Homeschooling Is Not A Suicide Mission
The title of this article sums up what I would like to say over the loud speaker at every homeschooling convention I am at. “Smile moms this is not a suicide mission.” You can tell the burned out, stressed out moms right away. I can usually spot them half way across the curriculum hall, sometimes I find the sitting in the hall crying. They are the ones that you just know are going to burst into tears when you ask, “how is your school going”? I will encourage them or go shopping with them. Boy do I give out lots of hugs. I also spend hours each month on the phone or through e-mail doing curriculum counseling and helping moms who feel like they just can’t do this anymore. Most of my phone calls come in January and February and they are usually accompanied by crying. The moms feel like they haven’t accomplished anything and the year is almost over. Boy, are they wrong.
I
would like to start out explaining a few things about burnout.
Some of the homeschooling experts will tell you that it doesn’t exist.
Hearing that said is enough to send most moms over the edge.
I know it exists—I’ve been bitten by the bug.
The symptoms are similar to the flu in that you ache all over and it is
not fatal. Let me reassure you that it is as common as the cold and that we have
all felt like waving that little yellow bus down at one time or another.
I
am going to take a few of the major causes of burnout and discuss them in depth
in the next few issues.
This is one of the major reasons I see moms giving up.
The children will not cooperate, help around the house, or they are
constantly fighting.
This one is probably one of the easiest to solve with a few rules.
You along with your husband have to set rules, tell the children what you
expect and what you won’t tolerate, then you must be consistent and firm. What
really helps at our house is to have Dad come home and ask if mom had a rough
day and who gave it to her. For
some reason kids can’t stand it when Dad is disappointed in them.
I think it has to do with all the fun things they do together. My children know they will not be included in Dad’s fun
plans if they are sentenced to the day in their room.
It really helped around here to have a consistent educational schedule.
I am far from a structured homeschooler.
We do not hit the textbooks from 9-3.
Except for Math and the upper level science course, we don’t use
textbooks at all. What we do is
have a set time when the kids must be doing assigned tasks or if those are done
educational activities. They also
have a chore time and a free time. Everything
is written on a whiteboard, so they know what is expected and can check it off.
This also makes it easier for me to check up on them.
At our house, Dad glances at the whiteboard when he gets home to make
sure all the tasks marked off. Just
knowing Dad is going to look makes a big difference.
Regular family fun time is a must in decreasing discipline problems. I have noticed with my own kids that the less time we play
together as a family the more they bicker.
We work on projects together, play games, go for hikes or bike rides,
read together, or just sit and talk.
If you are having a problem with attitudes you don’t care for, you
might want to re-evaluate how much unsupervised time they are spending with
other children. We keep this one to
a minimum. Either my husband or I
are present at all times. It is
easier to avoid bad attitudes than to correct them.
Unrealistic
Expectations:
Moms can be so hard on
themselves. They spend all
their spare time planning all these wonderful activities, then feel discouraged
because they can’t get to them. No
one tells them that life gets in the way and that there are no Super Moms.
Here is how we worked out education at our house.
We forged a plan, leaving room for minor changes and then worked the
plan.
Years ago when we found out that the school at home stuff wasn’t going
to work for us, we sat down and made a list of what we wanted the kids to have
accomplished before they graduated high school.
This included character goals, academic goals, life skills and personal
goals. We decided which educational
courses were important for each child to accomplish.
The goals differed from child to child when it got to the high school
years. In the high school years we took into consideration their
gifts and life callings. We worked
up a plan for each child complete with a check off sheet. They could see the light at the end of the tunnel each time
they checked off a task done and we could see what they had accomplished.
They were assigned books to read each year and class work to finish.
Along with the white board this was our answer—NO MORE STRESS for mom.
Remember your family is unique, you can’t copy exactly what I do or
what your neighbor does. You have
to try suggestions and be willing to throw out what doesn’t work for you. One of the biggest problems facing many moms is that so many
people have such great ideas and they are doing all this wonderful stuff
everyday, and you can’t get the dishes done.
If you only remember one thing from this whole article, please remember
this—are you listening here it comes? Those
people are not doing it all. It
sounds better at their house than it really is.
If they are doing it all their kids are older or they are doing it one
step at a time not all at once. No
one is perfect except for the Lord and we as humans make mistakes.
Don’t stress yourself out over what someone else seems to be doing.
Be easy on yourself, the Lord didn’t call you to homeschool
because he thought you would like wearing a straightjacket.
He called you to homeschool because it is what’s best for your
children, it is his perfect plan for godly families.
If you sit back and listen he will tell you what is important.
Not being committed to homeschooling for the long haul causes major
problems. I hear all the time.
I don’t want to spend a lot of money
I don’t know if I will like this or if we will do it more than one year. I
have big problems with this, if the Lord has called you to homeschooling, it is
a commitment. I don’t believe it should be because your child had a hard
time with Ms. Brown last year, or because he just isn’t ready for 2nd
grade. It has to be one reason and
one reason only, it is God’s best for your child and your family.
Yes, take homeschooling year by year.
Check off another year finished every June, but commit for a lifetime.
It is okay to let your family members have false hope thinking that you
might not do this forever, but you need to know you will.
When you got married did you say this is for a year honey if I don’t
like it I’m out of here? I really
hope you didn’t. You made a
commitment for a lifetime, for better or worse and even though you had problems
and conflicts you found ways to work them out.
If you leave yourself an easy out you are likely to take it.
I have watched parents try it for a year and when there is no commitment
they take the easy way out and put them back in school.
Usually they tell me that maybe they will try it again in a few years.
For us it has always been a calling and a commitment not a choice. If it wasn’t working we made changes so that it did.
We had to work it out there were no other options.
We made it clear to the kids from the start that this is it guys, we are
in this together—we either sink or swim so lets getting paddling as a family.
God called us to homeschool our children and I am not about to disobey.
Okay feeling discouraged and calling school off for a day due to PMS is
NOT the same thing. I came back to it the next day didn’t I?
Last but not least on the
issue of unrealistic expectations are Dads.
Poor Dads, sometimes they can’t win for losing.
They try to support us, but they can’t read our minds to know what we
need. They are just as much in
uncharted waters as we are; they have very few examples to follow.
We take them to seminars or we bring them home all these wonderful tapes
of fathers telling about all the terrific things they do with their kids, all
the subjects they teach, they even do dishes and laundry.
All the time they are getting more and more discourage.
No wonder our poor husbands give up, they can’t help but feel there is
no way they will ever measure up to your expectations, so why try.
I have been married for the past 26 years to a wonderful Godly man. He
works 12-16 hours a day so I can be home with the kids and homeschool.
There are not enough hours left in his day for him to teach science or
math with any consistency. Even
if worked only eight hours a day, I am not sure that teaching a science course
would be the best use of his time with the kids.
What my husband
does do it this, he talks to the kids when he gets home to make sure they
didn’t give mom a hard time and that their hearts were in the right place.
He checks the whiteboard to make sure things are done, as they should be.
He goes shopping with me for curriculum—he has much better insight into
what the kids will like than I have. And
most importantly he allows me to throw it away without guilt when it doesn’t
work for us, no matter what it cost.
Last summer he built a balcony on the upper level our home with the
kids-- tomorrow they are laying a hardwood floor in my office.
All the time they are working he is teaching them about woodworking,
measuring, and making it square and level.
But that is not all, they were talking about important things that are on
their hearts.
As I write this article they are playing Dr. Doolittle and rescuing two
sparrows that were blown out of a tree during a storm.
Yes, my son reminded me that God cares for even the sparrows.
I have to admit until he brought that up, I didn’t want them in my
house. It has really been a
learning experience. They have them
in a box and are feeding them hamburger. At
first they need to be fed every hour or two.
They all took turns all night and Dad fed them before he left for work.
The vet told us if they made it three days then they would be fine.
The boys have been mothering them for two weeks already—they are just
about ready to fly. The kids got a clear view of Dad’s heart when he is
willing to get out of bed to feed baby birds.
To me these times more important
to who are children will become an if he taught them math. I don’t put unrealistic pressure on him to be something he
isn’t. He wasn’t called to
teach math, he was called to be a dad and to raise sons and daughters who love
God. I want him to be an influence
in their lives, an example they can see by observe him.
This can only be accomplished by being with him.
In the small amount of time fathers have with their children each day,
what is the best use of this limited time?
What would God look down and smile upon, a father and son having a heart
to heart talk while they work side by side fixing the car, or dad forcing
himself to do math with his son. Our
husbands are the most important people in our children’s lives—God has a
higher calling for him than math teacher, he wants him to disciple.
One last
thought. If you are having a hard
time getting your husband involved with the kids.
Try the pray and duck method. Pray
that God will show your husband what the children really need from him and duck
to get out of the way so God can do his work.
You can push all you want, unless God does the nudging you are wasting
your time.
One of the major causes of burnout is starting academics too early.
I get call after call from moms who can’t figure out why Johnny, who is
only six, can’t remember what he learned last month.
There is a very simple answer, he wasn’t ready.
We waited to
start formal academics till the kids were ten. Does this mean they were
vegetating in front of the TV? NO!
They were outside observing nature, asking questions, being read to,
spending quality time with Dad, listening to what the other kids were doing, and
playing games with us. Our oldest son was not reading until after his ninth
birthday yet he was still ready to start college when he was sixteen. Our
daughter was reading at four because she wanted to.
Everyday she brought me the phonics book and begged me to teach her more.
If you wait until they are ready, more mature and eager to learn, it
will make your job much easier. Being old enough to do school was a right of
passage, a coming of age for our kids.
Pushing a subject they are not ready for also falls into this category.
We don’t teach formal grammar until the kids are in high school age.
We just make reference to nouns and verbs as we correct their writing.
We do narration and dictate with the kids so I can see where the spelling
and grammar problems are. By
waiting to start formal grammar study, we were able to avoid the, I hate grammar
most kids have from years of trying to figure it out and feeling stupid.
If you take a grammar series and lay all the books out side by side, you
will see that they repeat the exact same thing every year.
When they are ready, they only have to take the course once and it comes
much easier to them. The problem is
that we tell our kids everything is black and white, right or wrong, I say no I
mean it, 2 plus 2 is always 4. Then
we start grammar and we expect them at a young age to understand that a rock can
be a hard thing they can not throw at their sister (noun) or it can be something
you do in a chair (verb). They are
not ready to understand such abstract things.
By waiting I have found I save money, frustration, and they actually like
grammar when they are old enough to think logically.
I think it would be safe to say that 3 out of 4 of the moms that quit
homeschooling do so because of wrong curriculum.
They are either trying to duplicate the neighborhood school or they are
trying for use curriculum that was not designed for one on one or independent
study.
You see my goal is not to homeschool for the rest of my life. My ultimate goal is to work my self into unemployment.
I want my kids to be independent learners.
To accomplish this I have planned their course of study so that most of
their learning is done independent of me. For
example, I give them the teacher’s manual for their math program.
They look over the teacher’s notes for each section, watch their video,
and then do the student pages. They
correct their own work as they go, avoiding the problems caused by practicing
the concept the wrong way. I do a
surprise check every week or so. I
take the answer key away the night before and inform them that tomorrow I will
be checking their math. This keeps
them honest and lets me feel confident that they really do know their stuff.
For Science the kids observe nature, read books on topics of interest,
use computer software and then when they are in about 8th grade they
start working through the Apologia science program.
This program was written for the child to do independently.
My favorite part is that he talks to the child relating every topic area
to things from their everyday life. Best
of all it was written by a Christian homeschooling father that is also a science
professor.
For history we take much the same approach.
We assign the kids good literature to read every year.
They cover a wide range of historical time periods.
We are also reading as a family from literature books that are
historically based. We read a book
on a certain time period, discussing all the while who else lived during this
time period and what else was going on in the world.
We find all this information out by looking in a book called,
“The Wall Chart of World History”; this wonderful reference book is
available at every homeschooling conference and most local bookstores. It is a pull out type book so you don’t have to hang the
whole timeline up. When we are
studying a person we unfold it on the livingroom floor and find out what else
was going on at the same time. Don’t
forget you local library and video store. You
can get wonderful documentaries and historically based movies for almost any
time period.
As you can see our approach to education is relaxed.
I don’t feel pressure to use a curriculum for science or history
because I don’t need the tests. The
kids study a time period until they feel they know the people involved
personally. We spend a lot of time
discussing what we are learning. The
kids are required to pick a certain period of time or a certain person to do a
Web Page about. Instead of reports
that mom will circle mistakes in red and then file away; the kids do WebPages
they can share. If I assigned lets
say Leonardo DaVinci to my son and asked him for a report I would get as little
as he can get by with. When they
are doing a WebPage for all to see they are very carefully with their spelling
and grammar not to mention they put far more time and research into it. WebPages have been our answer to the report.
Okay I can hear you. By
this time you are thinking gaps gaps everywhere.
I don’t believe in gaps. God
called you to homeschool, if you have overlook something important God will fill
in the gaps. God never calls
you to do something that is impossible. He
always equips us better than we will ever know before he sends us out to do a
task. We were at a convention a few
months ago with J. Michael Smith from HSLDA.
He was telling about the myth of gaps and all the calls they get from
worried parents. One mom in
particular had a unique problem. Her
kids had to be tested every year. The
problem wasn’t the test—the problem was that she found out at the beginning
of the school year that her father didn’t have long to live.
She brought her father to live with them and they all shared the task of
taking care of Grandpa. She
didn’t worry too much about school she new he didn’t have much time and they
could always make up for the lost school time.
Her father passed away right as the school year was coming to a close.
It was now time to take the test and what was she going to do, they
hadn’t even started school yet. The
kids had done some of the stuff they could do on their own, but not nearly
enough. She called HSLDA worried
and looking for a way out. A wise
attorney sympathetically told her that she had done the right thing, not to
worry God would fill in the gaps they needed.
Sure enough when the test results came back each of the children had
scored at least one year above what they had scored the previous year and all
the children scored way above grade level.
We have to trust God that if we are doing what he has called us to do and
we do our best, then he will take care of the rest.