I Don't Know How You Do It

I've been homeschooling for seven and a half years now so of course I know everything there is to know about it. My days run smoothly and I never suffer from self-doubt or anxiety ...  ha ha ha. Not true at all. Homeschooling is a journey and I am in new territory every single day. But the years have given me some insights and wisdom, I hope, and for a while now I have been wanting to share them. This is the first of a series of posts from my short book:

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU DO IT!

How to homeschool your young children without losing your mind

The full book will be published as an e-book in September. I am looking forward (I think - be nice, please!) to your comments and insights! 

Introduction

So you have decided to homeschool your children. You have thrown away the school registration forms and announced it on Facebook. The grandparents have had their say and some of your friends are looking sheepish around you. You know they think you are either nuts or saintly, and you think you might be both.

Maybe this was an easy decision for you – you were homeschooled yourself or you read a book about it when you were high on oxytocin and carrying your newborn around in a baby wrap. Most likely, though, somewhere along the line you have come to the decision as you face that question every parent of a child over two is asked: So, where is she going to go to school?

I used to be a schoolteacher. I spent ten years in classrooms with chalk dust on my hands and piles of books on the back seat of my car. I thought of all the studying I did and all the experience I had and concluded that parents who homeschooled were deluded and yes, arrogant to think they could do it all themselves. A few years later when I had a toddler and a baby of my own, I read a book someone lent me that made me realise that homeschooling was not the same thing as school at home. I realised that it was a lifestyle of learning, an extension of the parenting my husband and I were already doing, and I began to envisage a future where my darling children and I would spend our days discovering things in the garden and snuggling up to read stories. They would be best friends with each other and by the time they were adults they would have graduated from the high school of life knowing how to solve quadratic equations, sew their own clothes and make jam.  But then I had another baby and there was a cute playgroup up the road, and without thinking about it much we began a journey towards traditional school. It was only when we needed to make that decision about Grade 1, that homeschooling became an option again.

I remember staring into my mirror one day thinking that it wasn’t too late to change my mind quite yet. The deadline for school registration had not yet passed, and although we were planning a fourth child he had not quite begun to exist just yet. I could still send my kids to school, shut the baby factory and keep life simple. And that thing that I had been daydreaming about ever since my first child was born might actually happen – I could pack lunchboxes, wave goodbye to my husband and the kids and have the house to myself for a few gloriously peaceful hours every day until they came home.

Maybe I was crazy, but I put that dream aside for a while and we went ahead with both homeschooling and having another baby. If I wasn’t crazy, my poor mother certainly thought I was! That was a long time ago – the fourth kid arrived and our homeschool journey began on a warm January day when the three-month-old wouldn’t stop crying and the house was a hot mess. But it happened – a bit of Maths and handwriting and reading and colouring was done despite the needy little brothers, and now that little girl who put on her favourite dress and brought her soft unicorn toy to “school” with her on her first day is putting on a uniform every morning and happily going off to high school where she has slotted in better than I expected and is surprising me all the time with how smart she has turned out to be!

Maybe you are reading this and hoping that at last someone has discovered the secret to successful homeschooling. Maybe you are hoping to find the key to successful, happy, stress-free kids and parents within the pages of this book.

Alas! There’s no secret formula. There’s no recipe, no curriculum, no daily schedule that will make it easy and guarantee success. But chances are you picked homeschooling because the idea of a sausage-machine education for your children jarred somewhere. You have decided not to take the well-trodden path, and that means you are going to have to actively find your way along this journey. You chose not to use the same map everyone else is using, so expect to get lost a couple of times along the way. Expect to hit some dead-ends and detours, and even to fall into a few heffalump traps along the way.

So – as I have said, there is no perfect formula. I will not wait until the last chapter of this book to make that clear. What works brilliantly for the mama whose blog you read, whose kids always look so happy in the photos, who seems to fit way more into her day than you can ever imagine and still look gorgeous at the end of it all, will most likely not work the same for you. What I am hoping to do is to help you see that just as your family is different to the family next door, your “homeschool” will be different too. It must be. You choose the groceries you buy and the meals you make. You choose the rules and the boundaries and the consequences. The formal schoolwork that is going to happen in your house is another one of the things on that list. You must choose it and you must choose what works for you. It’s going to be hard. This is parenthood, after all. But I hope I can help you to shake off expectations and assumptions that can prevent you and your family from remembering the homeschooling years in a positive light. I don’t want my kids’ number one memory of homeschooling to be of Mom getting tense and stressed and yelling at them. If I’m going to do this homeschool thing it needs to work for me, and the same applies to you.

So let’s do this. Let’s look at what’s important, and what is not, and how to begin thinking of homeschooling in a way that will make you look forward to your days and stop lying awake at night worrying that your ten-year-old will never get the hang of fractions, or your six-year-old will never learn to read.

That said – this book will focus primarily on the primary or elementary years. We have decided as a family that our children will attend high school. We have recently begun that journey and so far, we have no regrets. As a former teacher, I have never preached homeschooling as the only right way to educate children. Homeschooling can give children advantages that traditional school cannot, but depending on the child it can work both ways. They will miss out and benefit either way.

So as I take you through some of the different aspects of homeschooling your children, let me introduce the key concept behind what I plan to share with you:

Homeschooling needs to work for you and your family.

Everything I am about to discuss hinges on this idea. It seems obvious, but many of us do not remember this in the many, many decisions we make and the habits and practices we put in place. Not paying attention to this extremely important fact could result in all kinds of problems. Ever experienced any of these?
·         Temper tantrums (children and parents!)
·         Sleep deprivation
·         Depression and anxiety about school
·         Constant sibling conflict
·         Constant parent-child conflict
·         Feeling overwhelmed and burnt out
·         Feelings of failure and self-doubt
·         Embarrassment and shame

Notice that there is one thing not on this list:

• Children  not meeting standardised requirements for their age or grade

Think about it – which is worse? A burnt out, stressed-out mom and a kid who says he HATES SCHOOL, or a happy kid who is behind in Maths and really good at climbing up the rope in the garden? You know the answer. If your family life is a tangled disaster of bad attitudes from both the kids and you, nothing else will go well. Maths can be caught up. Kids who learn to read late often read better. Your homeschool must, on the whole, work for you and your family. This is not negotiable. If there is no way to make it work then you are all better off sending the children to school. My hope is to help you to begin to think about how that can happen.

Stay tuned for Chapter 1:Everyone has an opinion ...