Homeschooling With a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Free Time? What Free Time?

Today, homeschooling mom Teri Maxwell lets us in on a rarely spoken of secret in homeschooling: moms who want to home school well have to trade off ever having free time for themselves again.

Personally, I couldn't never figure out how moms managed to do it all - keep a semi-clean house, prepare three meals a day,  teach 3-5 subjects for multiple children and run their own home-based business.

Well, we've found some answers to that so far: Have your kids do more chores than schooling, count those chores as schooling, and be ready to blame your mom for not teaching you how to keep a house.

Now, Mrs. Maxwell begins the process of shaming young moms for needing any time alone.

I remember speaking to a lovely young mother after giving a workshop at a homeschooling conference. She had four children, ages 6 and under. She came up wondering how she could get more time in her day to herself. I suggested she rise early enough in the morning that she would have time alone with the Lord before the children were awake. I also encouraged her to have an hour or more each afternoon when all the children napped or did quiet activities. That would be another hour of quiet time for her to use as the Lord directed. This mom assured me that she already had those times worked into her schedule, but she needed more time to herself. (pg. 86)

Homeschooling Badly: Your Lifestyle Prevents Academic Learning

There is a post at Guilt-Free Homeschooling that is a get-out-of-jail free card for any homeschooling parent.  Titled "21 Things That Can Slow Homeschooling Progress", the list encompasses so many snags that any failure in homeschooling can be attributed to an outside problem.

For my sanity, I am going to clump the 21 items into larger categories - with my own titles - prior to discussion.

Category One: Turns out being a parent DIDN'T prepare me to educate my kids effectively.

1. Homeschooling for the first time
2. Leaving public or private school to switch to homeschooling
3. A reluctant learner who balks at the idea of schoolwork in general
4. An eager learner who wants to explore extensively into each topic

Response:   Learning to teach takes a great deal of time and effort.

By the time a teacher faces a classroom of students alone, they've received at least four years of college education in teaching plus at least half a year of supervised teaching.  Part of the rationale for this much training is to lessen the negative effects on students who have an inexperienced teacher - like the problems that come from homeschooling for the first time.

 A related concern from an experienced teacher - the oldest child is screwed.  For teachers, the first time teaching a prep (teacher jargon for a specific class or subject within a grade area) is the least effective.  A teacher is learning different ways to present and demonstrate the material as well as making choices about which activities to use.  In traditional schools, the negative effect of first prep teaching is minimized by the fact that students have many different teachers in pre-K through 12th grade.  In my life, a less than ideal 4th grade math teacher was more than compensated for by an exceptional 6th-8th grade math teacher.   In a home school, the oldest kid is always drawing the short straw when it comes to getting new preps.

Student teachers also learn how to deal with transitioning students into the school year, motivating discouraged students and challenging advanced students - without any of the added emotional burden of being that student's parent as well.

Category Two: Dealing with reproduction and tiny children are ginormous time-drains for parents.

5. Pregnancy
6. Childbirth
7. Adoption
8. An infant
9. A toddler
21. Miscarriage

Response: This is the QF excuse section.  Most Americans have small families (1-4 kids) of relatively close birth spacing.  While this makes for crazy years when the kids are small by the time the oldest kid is 6-7, the worst of the insanity of pregnancy, infants, and toddlers is over.

Not QF families.

Women are stuck trying to balance the needs of the current infant, toddler(s) and pregnancy while still managing a homeschool over and over again.

Various bloggers offer up "year-round schedules" as a solution, but if a mom needs 12 weeks off for a newborn and 8 weeks off for morning sickness/exhaustion during a pregnancy, that's a total of 5 months of "vacation" per year when most students in schools get 3 months off a year.

That's not quantifying the amount of time and effort diverted from homeschooling by the parent and school-aged kids to tending the needs of infants and toddlers.

Additionally, women who practice QF will suffer more miscarriages than the average American woman of similar fertility.  The number of miscarriages a given woman will experience is related to the number of pregnancies she experiences.  QF women have far more lifetime pregnancies than women who practice birth control so they will as a group have more miscarriages than the rest of the US.

The realities of how hard pregnancy and young children are on women led to public schooling.  Communities realized centuries ago that grouping school aged children for education outside of the home was a situation that benefited their reproductive-aged mothers by providing child-care and education while benefiting the teachers by providing income.

Category Three: Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans....

13. An elderly parent/grandparent who needs care or must be moved to a care facility
15. A legal or financial crisis
16. A job change
17. Moving to a different home
18. A wedding

Response:  An added bonus for out-of-home education is continuity during rocky times at home.  A school gives a student a needed respite from family worries at the least.  Often, students find support from other students who have gone through the same problems or from staff members who lend a listening ear - and sometimes a box of kleenex.  Additionally, schools are linked into the social services web.  (Yes, I know those words are anathema to CP/QF people, but that doesn't make the reality less true.)  As a teacher, I don't know all of the support available to a family facing foreclosure or a lawsuit - but I have a list of resource people like social workers who do know and will help get services for a family.

Category Four: When Life Is Genuinely Hard

10. A special needs child
11. A chronic illness or other health crisis affecting any family member
12. A severe injury requiring extended recovery or rehabilitation for any family member
14. Extensive property damage from fire, flood, or natural disaster
19. A divorce
20. A death in the family
21. Stillbirth

Response: These are major, life-changing events that can make homeschooling much more difficult - if not impossible.  Like the problems in Category Three, traditional schools can provide needed supports for students during crisis periods that affect their families.

Reflecting on some recent life experiences for me, I question how well families can homeschool in these situations.

• There is no way I could have homeschooled for the first month after my son was born; I was recovering from life-threatening pregnancy complication while dealing with all of the issues that come with having a critically premature baby.  
• Homeschooling once he and I was more stable - say months 2-4 of his NICU stay - would have meant cutting the time I spent at the NICU with him by 60% or more.   
• Homeschooling would have stopped dead when my son was home, but dealing with severe reflux leading to choking.  We had to keep him in the same room as an adult who was confident of their ability to do CPR on an infant and awake 24 hours a day while feeding him one ounce of formula every hour by NG tube.  (Thank God my parents lived nearby and are amazing.  That month is a blur of anxiety and sleep deprivation.)

The blogosphere of homeschooling parents gives me additional reasons for caution:

• I've yet to find a homeschool blogger who managed to continue homeschooling after a divorce. Being a single parent is plenty hard enough without adding sole responsibility for her children's education to the mix. (The divorced bloggers are clear that being a single parent - or co-parent - is MUCH easier than being in an unhappy, unhealthy marriage.)
• When dealing with an ongoing medical crisis involving kids, homeschool bloggers often discuss how hard life was while the kid was hospitalized or in rehab - but are very sparing with discussions of how homeschooling was accomplished for the kids at home.  
• Raising Olives' Kimberly had a son who suffered a broken right humerus (the bone between the shoulder and elbow) and Brachial Plexus Palsy which paralyzed his left arm due to a shoulder dystocia at a home birth. He needed physical therapy along with evaluation by orthopedists in three different states.
• Raising Arrows' Amy recently gave birth to a daughter who has an unusually small lower jaw that was causing her airway to be blocked by her tongue.  (Thank God she gave birth in a hospital; Mercy would not have survived at home since she required intubation from birth until her jaw expanded enough to support her tongue.)  Mercy was hospitalized for 6 weeks in a neighboring state.  Amy hasn't made any statements about how she accomplished homeschooling while traveling between states, but it had to be difficult.

Families go through hard times; that's life.  The important thing for parents to do is accurately access when they are able to school their children at home - and when families are best served by accessing public or private schools to educate their children.

Homeschooling Badly: Kid Prefers Public School

I found this gem on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Kris is homeschooling her two kids.  Her daughter told her that she wanted to go back to public school a few weeks into the first year of homeschooling:

"My oldest went to public school for two years. She was totally onboard with homeschooling when we began, but it wasn’t long before I was hearing, “I want to go back.” What was she missing?

Well, friends are pretty much a given (and usually a hard answer for a mama’s heart to hear), but then there were the other things — the big playground, class parties, and, of all the crazy things, square pizza. These things weren’t deal-breakers to me, but they were very important in the mind of a seven-year-old.

• I need to give Kris kudos for taking the time to listen to her child.  A lot of CP/QF homeschool bloggers pay lip service to listening to their children but spend far more time discussing how best to convince the kids that what the kid really believes and wants aligns with the parent's desires.
• Kris shouldn't have been surprised - even if she didn't want to hear it - that kids LIKE the socialization they get at school.  Kids enjoy being around people their age to learn and play with.  Bluntly, there is no way to replicate the variety, amount and freedom in socialization that occurs in a school in a homeschool.
• I know that limiting free socialization time is a feature of why CP/QF families homeschool, not a bug - but they should at least own that.  They are choosing to severely restrict their kids' chances to make friends and learn social skills.
• Notice how the secretly parent-centric view of homeschooling sneaks in.  Kris doesn't see her daughter's objections to homeschooling as deal-breakers. Making that statement subtly devalues her daughter's wishes, wants and desires after Kris asked for her daughter's feedback.

Kris tries to help her daughter by having playdates with friends from school and getting involved in a homeschooling group.  When Christmas rolls around and her daughter still wants to return to public school, Kris decides to take a more active approach to problem-solving.

" I sat down with Brianna and we made two pros and cons lists — one for homeschool and one for public school. I even added some of my own pros and cons to each to get the ball rolling.

It’s been seven years now, so I know I don’t remember everything (oh, how I wish I’d saved that paper), but I remember there being things like getting to sleep late and not having to stay after school on the pros list for homeschooling. There were things like big playground, square pizza, and seeing friends on the pros list for school.

The cons for homeschooling included not having parties and not having as much free time during the day. (That last one was mine! {grin}) For school, the cons included getting up early and not having time to eat lunch. How sad is that? Still, seven years later, Brianna often tells me that one of the best things about homeschooling is having time to eat lunch.

Edited to add: Brianna maintained the “time to eat” pro for homeschooling all the way through graduation."

• The parent-centric homeschool view screams from this paragraph.  The pro and con lists are not created by Brianna alone, but by Brianna and Kris.   Kris wants praise for sneaking a con in about having less free time during homeschooling than public schooling - but if that was true, why didn't her daughter think of that herself?
• I am not good at comparing lists of items in sentence form so I created two tables based on the paragraphs before.  I left Kris' idea off the "homeschool con" list.

Once I wrote these out, I noticed a few issues.  Some issues like wake-up time in the morning show up on both lists while others like school parties show up only on one list.  To make it more coherent, I simplified the two lists into a single list of the pro and con for public schools:

Based on the combined list, I can see why Brianna wants to go back to school.  Assuming she doesn't stay at school every day, she gains friends and playing on a big playground every day in exchange for not sleeping in and having a short period to eat lunch.  On a longer time scale, she trades staying after school for "square pizza" and classroom parties.

• If I were a homeschool parent, I would not be proud or excited that my child routinely listed "I have enough time to each lunch" as a reason she liked homeschooling.  Not when my kid was 7-9 years old and certainly not when my kid was 14-16 years old.

"After Brianna and I were satisfied that we’d thought of all we wanted to include, we began talking about what we could do about the items on the list. For example, there was absolutely nothing we could do about public school starting at 8:00, but we could change the fact that homeschool didn’t have square pizza. Um, yeah, I was totally up to making pizza in a rectangular pan if that’s what it took to make this homeschooling thing work.

What about the fact that public schools get to have parties? Well, homeschoolers can have parties, too! Our annual Valentine’s party was born that night. The first year, we had about 12 guests. Last year, we had around 75. And, that big playground? Well, the one at the local park is pretty darn big.

• An important lesson in Kris' homeschool is learned helplessness, apparently.  Public school schedules are not set in stone.  Getting the start time of the elementary school changed would be difficult - but it's not impossible by any standard.  Instead of demonstrating the steps needed to deal with an unpleasant bureaucratic issue, Kris decides to teach her kid that she's helpless to change the status quo except by leaving the system.  That's not going to serve her well later in life when she has to face issues in a marriage or a career.
• I wonder if the daughter wanted pizza that was square or if she liked the mass-produced frozen pizza served at every school.  Personally, I loved school pizza as a student and as a teacher as well.  It's not haute cuisine, but it's a tasty, filling comfort food.  If it's just the square shape, Kris could have saved time and cut a frozen pizza into squares instead.  If it's mainly the flavor, she might be able to get the same pizza from a local distributor.   Either way, it's an important piece of information to elicit from her daughter.
• The original post has a link to how to throw a Valentine's Day party for homeschooled students.  I'm stymied on which is most depressing:
• Parents who are homeschooling need help planning a party for a small to medium sized group of kids
• The kids will be most excited about games that they can't play often since they aren't around gangs of kids at once like "Red Rover"
• The kids should address their Valentines as "To My Friend" instead of using the actual names of the kids at the party rather than having to do all of the work of creating pesky lists of names to address the Valentines with.
• We have three large, fun playscapes in local parks to take my son to when he gets bigger.  None of them will be as much fun as playing with his friends at school - regardless of the size of the playscape. 

By the time we’d finished discussing the list, we both agreed that homeschooling was the better deal.
A lot of parents may not agree with this, but that first year was a trial run for us, so I let her make the call and she agreed that there was definitely more we could do to positively influence our homeschool experience."

I doubt Brianna had a whole lot of choice in the matter.  This whole blog post is an exercise in how to "gently" manipulate your child to give up requesting to go back to public schools.