The “typical” homeschool family may be a married couple with the mom staying at home with the kids and devoting herself full-time to homeschooling and home-making, but that is not the only way homeschooling can be accomplished. It’s wrong to believe that you have to have the perfect situation before you could consider homeschooling.
My mom never had the ideal situation to homeschool us, but she did it anyway. When I was little, my dad was in medical school, and my mom had to work to support the family while his job paid for his tuition. When she decided that she didn’t want us in daycare or school, she opened her own home daycare. Because of the drive for money, she would sometimes be over the legal limit for the number of kids, and I grew up in a very crowded house. I learned to study while rocking a baby at the same time, supervising toddlers and preschoolers at play, or just tuning out the noise of Sesame Street or yelling/crying. I was expert at changing diapers and soothing children, and I learned to cook to a very practical purpose of helping out with meal prep. I was given a lot of responsibility, and the task of running the family business was as important as the task of getting educated.
This was a mixed bag, of course. I couldn’t participate in a lot of the wonderful opportunities that are available to homeschoolers. No midweek museum trips for me, or long field trips around the country (like my cousins did when they toured Civil War battlefields for two months) were possible when we were tied down to work. On the other hand, the self-discipline and care ethic that I learned came in really handy when I was a young parent and a graduate student at the same time. To this day, I don’t understand the need for those “quiet study” areas in libraries or schools. I can concentrate no matter what is going on around me, and that is a skill I learned growing up in a daycare.
For my youngest siblings, the homeschooling has been effected by my parents’ divorce. I was nearly 18, but the bottom two were 7 and 2 years old. My mom had closed her daycare, and rather than open a new one she bought a franchise to become a Kumon Math Tutor. The kids have grown up going to work with mom in the afternoons and working in a tutoring center. They have also missed out on daytime activities, and they’ve also had the disadvantage of a mom very busy just surviving and trying to find her footing in life again. However, they’ve also had the chance to learn how to run a business, how to teach younger kids, how to interact with adults in a business-like manner, etc.
You can’t stop kids from learning, and you can’t predict what skills will come in handy in the future. I’m sure there are circumstances and situations which could never be a healthy way to grow up, for instance complete isolation or neglect or anything abusive. But there’s a wide middle ground between that and the most ideal, fantastic childhood and education that anyone could ever imagine. I learned a lot from the challenges my family faced when I was a child. Whether it was not getting new toys because there was no money for it, walking around town with my red wagon hunting for free wood we could burn in our wood stove, or sharing my mother and my home with other children, I grew from those experiences.
Of course I have a dream vision of what I’d like to give my kids. I’d love to take them traveling, for instance going to Boston when we study the Revolutionary War (which would be a long trip for us!). I’d love to not have to work, and be able to just be their mom. But, these are unlikely to be possible in the real world. Even if my marriage doesn’t end (which is looking more likely), life will still hold compromises in store for us. Everyone has something that requires a compromise from the ideal “schooling”. You may have to work homeschooling around caring for an elder, or around your own health issues. You may have a vocation of your own that will sometimes take you away from homeschooling your kids. Or you may have to cope with financial problems or divorce. I think you can view any challenge as a chance to learn, although that learning may not be what you originally envisioned. We cannot shield or cushion our children from all the bumps in the road, but we can help them get over them. And that kind of cooperative facing of challenges will build strength that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.
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