The Battle Of Peer Dependence: Chapter 4 - Part Five

It's been a while since I wrote about Marina Sears' "The Battle Of Peer Dependence" so I had to look back at my notes about the main issues I had with this chapter.  In this section, Marina Sears manages to combine a pet peeve of mine about bad homeschooling with her ongoing obsession with isolating her children from peers.

Let me place this section in the timeline of the Sears family.  Jeff died when his children were 7 years, 5 years, one year and not born yet.   Marina and the kids lived in the same house in the southwest USA for 14 months until that house sold.  The family moved to Montana to live with Marina's parents.  The Sears lived with Marina's parents for a year during which Marina started homeschooling her kids who were roughly aged 9 years, 7 years, 3 years and a toddler.  At the end of the year, Marina moved her family back to Texas when the kids were 10, 8, 4 and two years old.  In that first year, Marina relied heavily on God to determine the correct educational and moral goals for her kids.  (I'm still a bit lost on the details of that arrangement; I'm assuming it's a cover for a woman making decisions on her own in the absence of a male authority).

Marina needs to move her family at the end of the first year back in Texas:

This worked very well until the house I was renting in Arlington was sold, forcing us into another move, and another new home and church. Not having had the luxury of others around me who were also home educating, the new church we moved to seem to have a very large group of home educators. I thought that the extended family I was desperately missing was found, and it was wonderful. In just a short time I didn't feel as if I were alone in my struggle. My thoughts were, "Finally, other families with the same goals for their children as Jeff and I had for ours." I thought a little piece of Heaven had descended upon my life. Little did I know it was the beginning of a 7 and 1/2 year battle for the life of my son.  (pg. 46)

 *bom-bom-baaammmm*

I've trimmed the quotes so far to cut out the melodramatic twist endings where "everything is going well for our family" turns into "really bad shit was just around the corner!!!!!"   I like a good twist as well as the next person - but once a chapter at most rather than twice per page.

I digress.

One of the reasons traditional schooling has been so popular across the world is the benefits of specialization.   When I taught, I had four subjects that I taught yearly.  Because of that repetition, I was able to reuse lessons that worked quickly and spend my rare moments of planning time to fine-tune or completely redo lessons that didn't work as well as I wanted.    Each year, my curriculum became more solid and more effective for my students because I was able to focus on a small subset of the curricula presented to any one student.

Homeschooling parents are at a disadvantage by comparison because they have to create curricula for four disparate subjects (math, science, language arts, and social studies) along with any elective subjects (foreign languages, art, music, physical education, health etc., ) and religious training as they see fit for one kid.    When I was a public school teacher, my course load of four subjects was rare and considered grueling; most secondary teachers have 1-2.   A homeschooling parent has at least five cores plus most have at least one or two electives.   That's six courses for one kid - and Marina had an 11 year old, a 9 year old and a five year old in school with a three year old under foot!  I can't even imagine how much time planning curriculum would take if she did it all herself.

How do good homeschooling parents deal?  The same way that traditional school teachers do - by focusing on teaching the areas they are good at while using curricula created by parents or teachers who are skilled in other subjects.   I regret that I was embarrassed to ask other teachers for their lesson plans when I started teaching.  I assumed that those other teachers had created their lessons from scratch and would view me as lazy or unskilled if I asked for the plans.   As I matured as a teacher - and started creating lesson plans that were unique and working for my students - I realized that experienced teachers love giving lesson plans to other teachers.   For the experienced teacher, it's a good way to have someone else test the lesson and tweak it.   Personally, I remembered how exhausting and overwhelmed the first years of teaching were and anything I could do to make it easier for new teachers was well worth it.

For most homeschooling parents, having other homeschooling parents to bounce ideas off of and trade lesson plans with would be a huge benefit.  The fact that Marina Sears' children would be around other kids, though, is too much for Mrs. Sears to tolerate for long:

As we fellowship with other home educators, it was wonderful to see the children make friends so easily. I thought that for my children to have best friends would mean that their lives would be complete. I wrongly assumed that our lives were heading down the same path because we were associating with Christian home educators who use the same terminology as I did. I didn't understand that people can have the same goals, but have different ideas on how to achieve the goal. My mistake was in hearing the words, but not understanding others definition. The fault was my own because my focus was completely wrong. (pgs. 46-47)

*slow claps*
Imagine how much more awesome gossiping would be if we all could wrap our normal disagreements in such noble sentiments!

Mrs. Sears never mentions what the actual precipitating issue was - but we can write off certain tricky issues.   The other families couldn't have been involved in 'sexual immorality' or drugs of any kind; Mrs. Sears would have been all over that as a horror story.  Similarly, a theological rift would have brought on a detailed explanation on how the other side had gone over to the devil. 

No, we're looking at something really, really minor. 

Maybe the girls wear skirts that are marginally shorter than Marina liked.  The boys play a war-style game that the Sears kids were not supposed to like, perhaps. 

Or, maybe, the kids had the audacity to enjoy being around their friends as much as they liked being around their family!

That could rapidly turn into a negative cycle in a possessive parent.  The kids go to the Smith's house and enjoy the simple pleasure of being around new people.  The parent gets jealous of the fact that the kid enjoy the other family and lock down the family harder.  With enforced isolation, the kids react even more excitedly when they are allowed to go around other families - and the cycle begins again.

Thanks to COVID-19, I think I finally understand what life was like for kids in extremely sheltered families; getting out around other people feels amazing even though there is an overhanging fear of something bad happening because of being around them.   My experience was caused by a dangerous respiratory virus.  For kids in CP/QF families, the experience is caused by the emotional needs of their family.

That's a shitty way to raise kids.