Does Home Schooling Mean I’m ‘Screwing Up’ My Kids?
The private message on yesterday’s post read: “You’ve got to be kidding ….I mean, if you want to isolate yourself from society and anyone that is just the least slight bit different from you, that’s OK. But why do you want to screw up your kids? Kids develop social skills by being around other kids and having shared experiences. What’s going to happen when they get older and the make believe cocoon you’ve conjured up bursts. How will they cope? “
My kids don’t attend traditional school. But they meet lots of other kids. Through the years of homeschooling, my kids have interacted with their peers in children’s choir, in two different Sunday Schools, in Boy Scouts, in basketball, in baseball, in soccer, in karate class, in music lessons/recitals, at the library, and in playing with the kids on our street and the kids at the playground a block away. They also get to play with kids of all ages that I take care of while their moms have to be someplace else.
Is diversity a concern? Consider some of the interesting people that we meet and interact with on a regular basis:
- Until he died, we visited my Grandpa often. Grandpa had lost both legs, and used a wheelchair. As a result of spending time with Grandpa, my kids are unawed by people with “accessories” and will frequently strike up conversations with the “differently-abled” that we meet at church, in the park, in the store, and at the library. My kids jabber about their “Grandpa with no legs” and how much fun he was, and how he used to make knives and work hard in his garden. They often ask these people what kinds of hobbies they have. These people invariably express delight at meeting a child who can relate to them without being overly interested in their accessories.
- Our church is made up of multiple races and cultures, including African-Americans, whites, Hispanics, and Asians. We had a wonderful choir member who was a graduate student at the nearby university. He was from China, and played some unique and fascinating Chinese instruments for us. We were all very sad when his studies were complete and he had to go back to China. We had another choir member who is a prominent African-American composer; we were all sad when he moved to Texas. Yet another choir member was a locally famous black basso profundo who sang with us through his late 80s. He was one of my best friends, and we always exchanged a kiss and a hug when we met.
- Our church has a special ministry to the homeless and disadvantaged, and my kids often help me make deliveries to the Food Pantry or the Soup Kitchen.
- On my sons’ sports teams, we have kids who come from all over the area. Some of them are members of our church; others are unchurched. One of the boys had a hormone imbalance that caused him to gain a lot of weight. The kids are learning to help compensate for his limitations, but they don’t tease him about his size.
- Our own neighbourhood is a huge melting pot. We have Russian, Ukrainian, Jamaican, Armenian, Korean, Chinese, and several other nationalities living in the immediate vicinity. Their kids play with my kids quite often on the weekends.
I really don’t think isolation or lack of diversity is an issue for us. The real difference between my kids and traditionally-schooled kids is that my kids are not cooped up in a classroom with no one but peers and teachers for seven hours a day. They don’t spend 12 hours a day on school- and home-work. They don’t watch a lot of television or play computer games. They get a lot more fresh-air play, a lot more individual attention, and a lot more concentrated education than their peers.
And I reiterate: I believe that the home is the best place for a child to be socialized. Who do you want your child to emulate? A bunch of undisciplined, immature, bullying kids who pick on anyone who doesn’t conform to the group’s standards and interests, or well-adjusted, mature, generous adults who respect differences of style and interest and who interact with children as if they are people, not an annoyance? Personally, I prefer my children to learn social skills from mature adults who have perfected their social skills, not from little snots who still feel a need to bully, brag, and fight their way to the top of the heap.
And it must be working. My son’s psychologist says that he is extremely well-adjusted for his age, especially considering the trauma of the divorce. Many people, including random strangers in the grocery, have told me that mine are some of the best-behaved and most polite children they have ever met. And the most articulate. But they are not quiet little mice, believe me. They are all boy: boisterous, fun-loving, prone to wrestling with each other, highly competitive, and often really loud.
And they get on well with all ages. My sons are fascinated by babies, and love to sit and play with them, talking to them and showing them how to build towers with the blocks, for hours on end. They adore their new cousin, and are always excited to find that Elliott is coming to visit. My kids love to play with their peers, and are both kind and competitive. They are also a lot more resilient than many of their peers — the psychologist says that is because they are showered with love and attention at home, so they are very secure and have good self-esteem. My kids love to converse with older kids and with adults, as long as the conversation does not go too far over their heads.
I came upon my oldest talking with a Sunday School teacher one day when he was about eight. This lady also is a public school teacher, and she took me aside later to tell me how stunned she was by my son’s knowledge of our space program — he had been talking to her about the Mars Rover expeditions, and she was amazed at how fluently he had discussed the rovers and their work with her. She said that he was three or four grade levels above the other kids his age that attended the school where she teaches, and she wanted to know how I had gotten him interested. I told her it wasn’t my doing. He had seen the news report one evening, asked me some questions, and we spent some time on the internet looking at NASA’s site about the rovers. He had apparently retained a lot of what we’d read and discussed that night. That evening, my son told me that the lady was interesting to talk to because she knew so much about the space program.
“Make-believe cocoon”? I don’t think so. I think my kids are very widely exposed and very well socialised. All right, they don’t know a lot about sex or drugs, but that’s what I want to protect them from. They know those things are out there. They know that drugs, alcohol, and “inappropriate touching” can be harmful. Do they need to know more at the ages of 10 and 12? We don’t really need drugs, fights, and pre-teen sex to prove ourselves, do we?