Why Do I Homeschool?

I am subscribed to a site called Free Homeschool Deals. They send out regular emails outlining different topics, deals etc. Today’s email included a link to a reflection on a question I have had to answer time and time again “Why Do You Homeschool?”… The blogger Motherhood on a Dime faces this head on in her entry “Why Do You Homeschool?” (My Attempt to Answer the Question Without Offending Everyone Who Reads This Blog).

She gives her 5 main reasons for why she homeschools… I found that reasons 2, 3 and 5 really resonated with me…

2)  Homeschooling *forces* me invites me into relationship with my children.

I really hesitated to put this in here, because I’m afraid it might be misconstrued.  Please don’t read this the wrong way.  I genuinely love and care for my girls…it’s not like I have to be forced into loving them.  There are just moments when relationships are hard — when parenting is hard.

For instance, I butt heads constantly with one of my daughters.  Some days I think I would love to send her to school — just so I could have a break.  It’s at these moments I realize how valuable homeschooling is for our relationship.

If my girls were away from me for 8 hours a day, I’d miss the character and heart issues that need dealt with (in them AND myself).  Being with my kids 24-7 means we have to find solutions and grow together!  We’re *forced* into building a strong relationship.

In The Well-Adjusted Child, Rachel Gathercole mentions “the detachment snowball.”  This term was coined by Dr William Sears in The Baby Book.  She says, “According to this idea, the more time parents and kids spend apart, the less parents know and understand their kids; the less responsive, respectful, and communicative both parents and kids become; and the more time both need away from each other.”

I don’t want that to happen to my relationship with my children.  All too often, I’ve seen a similar progression in children as they go away to preschool, elementary school, and middle school.  By the time they are teenagers, they want nothing to do with their parents.

I’m thankful that homeschooling invites us to a deeper relationship with each other — and I’m grateful for the time we have to work on it!

3)  I’ve been given a great gift.

I went to a conference last summer and listened to the challenging Voddie Baucham.  He made a comment (actually several of them) that stuck with me…

“Just imagine someone coming to your house, knocking on your door, and asking for the keys to your brand-new car.  They tell you they’re just going to use it during the day, but they’ll return it to you in the evening.”

Are you kidding?!!  That would be crazy…I’d never do that!

Are not our children much more valuable to us than a car?

Yet, we turn our children over to a teacher we’ve met once and let them be influenced and molded by them for hours each day.

Now, do not think for a second that I am bashing teachers!!  I know there are excellent teachers in my community, and there are excellent teachers all across the nation (I hope I was one of them)!  I know how challenging it is to teach and the rewards are often few and far between.

But because I was a teacher, I also know that there are many teachers whose hearts are not in it.  They’ve grown cynical.  They crush instead of inspire. 

More than that, they don’t share my values — and even if they do, they can’t teach them outright in the public schools.

My girls are gifts.  They are little sponges….and I can’t stand the thought of them losing the curiosity they possess and the desire they have to learn and create.

I know what they love.  I know what they struggle with.  I love them more than anyone else ever could.  Ultimately, God has made me responsible for training and discipling them.

I don’t feel I can abdicate that responsibility to someone else for hours and hours each day.

5)  We teach as we live.

When you are one-on-one with a child, you can accomplish “schoolwork” in an abbreviated amount of time.

We don’t have to wait for the other kids to finish their work.  We don’t have to spend time moving from one location to the next.  We don’t have to go at the same speed for everyone.  We don’t have to deal with tons of discipline problems.  Our on-task time is probably more in just a few hours than what children in school accomplish for the whole day!

This frees up our afternoons — for music, cooking, playing outdoors, visiting, serving, or other creative pursuits!  We’re involved in local classes, sports, Girl Scouts, and various other community activities.  When family members visit from other states, we can take off and enjoy their company.  We can “do school” in the evening if necessary — or even on the weekend(yes, we have)!

Life is education.  Education is life.

I absolutely appreciate her openness with her struggles with her daughter… I have my own head butter on a regular basis as well. And yes, there ARE days when I wonder, would it not be better to send him on to school and let someone else fight that battle… and then I remember how I chose to become a mother (though bonus baby at the start was a surprise), this is MY battle to fight, my arguments to delve into. These moments of struggle and strife are helping HIM to grow into a wonderful young man and ME to become the mother I could be… the woman who is able to truly understand her children, to have the patience to deal with issue and learning and the time to share with her kids above all else. These are gifts not burdens!

Her third reason is another of my main reasons… What would I do without these minutes, hours, days? These moments are my gifts, my children as well. I am there to learn along with them, to experience the eureka moments first hand. My sponges are there and I can tailor our days to what they are interested in, what they struggle with…

Reason #5 is one that I am always surprised of. We can get so much done and then look back and see how it was even more than we thought! We have freedom, flexibility, while I do not have a one on one situation as much as I would like in our 5 kid classroom I do have the ability to choose my moment. We have had days where attitudes lead to packing it in and other days when we look up and it is dinner time and we all could do even more! Reminders that, as she said…. “Life is education. Education is life.”

I have my own reasons as well…

  1. The amazing sense of accomplishment we all share after completing a project and in turn sharing our knowledge and resources with others via this blog. 
  2. We have some unique and stubborn personalities… In all honesty, Zander would most likely have his own engraved seat in the naughty corner and a first name relationship with the principle. Gavin is rather sensitive to errors and while we are working on that, tears would be plentiful in a traditional classroom situation. Which is not to say that these personalities would eventually even out and fit in, but you know what? With all the bumps and bruises and tears and smiles… I don’t want them to change that much. Well a little more respect from little mouths would be nice, but these difficult characteristics are things that as adults… well I cannot wait to see the strong and empathetic people they are going to grow up to be.
  3. It is fun! You heard me, FUN! I LOVE learning with my kids, teaching them things that I had great memories of learning about… that does not mean we leave out the difficult and the less entertaining but I cannot explain to you the JOY I felt when it clicked with one of the boys as to what we were actually doing with multiplication.
  4. It feels right… ups and downs, good and bad… it just feels like this is where we need to be, learning together… living our days always looking for that next learning opportunity!

I come back to this question time and time again (often when being asked by someone new or someone who is still unsure of our motivations). And each time, instead of making me question the validity of the choice it makes me delve deeper into my motivations. So in a way I must THANK the people who ask, you are reminding me that there ARE great reasons to choose this path. And that while this is not the path for everyone, it IS the path for us!101_2226

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