’ve lost almost 30 pounds since I stopped homeschooling.

At the time (last June 9, to be specific), I was reacting to a book I had just read called Why We Get Fat. It made so much sense that I decided to give the author’s recommendations a try, if only for a few days. It was easy enough to stick to that I just kept at it all summer as we packed and moved, and all fall as we unpacked and then pitched many of our belongings while keeping and placing only our most needed and wanted possessions. (See “The Downsizing Chronicles.”)

I feel great, which is a good incentive to stick to the plan, as was my recent reading of another book, Wheat Belly, which helped me understand why I feel so good now. But I can’t help wondering if my efforts were helped along by the fact that for the first time in many, many years I have the time to concentrate on an eating plan instead of being too busy with homeschooling to think about it beyond a few minutes of good intentions. Again, maybe it’s pure coincidence, but I have to wonder.

The bonus for me is that I was becoming increasingly incapacitated by lower back pain when I stood or walked. It had been a problem for about ten years. And now it’s completely gone! Where before I had to sit down after walking for five minutes, I can now walk as long and as far as I want. I keep expecting the pain to strike but it never shows up, thank God.

If you’ve struggled with your weight, I think you’ll find these books to be very helpful:

And if you feel like you’re too busy homeschooling to try losing weight, now you know that there’s always hope that you’ll lose weight once you have more time to yourself  🙂

“Check Out” My Book on Amazon for Free

Would you like to read my new book for free? You can, and it’s all because of my husband.

You see, “we” bought an Amazon Kindle quite a while back but he became so attached to it that it’s now his Kindle (he denies this, but he’s always using it!) There are many things he loves about the Kindle, but recently he found out that he can check out a book for free on his Kindle and keep it checked out as long as he wants, and he really liked that idea  🙂

So we’ve decided to allow my newest book, Thriving in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality, to be checked out for free on Amazon because the economy isn’t getting any better and we want people to learn how they can prepare their kids to thrive in challenging times (hint: homeschooling is definitely a part of the process!)

Of course, you can read free excerpts of the book here, but if you want to read the whole book, learn how you can borrow it for free here.