Homeschooling with A Meek and Quiet Spirit: Reasonable Expectations, Consequences, and Emotional Boundaries

I've reviewed several books on this blog - and the theme connecting the books is absolutely terrible advice. 

We've heard Debi Pearl's idea that girls should learn to make cheese because they might marry a dairy farmer who needs a wife who can make cheese.  (I've still not found an real-life situation where a woman who married in saved a dairy farm because of her cheese-making skills.)  The Botkin Sisters' advice to never show interest in a guy prior to his asking permission to court from your father is pretty atrocious.  Sarah Mally's worst advice was holding the Princess' life as being a shining example of Christian living when a better description would be nearly-terminal-ennui.

From that background,  I had a nice surprise in "Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit" by Teri Maxwell.  She has some good advice in the chapter on "Anger" that could save parents and children a lot of strife:

Consider for a moment a sin or habit that you have been praying about and would like to see changed. Here is a simple example from my life. A few years ago, Steve said he would like me to put a cookie sheet under the electric fry pan so that the heat from the fry pan would it damage the kitchen counter. High goal for Mom, but shouldn't be too tough, since she likes to please her husband and surely doesn't want to burn her countertop. However, Mom has never put the cookie sheet under the fry pan in all her life! She is usually preoccupied when working in the kitchen and finds herself forgetting, time after time, to put that cookie sheet in place. I did not want to forget. I did not purpose to ignore my husband's request. I just didn't think about it!

I wonder if sometimes this is true for our children. More often than not, they don't deliberately choose not to do what we have told them in the past. It just doesn't occur to them at the moment; they are still children. If my expectation is that they will probably forget and I will need to remind them, then it is okay. I am expecting to do my "job." However, if I have expected them to remember and they don't, I will be angry with them. (pgs. 70-71)

Whoa!  This flips every idea in CP/QF about training children upside down! 

CP/QF assumes that adults can make honest mistakes but children never do.  If a child doesn't do a chore, they are being rebellious.  If a kid denies doing something a parent accuses them of, the kid is lying - and being rebellious.  Hell, the Pearls have made their fortune promoting that beating your children early and often will create happy little robots that never make mistakes.

In my teaching experience, the vast majority of student issues involving completing work and following classroom procedures stem from simple forgetfulness and normal human error.  A student will forget to hand in an assignment or to grab the day's notes from by the door.  Students broke lab equipment accidently all the time.  One student went to open the vertical blinds and pulled the attachment bracket out of the wall.  Another excellent student was goofing around and put his foot through a poorly constructed wall.  Oh, and there was the time I went to the office at the behest of the principal and came back to find 30 sharpened pencils stuck in the acoustic ceiling tiles.....

Because I grew up in a sane society, my assumption was that accidents happen and that teenagers can made dumb life choices - like seeing how many pencils they can stick in the ceiling - without being guilty of rebellion.

I suspect homeschooling parents who follow this advice will be much, much happier.

(Unrelated, unimportant side note: Why would you place a cookie sheet under the electric frying pan?  The sheet is metal which is going to conduct the heat through to the counter and burn it.  Plus, if she's been cooking without it for multiple years and the counter hasn't burnt, why add one new level of hassle?)

This next bit boggles my mind a bit.  I think the issue is that I'm a decisive person and have never had an issue thinking of a reasonable consequence for a poor life choice by a student......

As we think about the idea of correcting our children, we found ourselves face-to-face with another area that can deprive us of a meek and quiet spirit. What happens when a child has done something wrong, but you just don't know how to correct for it? Often a mom will become angry at that point, feeling a great deal of frustration and impotence.

You will find it most worth your time and money to invest in Doorposts' "If / then chart". This chart is designed to help you think through and plan corrections for the most common children's offenses. After filling in your particular consequences, you mount the chart on the wall. When there is a problem involving your child, you go to the chart where you read to the child what he did, the Scripture that applies, and the correction. There is no guess work. There is no frustration over not knowing what to do. You don't need to be angry about having to correct the child. It is all lined out for you. (pgs. 74-75)

Having clearly defined consequences is a great idea. 

Having 10 different categories of wrongs and consequences would make me insane.

My classroom rules were very simple: "Respect yourself, your classmates, your teacher and anyone else who is in this room.  If a person's behavior interferes with my ability to teach, I will assign consequences that I believe are appropriate and are in line with the school's handbook." 

It's based on how my parents raised me now that I think about it.

My main classroom consequence was redirection.

• If a student was off-task, I would gesture for them to get back on task.  If this was happening frequently and affecting the student's performance, I'd move their seat so they were sitting closer to me and farther from their friends.  The students who were truly dedicated to staying off task eventually got to do their classwork in a separate room with a parapro - but that was like 1 kid per semester.
• Swearing got "Language, please!".  The kid would respond "Sorry, Miss!" and make an attempt not to swear.
• I had an "if your phone is an issue, I'm locking in the cabinet with my purse until the end of class" policy.  Some kids just couldn't handle the distraction.

For times where students needed other consequences, I learned pretty quickly what consequences a given student would want to avoid.  

• I had a student who kept reading novels before she finished her assignments in my class; I informed her that I'd confiscate her book for 24 hours if she continued to do that.  That stopped that problem cold for the next three years.
• My 4th hour class was always filled with little angels; they hated being held over into lunch time - which I did on an individual by individual basis.

As a homeschooling parent, you have far more consequences - and rewards - at your disposal than I ever had.  I couldn't let kids out of school early, take kids on personalized outings or do a chore they particularly disliked for them.  I also couldn't interfere with their internet access, phone privileges or ground them for misbehavior.

Really, all of this is moot if a parent-teacher lacks emotional boundaries.  A teacher or a parent needs to learn how to separate the actions of the kids from the emotions of the parents.  Students and kids do dumb, irresponsible and sometimes hurtful actions.  The trick is learning how to separate their choices from your feelings.

I think emotional boundaries is what Steve and Teri were trying to get at in this anecdote. 

Once, Steve painted a word picture for me that I have recalled regularly. Think about a policeman. His job is to enforce the "laws of the land." When a motorist breaks one of these laws, the policeman pulls that motorist over and writes him a ticket. The policeman calmly, and often with a pleasant smile, tells the motorist what the infraction was and what the penalty will be. The policeman isn't irritated because he has had to pull over the same motorist for three times already that day. He doesn't become angry with the motorist for trying to talk him out of the ticket. And, most of all, he certainly doesn't cry!!!

My role in our home is very similar to that policeman. I am to enforce the "laws of the family." My children must be stopped frequently and given a ticket. What is my attitude going to be? Will I matter-of-factly, with a pleasant look, write my child his ticket and give it to him (in a manner of speaking)? Will I be frustrated by the constancy of my job and by the fact that I have already given the same child a similar ticket? Will I become angry over it? Will I cry? Will I have a meek and quiet spirit? Sometimes having the proper picture of our role, along with lowering those expectations, is essential to a meek and quiet spirit. It all works together!. (pgs. 78-79)

Yeah, I think Steve was trying to introduce the concept of emotional boundaries to Teri. 

Parents and caregivers of young children spend most of their waking hours teaching children how to follow the basic rules of society like "Use your words, not your hands" to redirect kids to talk out problems rather than hitting or modulating the volume of their voices inside.

The process is rewarding - eventually, the kids can function in society! - but the process is also tedious as hell.

The problem I have with Steve explaining emotional boundaries to Teri is that homeschooling CP/QF moms are nearly overwhelmed as is.  I had years of training and mentors when I entered a classroom.  I had (theoretically) a prep period to get work accomplished without students under foot.  I had a lunch period.  Most importantly, I could go home at the end of the day.

Teri - and other CP/QF moms - have none of that. They are trying to be a mother, housekeeper, cook, early childhood educator and elementary school teacher during the day and add in the added role of properly supportive wife when her husband is home.   I'm not surprised so many CP/QF moms advocate student-directed learning for their junior high and high school aged students; they really don't have time to teach the older kids on top of everything else.

Women aren't even allowed to question if they really like raising and educating  a never-ending stream of children; apparently God stamped us all in identical molds of "wife, mother, teacher" by giving two X chromosomes.   When all women are forced to fit into the same mold, I would expect a lot of misdirected anger and tears.