Preparing Sons: Chapter 10 - Part Two

The second half of Steven Maxwell's chapter on raising preteen and teenage boys to be workers in "Preparing Sons to Provide for a Single-Income Family" quickly devolves into a mishmash of educational and vocational topics.  Generally I review the chapter in the order that the topics appear in the book - but this chapter makes the teacher in me twitch a little bit so I rearranged the sections in an order that makes more sense.   In the actual chapter, Maxwell covers computer literacy followed by starting a small business then segues into the evils of employment outside the family before doubling back to discuss college preparatory courses and creating real-life learning scenarios.   For my sanity, I've moved the section on college prep and project-based learning to after computer literacy to link all of the "homeschool" topics before moving into working outside the home.  The saddest bit of the change for me is that I suspect that the nameless non-family member proofreader that the Maxwells employ made the same suggestion and was shot down.

Ah, well.  Hopefully the proofreader gets paid well - or knows how to fire a client.  Perhaps going unnamed is a requirement on behalf of the proofreader.

I'm all in favor of computer literacy - but Maxwell wants major props for reinventing the wheel:

You will want to find computer application projects that require him to learn more. The spreadsheet is very common business application, but you will need to work on coming up with practical projects for him to use what he is learning. If he has his own business, there will be data from the business that he can use in a spreadsheet. We learn by doing. Your job is to find computer projects that will cause him to grow.

You might be good with an inexpensive, generic home office software package. After he has mastered the word processor, spreadsheet, and database, it will be time to purchase a professional business office package. This may be a significant expense, but it will pay dividends for his lifetime. Pray that God will allow your expenditures to be revenue-producing. Then your son will be able to finance his own learning experiences.

What will you do when your son runs into difficulty learning or using a software program? Will you let him quit in frustration? No! Encourage him to persevere, with Dad right beside him. Go to the library, and check out books. Use the web for research. (pg. 150)

Back in the late 1990's, I was in a weekly computer class at my elementary school.  The class was based on age-appropriate academic and business projects that we completed to learn how to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  In the early 2000's, I took two college classes on desktop publishing and Excel for general education credits.  Both courses' assignments were based on business or education-ready projects.   (Sidenote: Desktop publishing was a great class to take as a future teacher.  I learned a lot of design principles that let me create classroom materials that looked finished and professional quickly.)  In the last two years, I've taken courses on using R (a freeware statistics program that is very powerful) at my graduate program.  I'm sure you can finish the sentence - because the coursework was based on creating analyses of real data sets found in biological sciences.   

The funniest bit?  Parents don't need to create projects for their kids in these areas.  There are plenty of gently-used soft cover textbooks available on Amazon for under $20.00 that have more projects ready to use than a homeschooling parent could be expected to create.

The second paragraph is a tad dated.  To save money, I've used Open Office which is free for at least 5 years now.  (I think I might be closer to 10 years, but I'm not certain because I can't clearly remember if I was using Open Office or Microsoft Office on my desktop before I married my husband.)  Open Office has a few quirks if someone is used to using Microsoft Office but none of the quirks are deal-breakers in my opinion.   I find Maxwell's sudden solicitude on the price of Microsoft Office strange; a professional version of Microsoft Office (or similar) runs around $300; a home/school version is about half that cost.  It's certainly pricy - but this is a guy who humble-bragged about putting at least $1200 down on Delphi plus a refurbished computer for Joseph.  Unlike Delphi, the entire family can use a copy of Microsoft Office and learning Microsoft Office is a basic expectation for high school graduates today. 

Accepting that one of the costs of homeschooling a high schooler is purchasing a copy Microsoft Office makes far more sense to me than praying that the family will make money from having a copy of Microsoft Office.    The Maxwells have made that work by counting Sarah Maxwell's bookkeeping work for her brother's companies as income, but that feels a bit shaky to me. I think my main objection is that none of the Maxwell kids were allowed to go to college so I can only imagine how much more useful Ms. Maxwell's services would be if she had been allowed to get a finance or accounting degree.

The next topic we're going to look at is Steven Maxwell's ideas on educating teens to be ready for college.  The advice is underwhelming.

If you know your son is headed for college, you will want your son's high school courses geared towards college prep. You will have to spend time researching entrance requirements to potential schools your son might attend. Do this before he even enters high school so you can plan his course of study to meet, and perhaps exceed, the university's entrance requirements!

This would be a good time to check out scholarship criteria since this may affect the course is your son takes. We know a family whose son qualified for excellent academic scholarships. When his university rank the top academic students to determine the amount of scholarship money each would receive, the basic academic courses and test scores were so close that the school rated highest the students who had four years of a foreign language. Information like this can be very helpful in planning your son's high school courses. (pg. 157)

*slow claps*

That's pretty horrible advice on both fronts. 

Colleges list the minimum requirements for entrance. You do not want to educate your college bound child to the minimum requirements because there is no real benefits to being in the bottom 10% of an incoming class.  According to the College Board, most colleges expect incoming freshmen to have had four years of English/Language Arts, three years of math, three years of laboratory science, two and a half years of Social studies, two years of a foreign language and one year of an art/music/performance class.   That schedule leaves lots of space for electives so most high school students who have a sense of if they are more science/math types or humanities types adapt accordingly.  I knew I was a science geek so I took four years of high school math including AP Calculus AB and four years of lab science courses.   My friends who were humanities-bound took the less math and science than I did but took every elective writing course available.

Colleges have scads of scholarships available.  Looking up the major requirements for full-ride scholarships at colleges that a student might attend is an ok idea - but lots of those have individual requirements involving ACT/SAT scores, high school class ranking, GPA, strength of courses and tests created by the college.  A full-ride scholarship is nice - but the vast majority of college students receive a combination of scholarships and loans.  Most students are seeking to get as much scholarship money as possible and that's where traditional schooling has some advantages.  Traditional schools have a broad number activities available for after-school activities.  Many of these activities can lead to scholarships at the college level.  Personally, I received a scholarship that required a demonstrated history of leadership which I showed through my work in Peer Ministry.  This isn't impossible for a homeschool student by any stretch - but their resume is going to be stronger if their activities can be verified through an outside source like a community group or established church.

After shitty advice on how to prepare students for college, Maxwell decides to ad-lib some ideas about how to create project-based learning classes in for a homeschooler:

Courses could be developed for just about any interest. Working models of car engines are available. First he could build the model, and then he could write a paper about how it works. Next you could research air conditioning technology. Go to a junkyard and purchase the components of the system. Bring them home and reassemble them into a simulated working system. Finally take each piece apart and have him describe how it works. In similar fashion, courses for other interests can be developed. (pg. 158)

I created three science project-based learning classes at the last high school I taught at.  I had two separate issues in creating them.  First, creating a good quality project based learning class is extremely time consuming.  Let's assume Maxwell was describing an automotive technology class.  A good curriculum would start with a list of objectives describing the learning goals for the student.  A sample objective could be "the student will describe the function of the parts of an internal combustion engine."  The activities of building the model engine and writing a paper about how it works would (presumably) teach the objective and give the student a way to demonstrate the objective.  For the paper, the teacher would need to create a grading criteria for the paper so both the teacher and student know what is expected.   I'm willing to bet that building the model alone will not teach the kid how an engine works unless there is additional educational material like videos or readings on how internal combustion engines work.   Putting all this together for one unit (and that's one unit, not a course) would take me an hour or so - but would probably take a bit longer the first time a teacher did it. 

The second issue is that project-based learning classes get expensive quickly.  A good - but not great - model engine runs around $50.00.  A used-book on how cars run is around $20.00 - but could save the parent-teachers hours of work in terms of educational material gathering.  The cost of an automotive air conditioning system from a junkyard depends a lot on the junkyard - and how much work the family is willing/able to do to find and remove the AC unit themselves.  (Plus, junkyards are the last home of cars that have been through every other repair option so a working AC unit might be an impossible dream....)  Pulling the unit personally is much cheaper than having the junkyard pull it - but it does require having a bunch of tools available.   I really don't know how much the Holy Grail intact automotive AC unit at the local junkyard costs - but let's assume it's $50.00.   How many CP/QF families have $120 dollars to spend on two units of a course for one kid?  Remember, buying a copy of the professional version of Office is a major expenditure according to Maxwell.

Once Maxwell has shared his educational big ideas - in spite of never having taught homeschool himself - he shares his logic on shorting his kids' academic education to cram in extra computer time.

When our oldest sons were in high school, the Lord was not directing them to college. Therefore, we encourage them to study math only through Algebra II, using further math course time for computer study instead. They were seeing God leading them into having their own computer related business. The computer courses would be necessary for their vocations; calculus might not. If at some point the Lord showed them a change of vocational course that needed higher math, they could always study at at that point. (pg. 159)

Interesting fact: None of Maxwell's kids have been directed to go to college by the Lord!  I haven't been able to find the exact statistics to do the math - but the chances of zero kids attending college in a family of eight with one parent with a college degree due to random chance is pretty damn small.  In a different Maxwell book I snagged second-hand on Amazon, Steve and Teri share two anecdotes of their two youngest kids explaining why they personally don't need college when the kids were 15.  That implies that the Maxwell kids have been indoctrinated to view college as a waste of time.
Sadly, it would require massive amount of time input for the Maxwell kids - but mainly because their parents skimped badly on educating them the first time around. Compared to the College Board recommendations,  the Maxwell family homeschool graduates missed the requirements in English, math, science and foreign language.  They do hit the bare minimum in social studies and art - which is better than nothing, I guess.

Now, Steven Maxwell likes dropping his electrical engineering credentials to gain some level of respect - but his kids are so far behind on the math and science requirements to enter an engineering program that it's absurd.  Engineering schools expect freshmen to be in Calculus I - but many students will have already completed Calculus I in high school.  The Maxwells complete Saxon Algebra I and II. This puts them around 2 years behind; they would need to complete a Geometry class and a Pre-Calculus class.  In terms of science, the family only takes the most basic Apologia Physical Science class in 9th grade before stopping.   That puts them three years behind since they are missing biology, chemistry and physics.

Did Steven and Teri spend as much time explaining to their kids the fact that they were under-educating them as they spent teaching them that college was evil?  Do they have a plan for how an adult will catch up on 2 years of math and 3 years of laboratory science if God wants the adult to be a doctor or an engineer?

Did I mention what the Maxwell parents were swapping out instead of academics?  They were swapping out either working for one of the Maxwell family businesses in one form or another:

Nathan and Christopher to get a lawn mowing business when they were ages 13 and 11. Maxwell's mowing service was an excellent source of income and experience for them. To ensure that there was positive growth for the boys through their business, Terry and I gave it oversight as needed. We had a voice in the business decisions and also acted behind the scenes to provide quality control.

It would be worthwhile to list some of the benefits our sons experienced. The boys learn to work hard under physically difficult circumstances, as summers in Kansas are hot and muggy! They learned to manage money and performed business accounting. They acquired customer service skills. If their business was to succeed, they had to do their best. Within a couple of years, the boys were averaging $15 per hour each, allowing them to save a significant amount of money. They learn the importance of maintaining their equipment. They had to manage their time and spend it wisely. They were able to set their own schedule consistent with the needs of the family. They were never bored. They had good fellowship and avoided evil companions. They also developed a reputation throughout the neighborhood is hardworking, honest young men. A young man's business can be of tremendous profit, and not just financially. (pg. 151)

CP/QF leaders are hard-core believers in starting a family-run small business.  That's definitely one way to earn money - but it's hardly the only way.  Starting a business is hard.  Not everyone has the skill set to launch a successful business and not every business can make enough profit for an owner to use it as a single-income source.   The Maxwell Family already knows this; they've had plenty of successful businesses - but they've had businesses fail miserably as well.

Steven Maxwell began Communication Concepts Inc as a printing and online forms sale company.  Somehow, this company morphed into small-business freelance IT consulting business.  Until a few weeks ago, most of the Maxwell sons along with Steven Maxwell were prominently featured on the website.  Now, the only people on the website are Nathan Maxwell as an IT professional and Annie (the middle sister) as the call center representative.  In the strangest cross-cross marketing I've seen, the Maxwells (as of 2013) still list Communication Concepts Inc as the publisher for all of the Titus 2 books - including the "Managers of their ...." series, "Preparing Sons...." and my current favorite "Raising Great Conversationalists".

In addition to Communication Concepts Inc., Nathan and Joseph Maxwell started a company that sold web-based classes to prepare other homeschooled conservative people to pass computer credential classes.   ITonRamp survived for about four years before closing in 2015.  It currently offers one set of videos to rent for $65.00 for 6 months.  Sarah Maxwell is in charge of sending people who order the videos worksheets to complete on their own.

Christopher Maxwell was involved in Communication Concepts Inc specializing in photography.  Since his photography business didn't really mesh well with CCI's ongoing specialization in computer security, he spun off  his own photography business. He will only photograph weddings that have modest women's dresses, no alcohol and no dancing - and then implies that his schedule is open because of his own choices about his family rather than having eliminated 99% of weddings in the US.   He mentions in the pricing section that he has an assistant who travels with him, but needs a separate hotel room.   I suspect his assistant is either Sarah or Mary Maxwell.

In addition to photographing weddings (and possibly photos for internet sales), Christopher Maxwell has an underwhelming website advertising his skills at fixing websites for small businesses.

Sarah Maxwell is a daughter - but she's been the main force behind Titus 2's online presence including all of the "Managers of Their...." forums and updates since she was in high school. (This becomes weirdly clear if you read the family schedules in the "Managers of Their School" book.  Sarah's schedule from when she was 18-23 has most of the morning dedicated to working on "Managers of Their Home" work while Teri has no time available for that job.)  She's written something like 10 children's books that have been completely scrubbed of any questionable material like kids who disobey their parents.  She also does the bookkeeping for several of her brother's businesses.

Joseph is currently the lead designer at Swift Otter Solutions focuses on e-commerce site design, maintenance and support.  Steven, Christopher, and Jesse Maxwell are all listed as members of that company.  How Swift Otter is different from Christopher's separate business over at FourPointEleven is not entirely clear to me; maybe Christopher works only with sites that don't do business on the website?   In the section on "Work" for Swift Otter, there are ten completed projects listed - but there have been no new projects added in over a year.  The site is also offering free study guides for some Magento credentials in exchange for your email address.  I'm very curious why they want my email address that badly.

The only son who has stepped away from Maxwell conglomerate of businesses (a little) is John.    Instead, he has Maxwell Irrigation which offers an independent service of drafting irrigation designs for farms of all size.  Unfortunately, an independent draft of an irrigation design is useless if the farmer needs installation - and Maxwell Irrigation is light on experience in installing and maintaining irrigation equipment.    John also has a realtor's licence and his bio on that page states that he is a licensed Master Electrician and Master Plumber.  Being a Master Electrician is a major time-investment in Michigan so I was curious how he pulled off completing 12,000 hours of hands-on training in six years in a family that doesn't believe in working for others.  Silly me; Kansas doesn't licence electricians at the state level.  He might hold those credentials at the local level in Kansas City - but both of those simply requires passing a test and getting two people who work in the trade to vouch for your skills.  John's not entirely free of the Maxwell business snarl, though.  One of Christopher's sub-specialities in photography is real estate listings....

Ten adults of working age.  One non-profit ministry that sells a lot of materials.  Five for-profit businesses.  Two shuttered or failed businesses.  So many moving parts.

Perhaps a parent isn't quite sold on having their kid drag a mower around to the neighbors under the guise of a business.  Perhaps a parent is ok with their teenager working at the local greasy spoon or family owned business.  Don't worry; Maxwell can make that US rite of passage the doorway to hell!

The disadvantages of outside employment, if they are present, can offset all the advantages to include his paycheck. The pay is frequently far less than what the teen could earn from his own business. His boss dictates the hours of the son works. He can be exposed to significant worldly influences and temptations. It is possible that the worst negative could be for his heart to turn towards his boss or a co-worker. Work circumstances have even been known to lead to an immoral relationship at this vulnerable age. (pg. 153)

I got so busy tracking down the Maxwell businesses that I forgot to point out my pet peeve with the argument that teenagers can make more money working for themselves.   How did the Maxwell boys at age 13 and 11 finance a commercial lawn mower?  How did they take the mower to and from clients?  When the Maxwell sons were making $15 dollars/hour mowing lawns, was that amount before or after business expenses were removed?  How about taxes?  What did that work out to when including the dead time of late fall/winter/early spring? 

Yup.  A teenager who is old enough to work at a business (usually 15 or 16 years old) may well be exposed to swearing, visibly drunk or high people, unsaved coworkers and clients and people wearing standard American clothing.  I don't see the issue; if CP/QF adherents are supposed to be strong enough to change the entirety of US culture while converting everyone to Christianity, they need to know how to deal with US culture.

Having a teenager fall for a much different in age boss is rare enough; having the boss reciprocate those feelings in extremely rare.   Now, romances between coworkers who are teens are pretty darn common - but again - either CP/QF adherents can deal with being around people who don't believe in emotional purity and still hold their beliefs...or they can't.  If they can't, it's better to find that out at age 16 than at age 26.

Steven Maxwell's solution for this is....unique:

If you choose to let your son work outside the home, visit him often at the job. Make it a condition, with his employer, of his working there. Know who he is working with, and make sure he is learning beneficial skills. If he isn't learning, he probably shouldn't be working there. These are critical years in developing his life skills, and time cannot be wasted for a paycheck alone. If you sent his heart is drifting away from you even slightly, he needs to quit. Parents, you are responsible before God for this son; be zealous for God's best in his life. (pg. 153)

Good luck with that idea.  My parents saw me every once in a while when I worked at Meijers - but I worked in the guest service department as a cashier or bagger.   They didn't come traipsing after me in the backroom when I was sorting men's basics or getting clothing down from the hanging storage.  I can't imagine hiring a teenager who had a parent who was so controlling that the parent wants instant access to the teenager at all times - plus access to all of the teen's coworkers for the purpose of judging them.   It's just not worth the hassle.

Preparing Sons: Chapter Six - Part 3

I'm back!  I'm sorry for the longer than expected break.  Our trip to Pittsburgh was one day longer than I had planned for and traveling long distances with a 12 month old adjusted baby wiped me out. 

I realized when we arrived in PA that my long-suffering laptop power-cord had finally died from an internal wire break so I was sans laptop until a replacement cord arrived today. 

Pittsburgh was amazing and my niece is the brightest little thing ever!  She and my son had a standard toddler-old baby love/hate relationship.  My favorite moment was after one of the adults made her relinish one toy for my son to play with she muttered "Baby bye" which I translated to "Time to get rid of the baby, people!"   Watching her at the Aviary and the Botanical Gardens was so fun; she wanted to look at everything.  My mom, my sister and I introduced her to the joys of swimming; she was hesitant at first but soon was putting her whole face in the water to try and blow bubbles.   We watched the Winter Olympics together and she learned the words "hockey" and "curling".   Unfortunately, she also screamed "NO!" everytime we tried to convince her that the hockey team she liked was the Detroit Red Wings rather than the Pittsburgh Penguins.  :-)

It was a great weekend - and a weekend filled with activities that the Maxwell clan forbids.  Modesty guidelines prevent them from swimming.  Professional and amatuer sports are out.  Heck, television is out.  Technically, the Aviary and Botanical Gardens aren't entirely forbidden - but I've never seen a picture on the Maxwell blog of family members visiting any cultural attractions outside of agricultural fairs.  Most places frown on patrons attempting to convert other patrons on the sly; it changes the experience of the patrons in a negative way.

This section of the chapter focuses on the horrors of youth team sports.  I am biased strongly in favor of youth and adult league sports.  I played soccer, softball, volleyball, and basketball as a kid and pre-teen.  In high school, I played one year of soccer.  During late high school and college, I acted as an assistant coach for girls soccer at the elementary school because I enjoyed teaching girls how to goal-tend.  Athletics taught me how to use my physical strength while compensating for my undiagnosed exercise-induced asthma and low flexibility.  I learned how to communicate effectively with others on the fly.  I learned how to motivate others and how to accept support from teammates. 

I loved to play positions that required aggressive physicality; I led my team in rebounds in 5th-8th grade mainly by being willing to do whatever it took to get a hold of the ball once it hit the rim or backboard despite the fact that I reached my adult height of 5'3" at age 10 and was shorter than average by age 13.  I loved diving for shots in soccer especially the ones where someone was running at me on a breakaway; it was the best game of chicken ever!  I played catcher in softball and lived for runners who tried to go through me,  I played rough and tumble pick-up games of basketball with the boys at recess during 7th and 8th grade.  Looking back, I've always felt constrained by societal expectations that girls were supposed to be non-aggressive, passive and weak.  Sports were a place I really be myself long before I knew how to bring assertiveness into my day-to-day life. 

I benefited as well from my lifelong issues with cerebral palsy, too.  I've spent most of my life tripping over my own feet because my legs don't always move like I expected.  Because of that, I learned how to fall in ways that minimize injuries to myself and developed a high pain tolerance for bruises on limbs.  To this day, my husband will ask me about a nasty looking bruise on a leg or arm and my response is "Oh, I smacked my arm with the car door last week.  Huh.  That looks more ugly than I expected."

I love sports.  Steven Maxwell abhors team sports - and goes into amazingly wound-up hyperbole right off the bat:

Team sports are generally accepted as a good, proper, and beneficial activity for youth. What about Christian youth? A child only has a limited amount of free time in a week. Have the parents evaluated what the best use of this time is? (pg. 95)

*rolls eyes*
Yes, Steven.  Parents evaluate activities for their children all the time.  It's the reason that many parents choose traditional schooling; they feel that their children will receive the best return on the amount of time spent on education.  Other parents choose homeschooling for the same reason.  

Ironically, I live within a short distance from three colleges founded and run by Calvinistic-Baptist denominations.  All three of them have competitive sports teams - so Steven is moving in his own realm of crazy here.

After a workshop one evening, a man discussed with me his son's involvement in team sports. He wanted his son to learn to work hard and with others on a team. I asked him whether he could think of no better way to accomplish these goals.

I have not observe team sports building the proper spirit of teamwork. Rather they foster a spirit of pride. If you want to develop teamwork, have your son work with his siblings on some projects. If he can work with them, he can get along with anyone. If you want him to learn to work hard, take him with you when you help a widow with some home repair. (pgs. 95-96)

For any poor soul who decides to have a conversation with Steven Maxwell in the future, keep in mind that anything discussed is fodder for his next book.  Maxwell is not listening to your argument; he's simply waiting for you to stop talking long enough to interject why your choice is completely wrong.    Likewise, when he seemed to be watching his young sons play sports he was really judging the amount of "teamwork" compared to "pride" shown by the kids.  

The argument that working alongside siblings under the eyes of parents is identical to working with random people assigned to a team under an assigned coach is palpably absurd - and tired.  For the vast majority of parents in the USA the goal is to raise independent adults.  Independent adults can support themselves financially independently of their parents.  They choose to set boundaries between their family of origin and their immediate family.  Adults can behave morally without having their parents overseeing their every move. 

Steven Maxwell's goal is not to raise independent adults; he aims to keep his children dependent and under his control. 

How has his plan worked out for his kids? 

Well, his oldest four sons are married - but his oldest two daughters are unmarried at 36 and 25. 

Christopher and Joseph each had a failed engagement prior to meeting their wives. (This explains why Steven was so irritated when John's now-wife Chesly's family announced their engagement before the wedding; twice bitten, thrice shy.)  By comparison, I've never had a wedding called off after a publically announced engagement in my extended family of 50+ adults.   

Nathan's running a successful business; Nathan, Christopher, Joseph and John have each had a business fail.  

I would need a whole lot better set of outcomes to deprive my son of sports.

Maxwell attempts to explain what a massive time commitment sports were on his family:

Nathan and Christopher were great Little League baseball players. They loved baseball, and we love to watch them play. Going to the games was fun and a real family affair. Practices will begin in late February, and the games will continue into June. Then if you were " fortunate", your son would be chosen for the All-Star team and participate in another couple of months of practice and games. The end result was an incredible amount of time invested for the whole family. (pg. 96)

I went down a rabbit hole after I read this passage and tried to figure out how old his kids were when they were playing Little League.  I stopped because Steven Maxwell has bent or mangled the truth so many time previously in the book that the ages of his sons are moot.  This passage could be describing Nathan at 12 and Christopher at 10 or they could have been 6 and 4 years old; Maxwell would write the same story either way.   

The amount of time invested for a family with two kids playing Little League is not as massive as Maxwell makes it sound.  We usually practiced 2-3 a week and had a game once or twice a week - and often the game replaced a practice.  Maxwell wasn't a coach - and a careful read implies that he and Teri didn't stick around for practice times.   Assuming that the boys needed to be driven 15 minutes each way to three practices and played one 90 minute game a week, that's an investment of 6 hours of driving + watching games total.   Remember, the Maxwells had a total of three kids when Nathan was at the maximum age for a Little League with one stay-at-home homeschooling mom. 

The Maxwells clearly lived somewhere a lot warmer than Michigan; our outdoor sports season doesn't begin until early April which caused the season to be run pretty tightly. 

If the Maxwells hate the All-Star team so much, they don't have to let their son try out.  It's not mandatory.

The next section makes Steven Maxwell's main reason for removing his kids from sports clear: he cannot deal with losing control of any aspect of his sons' lives.

What did allowing our sons to play baseball cost us? We could no longer set our own schedule. We were at the mercy of the coach decide where we had to be and when. We were no longer controlled whom our sons associated with. They were part of " the team" and were to bond with each other. The greatest price we paid was at our family evening altar time.

Family Bible study is very important to me for the development of my family. I value it next to importance to my own Bible reading and prayer time. I was now forced to sacrifice our family altar time to the god of sports. I was choosing to give up my opportunity to teach my children God's Word - - the one thing that would have the greatest impact on my son's ability to lead and provide for their families. Finally, this realization hit home! (pg. 96)

My first response was indignation; Maxwell's in la-la land if he thinks the coach has control over practice and game times!  

My second response was bemused recognition of Maxwell's privilege as an male engineer if he's up-in-arms over losing control of his schedule.  Welcome to reality!  Try balancing practices and games with a guest service job, a demanding college schedule and using limited public transportation - or two adults working 5 jobs.  Try keeping a homeschool schedule with a difficult baby and a sick toddler.  Heck, try keeping that same schedule in the year Mary was born.   

The Maxwell kids might get to know other kids!  Kids who have not been pre-screened to avoid single-parent families, divorced families, ideological disagreements with the Maxwells or mothers who work outside the home!  Oh, the horrors!  The other kids might.... I can barely say it.... they might discuss a TV show!  Oh, the humanity!

No, really.  That's humanity.  We're a jolly mess of differences - but most people can work together long enough to play 7-9 innings of baseball. 

That whole "altar time is sacrificed" spiel?  Completely made up.  Here's how I know: The Maxwells included their family schedules in "Managers of their Homes" and family evening prayer time was scheduled for 30 minutes in the evening.   In a traditionally schooled family, the athletes would need some time before or after sports to do homework, but the Maxwell Family homeschools - and didn't have any evening homeschooling blocks in any of the schedules in "Managers of their Schools".    Teri Maxwell is a bright cookie; with only three kids at home, I'm sure she could prep a dinner during the early afternoon that was ready to eat by the end of the game.  If altar time was truly a priority, the Maxwell Family would be able to fit 3.5 hours in a week pretty easily around sports.

The next quote demonstrates how little of a priority emotional regulation is for Steven Maxwell:

Teri and I knew it would be the last baseball season for our sons. After the final game of the season, I took Nathan and Christopher out for a soda. With tears running down my cheeks, I explain to them why we are ending team sports for our family. I shared with each of them how much team sports was costing our family and that we could bear it no longer. To my joy, they both accepted my direction. I firmly believe that as a result of this decision, we have seen God pour out unimaginable blessings into our sons lives. (pg. 96-97)

I have a very dark sense of humor.  In my mind's eye, the two boys are in slightly dirty baseball uniforms including hat and stirrups enjoying root beer floats at Dairy Queen when Steven Maxwell starts visibly crying over the fact that "God doesn't want you to play sports anymore!"  The boys exchange slightly worried glances at each other - is Dad ok? - before saying something like "That's ok, Dad.  We're ok with that."  Both boys are a bit relieved; after all, they're not great players and watching Dad glower every time the coach talks to them has gotten old.  (Did I mention I suspect that some of Steven Maxwell's disdain of the All-Star Team is because Maxwell didn't make the team as a kid and his kids didn't either?  Hmm.....)

Just imagine.  If Steven Maxwell had never entered his oldest boys in team sports, Nathan and Christopher might have been spared the pain of two failed businesses and one failed engagement.  How did Steven Maxwell make such a grievous mistake?  (I'm being sarcastic, of course.)

A few pages later, Maxwell throws in one last horror story of how team sports can lead directly to porn:

I know someone who was introduced to pornography by his own father. The father had the magazines in his home, and the boy found them. How horrible for a father to cause the entrapment of his son. I know another young man whose baseball coach introduced him to pornography. The team went to another city to play a championship game and stayed overnight in a hotel. The coach " treated" the team to a stack of magazines for their entertainment. (pg. 101)

I can't imagine handing a stack of porn magazines to the teenagers; it's such a gross idea. 

 Obviously, I can't rule out that the story is true; there are sick people in the world - but I'm boggled at how this coach handed off a stack of porn mags to his team.  It's pretty rare for a coach to travel with an entire baseball team alone; normally there would be other parents in the hotel staying overnight before the game.   How did the team keep the parents from hearing about the great porn award?  Teenage boys talk a lot - and they are not great at keeping their voices down.  I have a mental image of the Bela Karolyi knock-off Simpsons character standing in front of a bunch of teenage boys and saying "Good job.  You get porn mags.  Make you men." 

Now we are all up-to-date on how youth team sports will destroy parental leadership and lead directly to porn.   Remind me to sign my son up for tee ball and U-5 soccer in a few years. :-)

Buying a Home Debt Free: Financial Privilege

One theme I've noticed across CP/QF blogs is a tone-deafness around financial privilege.  Every family has different levels of wealth and income.  Families that have higher levels of assets and income can give their children financial benefits that put the kids into a better starting position than people with fewer assets.  My concern is that many CP/QF voices extol the virtues of hard work and saving without ever tallying up the large amount of wealth that is transferred from one generation to the next.   Without that accounting, people can be overly judgmental about how poorer families "just don't work hard enough" - and I have problems with that attitude.

Steven Maxwell posted a two-part testimonial written by a young man who built his own house when he was engaged at age 19.  I'm glad  that he was able to do that - but the main reason he was able to do so was that he received a lot of direct and indirect transfer of assets from his family and friends.  I'm going to pull out the sections that discuss input from other people and do a rough estimate on the amount of asset transfer that occurred. 

I grew up on a dairy farm. My siblings and I helped on the farm a lot, and Dad paid us by giving us portions from the sales of cows or by giving us calves. I used some of this money to buy beef cattle and thus got more funds. One of my brothers and I also had a lawn mowing business, and I tried never to spend money. I lived at home, used my parents’ vehicles, and didn’t buy myself hip clothing, coffee, or gadgets. I had thousands of dollars in savings by the time I got engaged.

• Depending on how the market is doing, a dairy bull calf runs between $50.00 and $150.00.  
• Beef steers do great on left-over dairy cattle feed so the costs of raising the beef steers was pretty negligible for the kid. 
• A grown cow eats around 30 pounds of hay a day; the steer would start out lower and end up higher because the amount of hay eaten is roughly dependent on body mass.  Assuming the steer needs ~30 pounds of hay a day for 5 months out of the year that grass forage isn't available for the two years it takes to mature him, that's 9,000 pounds of hay.  Round bales of hay vary a lot in weight - but I'll give a generous estimate of 1,000 pounds of hay per bale - so he'd need to buy 9 round bales per steer per year.  The price of hay moves around a lot, but $100.00 a bale is a good average.  
• That's $900.000 over two years in feed.
• I doubt the brothers had to buy their own lawn mower for the business to start with.  A walk-behind gas lawn mower runs between $100-$300 dollars while a riding lawn mower runs between $1,000-$5,000.
• Living at home and using his parents' vehicles means that his parents were willing and able to pay for his food, cleaning supplies, health insurance and automotive insurance plus the amount that utilities increased from him living at home.  (I'm assuming he was purchasing his own clothing and work consumables.)  This amount varies a lot by family and geographic location - but that's probably between $500 - $1500 per month of expenses for his parents.

When I got engaged, it was obvious that we’d need a place to live, and it seemed most sensible to build a house. My grandfather owned a number of pieces of farm land, and he offered to give me the land to build a house on. My grandfather got power put in to the property and set up a submersible pump in the well. He also dug a trench with his backhoe to bury the pipes and main wires to the house.

I've decided I would like his grandfather to be my honorary fairy grandfather - because I would really like having a grandfather that can give that amount of assets to a grand kid!

• If Grandpa was handing him a standard 180 acre Midwestern farm, that's around $1.5 million dollars in assets.  More likely, Grandpa was giving him a lot that was "split" off of an active farm.  Agricultural land runs at between $4,000-$7,000 per acre.  
• The cost of bringing a power line onto a plot of land varies quite a bit from utility to utility - but that's between $1,000 - $6,000.
• The cost of a submersible well pump is between $150 -$300 plus labor.
• Backhoe rental for one day: $300-$500 plus labor.

Dad and Grandpa dug a basement with tractors, and then I rented forms for basement walls from the concrete company so we could set them up ourselves and save hiring labor. We put old scrap metal in the forms instead of buying rebar. The company I bought the cement from also sold me a used concrete septic tank! My dad negotiated a good deal on lumber from a building center. I bought whole pallet loads of OSB and agreed not to return any boards from the loads they delivered. For framing the walls, I bought used boards from a man who was tearing down some old buildings. The boards were rough cut and only had four or five usable feet but they were still solid. We nailed these 4’ 2”x 4”s together to make 12’ 4”x 6” studs which were spaced every two feet.

• Cost of bulldozer rental: $500 dollars per day plus labor.
• Rebar costs ~$0.75 a foot.

Good ideas:

• Using scrap metal instead of rebar if they've got it laying around.
• Cutting a deal on lumber and OSB.

Possibly a good idea:

• Saving labor costs by placing basement wall forms - but there's a trade-off of lost wages that we don't have enough information to determine if it was a good idea.
• Re-purposing used lumber to make studs IF the boards were glued as well as nailed AND the author lost no wage earning time to doing this - or counted it as a hobby. 

Don't buy used septic tanks.  It's not worth it to risk polluting your well when a new concrete septic tank costs between $600 - $1,000.  

I got a used water heater from a neighbor, which is still serving us 10 years later without trouble. I bought windows and a used door from another person. My grandpa procured some interior doors that the company he worked for was getting rid of. Some friends of my wife’s family gave us their used (but working!) washer and dryer. I also got a used fridge and stove. Instead of cabinets, I made shelves from some plywood crates I tore apart but eventually I replaced these with normal cabinets.

• I'm assuming that the word "got" means "bought" - so he probably spent around $50.00 each on the water heater, fridge and stove.   
• The used washing machine and dryer is another $100 dollars saved.  
• A cheap interior door retails for $35-$40 dollars so let's give the doors that Grandpa scored a value of $30.00 a piece.

I traded a calf to a carpenter from our church for a couple days of help, and he loaned me a book on general contracting, which was very helpful. We didn’t have high speed internet then, and I don’t recall googling how to do anything. We did all the plumbing ourselves and the wiring too.

Dude, you massively unpaid your carpenter friend if you traded him a $150.00 calf for two days of work.  That's less than $10.00 per hour if he worked for 16 hours across those two days - which is in the lowest 10% of carpenter's hourly wages in the US.   A fair trade would have been two calves for a weekend's work - or a feeder steer for a week's work.

If the general contracting book was helpful, he should have hired an electrician and a plumber.  There are a lot of projects in a house that can be completed by relatively inexperienced people without health and safety issues; electricity and plumbing are NOT in that category. 

On the other hand, if "we" is short-hand for "Dad and Grandfather who have kept a dairy farm running for x years", they were probably okay.

The week before I headed to my wedding, some friends from a few hours away drove up and helped finish mudding and painting the drywall on the main floor. The second story had no inside walls framed yet and no insulation in the roof so we lived on the first floor for a while. When I was gone on my honeymoon, my family laid some flooring and finished getting things livable. The house was only covered with house wrap, but a couple years later I put on siding.

That's a lot of labor costs saved by friends and family. 

I grew up in an older suburb of a medium sized Midwestern town.  There's no way a person could get away with having only house wrap on the outside of a house for years in a more population dense area.  People do not take kindly to having an eyesore like that dragging down property values.  Likewise, I've enjoyed mentally following all the same things that Amos' family has done at my parents' house.  We'd have had the cops called when there were cows, when someone started running excavation equipment out back and especially we started building an entire house my parent's 1/4th an acre of land. 

Why does this matter?  Most CP/QF families don't have the amount of assets available to a multi-generation dairy farm family.  Most CP/QF families don't have fathers who worked as electrical engineers.  Most CP/QF families are raising large families on (ideally) the income of the father alone - but the anti-intellectualism of CP/QF greatly limits the potential income of the men. 

Amos and his family did nothing wrong or anything immoral - but they are not the average CP/QF adherent.

Life with One (1) Medically Complicated Infant: An easy day.

Being a bit over a year into my son's wild and crazy life, his medical needs have dropped down to "baby who needs asthma-control medication and judicious choice of outings during cold and flu season".  IOW, he's so close to being a normal 9 month (adjusted) baby that I feel like I can breathe.

I'd breathe more easily if I hadn't gone back to child hoarding adoption blogs. 

See, I have no idea how many of these families are even pretending to function.   My single medically complex son pushed my skills at organizing, sticking to a schedule, staying calm, ad-libbing, communicating and not losing my mind to the brink.

I didn't home school.  I didn't work outside the home.  I didn't do more than a handful of chores a week.  I didn't cook meals from scratch.  I relied heavily on my husband, my parents and a few family friends to keep our lives running well enough that we could keep my son healthy and growing.

I don't think people get a clear view of what a medically complicated kid looks like from those blogs - so I'm going to outline what I remember doing at various time intervals.

I also feel compelled to point out that my son was much easier than many medically complicated kids.

• The doctors know exactly what is wrong with him.  
• I live 30-60 minutes away from a city with a level 4 NICU (that's the kind that is attached to a pediatrics hospital that can do all sorts of tricky surgeries), a top rated children's hospital that has an out-patient clinic where my son is being monitored by a series of pediatric specialists, and a family doctor who thinks she's the luckiest doctor in the world to get to have my son as a patient.   
• My son weighed between 8-16 pounds so I could move him without assistance and without being likely to injure myself.
• My son is a super-good, mellow baby.  His personality is as easy-going as they come.
• My husband and I learned how to use Jack's oxygen (O2) and feeding tube (NG) easily.
• I'm really good at formulaic paperwork and I find playing phone-tag with insurance companies vaguely enjoyable.   
• My husband makes enough money that we could simply buy a lot of odds and ends that has made our lives more simple while he was working half-time.  
• Most importantly, my parents were on-board and ready to go with helping out with Jack.  

Here we go.  I'm going to start with an "easy" day.  This is any day that does not include a bath, having to redo taping, out-of-the house visits or any in-home therapist visits.

Average Day Schedule with a newborn Jack:  (Jack had issues with severe choking during reflux episodes not associated with feeding so an adult who could do infant CPR had to be with him at all times.)

9am: Wake up.  Get dressed for day. Stretch legs.   Eat breakfast while getting an overview of Nico's time with Jack.

9:30am:  Take over Jack's feeding so Nico can get ready for work.   Say goodbye to Nico when he leaves around 10am.

10am: Get Jack settled into his Rock'N'Play.   Throw in a load of laundry. Tackle one of the weekly duties.   Nap/ down time for me if possible.

11am:  Change over laundry.  Fold yesterday's load.  Give him his dose of Zanac at least 30 minutes before noon.

Noon: Begin a feed with Jack.
Feed routine:
1) Change Jack's diaper (and clothes if needed).  He's got wires on the toe of one foot, two chest leads, one oxygen cannula and a feeding tube.    I always felt like I was trying to put a diaper on an octopus.
2) Put Jack in safe location while I get his bottle out of the fridge.
3) Put warm water in his bottle warmer.   Put bottle in warmer.
4)Look up what medication/vitamin he needs at this feed.  Measure medication and add to formula.
5) Assemble the Dr. Brown's bottle system.
6) Stack pillows on the couch so that I can feed Jack in a left-side lying position without too much discomfort for me.
7) Feed Jack stopping to burp after each ounce.  Each choke, gag or reflux flinch is "one strike".  After three strikes, we need to stop the oral feed and switch to his feeding tube so that he doesn't learn to associate feeding with pain.
8) Finish by feeding tube.

• Put baby in rock'n'play or his crib.
• Get a 10ml syringe, 2 oz syringe, and a length of string.
• Tie the 2oz syringe to the string.  Tie the string to a piece of furniture that will hold the syringe at a constant height of between 6-12 inches above Jack's head.
• Pull the feeding tube out of Jack's onesie. (This was often the hardest part; I swear that kid wrapped the tube around his legs on purpose.
• Attach the 10mL syringe to the feeding tube. Draw out any air that's accumulated in his stomach.  Detach the syringe from the tube and blow the air out.  Repeat until the syringe shows stomach fluid or formula.
• Attach the 2oz syringe to the feeding tube.  
• Hang the 2oz syringe from the string.
• Fill the syringe with 2oz of formula.
• If the tube isn't flowing, use the plunger to push a few milliliters of formula through the tube.  
• Repeat the last two steps until he's finished the bottle.
• Detach the 2oz syringe from the feeding tube.
• Use the 10mL syringe to draw out air as above.
• Cap the feeding tube.

9) Wash up all of the items used during this section.

Feeding Jack takes between 1-2 hours.  Jack's usually pretty tired by the end and often will fall asleep.

1pm: One or both of my parents would come over.  They would finish Jack's feed while I caught an hour to two hour nap.  I'd need to add medication to his 3pm feed if they were staying before I fell asleep.

3pm: Wake up from nap.  If my parents are staying, I do an out of the house errand or exercise.  If not, Jack's ready for his next feed which will last until between 4-5pm.

4pm: Nico comes home.  He goes to sleep for two hours.

5pm: Eat lunch if I haven't done it already.  

6pm: Nico wakes up in time to take over for Jack's 6pm feed.  I go to sleep in the bedroom until 11:30pm.  

9pm: Nico feeds Jack.  He also gives Jack his nebulizer treatment which Jack has strong feelings about.  He catches a nap on the couch where he can hear Jack's alarms.

11:30pm: I wake up and take over Jack for the night shift.  Give Jack Zanac right away in his feeding tube since it is most effective on an empty stomach.

Midnight: Jack never wakes up for this feed - ever.  Since infants aren't really active participants in physical therapy, I do his PT on him after I change his diaper, skip the oral feeding portion and move right to feeding him through the tube.  It takes about 30 minutes to feed by tube only and 15 minutes to change his diaper and do PT when he's asleep.

1am: Work on blog post if I'm not sleepy.  Nap on the couch near Jack's bassinet  where I can hear and respond to his alarms if he chokes if I'm sleepy.

3am: Question all of my life choices; I'm not a night owl.  Play a bit with my wide-awake baby, remember that this isn't going to help him differentiate day and night, and get down to feeding the baby.  

Between 4-5am: Finish feeding Jack.  Fall asleep on couch.

5:30am: Nico wakes up and starts making coffee.  I wake up, mumble "I love you" and go into the bedroom where I can sleep more deeply until 9am.

That was an easy day with one kid and three-four caregivers.  The next post will be on the repeating issues that cause days to go from "easy" to draining.

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Depression - Part Two

In the first post on depression, we looked at some of the decent ideas for surviving depression while being a homeschooling mom like exercising, avoiding caffeine, and following a schedule.  We saw one terrible idea - use OTC progesterone creams. *shudders*

This post is focused on quotes from the chapter that are mediocre to terrible.    Let's jump in:

I discovered that I made it best through a time of depression when I didn't try to analyze what was causing it. It was better to accept my feelings - as Steve would encourage me to do - like a physical ailment to be patiently waited out. The more I ferreted for the causes, the more discouraged and upset I would become.

However, the times I accepted the feelings and said," Lord, I don't like this, but I'm going to focus on you and not on me. I am not going to make any major decisions or search for the cause. I will just wait. If I do that, it will pass with no damage except for feeling down. If I think about being depressed, and talk to Steve about it, it will pull me further down, resulting in wrong thoughts and words." (pg. 99)

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Depression - Part One

This is the second to last post on Teri Maxwell's "Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit".  She has an entire chapter dedicated to discussing her personal struggles with depression and strategies that worked for her.  I've decided to divide the chapter into two posts.  This post is about non-toxic strategies.  The last post will be about toxic strategies.

Let's dive in at the beginning of the chapter.

In one of Steve's monthly home school in articles for dads ( www.titus 2.com; July 2000), he mentioned that my bouts of depression were part of the reason we decided, at one point, to limit our family size. We were amazed at how many people emailed us, after that one sentence in his article, to ask how we dealt with the problem of depression. (pg. 95)

Wow.  I've discussed tangentially my concerns about mental health issues in CP/QF families before - but the fact that the Maxwells' had a wave of emails in response to a single sentence mention of Teri's struggle with depression is sobering.  In the wider US society, there is still lingering stigma about mental health issues - although lessened for the "acceptable" illnesses of depression and anxiety.   By comparison to CP/QF society, the rest of the US lives in a wonderland - a land where medical and psychological remedies exist to lessen the burden of mental illness.  In CP/QF land, all of the asinine assumptions about mental illness exist along with a heap of guilt because if a person REALLY loved God, they wouldn't have mental illness.  (If my options for reasons I have a mental illness is a) not enough faith or b) demonic possession, I think I'd pick the demonic possession.  The fact I'm not entirely to blame for the demon picking on me could be comforting.)

It is only been this 8 years since the Lord has given me freedom from the at times devastating depression from which I had struggled. It was usually worse during the year I nursed a baby. My pain through those difficult years was very real and is not that distant. I can fully understand the concerned feelings of a mom who is struggling with times of depression and the worry of her husband, because that was my experience too. (pg 95-96)

That's a classic description of postpartum depression; it begins within the year after a child is born and can be worsened by the hormonal changes that accompany lactation.   During the years (late 1970's through the late 1990's) that Teri Maxwell was having children, doctors tended to take an overly hard line against the use of anti-depressants during pregnancy and lactation.  Now, doctors have realized that use of most SSRIs during pregnancy has no increased risk of birth defects in the infants while decreased depression symptoms lead to better pregnancy outcomes since the mother is more likely to seek prenatal care and take better care of herself during pregnancy.  In a similar vein, doctors have found that the amount of most SSRIs found in breast milk is nearly none. 

Personally, I remained on an SSRI during my pregnancy with my son and increased the dose slightly after he was born prematurely.  I checked with the neonatal staff and they said that there are very few drugs that are incompatible with breastfeeding - and most of those are contraindicated during pregnancy so I had no reason to worry.

Postpartum depression has been shown to be very treatable through psychological therapy methods as well.  I see a therapist and was extremely grateful for her support during my son's early days.

We discovered that there were very real hormonal imbalances that affected my emotions. I would do everything I could to deny this, but it was obvious to everyone except me. What I could normally handle one day would send me to tears another day. To combat this physical imbalance, I used a natural progesterone cream for a time. In addition, I followed a vitamin regimen suggested by our naturopathic doctor friend. I eliminated caffeine as well. (pg. 97)

Here's my PSA for the week: do NOT use cosmetic creams that contain progesterone - EVER. 

There is a terrifying loophole I learned about while doing background research for this post: as long as a skin preparation is for "cosmetic" purposes, the FDA cannot screen it as it would a skin preparation for "medical purposes".    This means that a cream may contain less progesterone than is advertised - or more.   

Progesterone passes through the skin with relative ease; it has a non-polar structure that is soluble in the lipids that make up the skin.  CP/QF folk already argue that hormonal birth control is evil - and horrible for women's health.  Well, while I was pumping for my son I was on Nora-Be as a birth control method.  It contains a daily oral dose of 0.35 mg of progestin.  For the life of me, I can't remember if Nora-Be was a 21 active day or 28 active day pill - but I received either 7.35 mg or 9.8 mg of progestin per cycle.    Many of the skin creams advertise that they contain 445 mg of progesterone in 2 oz.  Assuming 25% of the progesterone in the cream makes it into the blood stream (which is very conservative), a woman would need to make that 2 oz of cream last for 12 months to keep her hormonal exposure under the amount in a mini-pill like Nora-Be. 

If you think you have a hormonal imbalance that needs to be treated, you need to be seeing an MD, DO, PA, or FNP on a regular basis.

Thankfully, she does have some recommendations that are sane:

Daily exercise was critical at this time. I know daily exercise sounds impossible to an already depressed, overwhelmed, terribly tired mom. My walks were about the only time I was away from home. When I began to feel myself spiraling down, getting out would be the single thing that would change the course of my emotions. Just being away from the environment I was struggling with for a short period each day, plus the effect of the exercise itself, was very helpful (pg. 97-98)

Exercise is huge for my personal sanity.  When Spawn first came home from the NICU, he was a mellow baby who had complicated medical needs.  Going for a walk every day kept me sane.  I needed some time out of the house where I could be away from listening for alarms while scheduling appointments, doing physical therapy with him or caring for him or his equipment.  That mental break boosted the stress-relieving and mood-lightening effects that exercise has for me - plus being outside is very calming for me.

What I was more struck by is how much Teri Maxwell struggled with the entire concept of a SAHM who home schooled to boot.  She doesn't describe struggling with herself nearly as often as she describes struggling with the environment or feelings produced by her environment - and that's a sad commentary on what life must have been like for her.

Being tired was sure to put me off balance. I am a light sleeper, often being awakened in the night by a noise or perhaps the need to nurse a baby. After that, I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. For 8 years now, I have worn earplugs when I sleep. They have transformed my nights! I thought not being able to sleep was just part of my physical makeup. Not so! Since I began wearing earplugs, I hardly ever have a sleepless night. Steve became the "ears" for our family. I know he will wake me up if the children need me.(Earplugs may not be an option for a mom whose husband can't do this.) (pg. 98)

I have been wearing earplugs for around 15 years now and I sleep much better with them.  Some people are simply wired to respond strongly to noises in the night.  Having earplugs in mutes out a lot of the repetitive noises in the night like the furnace kicking on or the random sounds of cars driving by at night while still letting high pitched noises like fire alarms and human voices make it through.

At the risk of being overly nit-picky, her youngest child was 4 or 5 when this book was written.  Little Mary was more than capable of waking her mom up by shaking her shoulder if she needed her to wake up.  Likewise, if my son is really upset at night - like starts to cry loudly instead of sleep whimpers - I can hear him through my earplugs.

I have another revolutionary idea as well: Steve can deal with most -if not all - of the family's needs at night if he wakes up!  Crazy!

I think if depression-prone moms could figure out a way to work on even a skeleton of a schedule, it would help. I have had moms write to me that when they are depressed, brain-dead, or just overwhelmed, their schedule directed them through the day. This was especially helpful because they couldn't make decisions themselves. If you have somewhat of a schedule in place, despite tiredness or feelings, many things would be accomplished because that is the easiest path to take - just do what the schedule says! Without my schedule on those bad days, I would have simply sat and cried. That would have made everything even worse because then I would have been a day behind! In addition, you can let your schedule direct your children when you don't have the energy to keep up with what you wish you would like to be doing. At least they are accomplishing things rather than just undoing everything. (pgs. 102-103)

Schedules have helped me when I was depressed - but I tend to have an internal schedule naturally when I am not depressed.  Trying to institute a schedule while depressed or overwhelmed by external events may work - but it should be undertaken slowly and gently.  Add one item a day like "Eat breakfast" or "Go for a walk".   This is NOT a good time to purchase the Maxwell's "Managers of Their Home" system and try it for the first time.

I feel bad that Teri Maxwell cannot articulate how angry she felt being at home with her kids.  Oh, she has a chapter devoted to anger - but she never fully owns that being a homeschooling SAHM drove her batty.  Instead, it slips out in bits and smidgens like when she describes how her kids just destroy everything when left unscheduled.....

The last post in this series will be about some spiritual methods of combating depression that sound completely worthless to me.   The next book to be reviewed will be her husband's book "Preparing Sons to Be Single-Income Earners" - in which you can help me try to figure out what kind of career path Steve Maxwell has had.....

Homeschooling With a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Help at Home from Husband

In the two previous posts on "Homeschooling With a Meek and Quiet Spirit" by Terri Maxwell, she's outlined how feeling overwhelmed by doing all the cleaning, cooking, laundry and homeschooling is the fault of your mother for not teaching you how to keep a home while leading you to expecting free time. 

Personally, my solution to this problem is two-fold.  First, I'm planning to let paid educational professional educate my kids - while I educate other people's kids.  I get the irony - but I do best with secondary and post-secondary students learning science so my son will get a much more enjoyable and well rounded education from men and women who want to teach kids.  Second, my husband helps out with our son before he goes to work and in the evenings when he is home along with helping out with home chores.

I can't even pretend I've created a revolutionary solution here; I'm modeling what my parents did when we were young.  Alas, I've apparently been lead horribly astray in expecting that my husband would be an active participant in our family life.

I wonder how the scenario causes you to feel. You've been busy all day homeschooling, getting some laundry done, had an hour of cleaning, made all the meals, and now dinner is over. Your husband heads for his easy chair in the living room and kicks back with the newspaper, while you head to the kitchen to clean up after dinner.(pg. 90)

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit: It's Your Mom's Fault

This posts links with the next two posts to discuss Teri Maxwell's idea of why so many homeschooling mothers feel overwhelmed, overworked and underappreciated.  A quick paraphrase is "It's your mother's fault you feel like chores are never ending while never having any free time and expecting help from your husband."

This post covers how previous generations of mothers failed to teach their daughters how to keep a home.  There is also a hidden agenda to justify why children - especially daughters - should shoulder lots of domestic responsibilities without their mother feeling guilty.

The first group of guilty mothers stayed home - but sent their kids to school! *gasps in mock horror*

Many homeschooling moms were raised in homes where their mothers were home all day while the children went away to school. If our moms wanted to, they had six or more hours in a day to devote to house cleaning, laundry, and organizing. Perhaps because they stayed home, having time to do lots of housework, they were of the "children are only children once" philosophy. This often meant they didn't require very much of us as far as chores and responsibilities were concerned. (pg. 87)

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!

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit - Magical Hubands

I like my husband.  He's a sweet, caring man who is bright and a good listener.  We suit each other well.  I don't like change much - so his love of new experiences pushes me out of my comfort zone.  He struggles with planning and organization outside of his job - so my skills in keeping our life organized makes our home pleasant place to live.  Most importantly, we enjoy each other's company and know how to support each other during hard times.

On the other hand,  neither of us abdicates responsibility entirely to the other person.  I don't ask my husband for input on how I handle grocery shopping or when to schedule Jack's medical appointments; that's my realm of expertise.  Likewise, my husband doesn't expect me to tell him how to fix the well; he's been doing that since he was a teen and I honestly have no experience in that area.

With that background, I hope you understand why the next quote from "Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit" scared the snot out of me:

Instead of fearing you are failing in an aspect of your homeschooling, trust that if you are truly failing, your husband will become aware of it and point it out. (pg. 54)

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Talking with Your Husband

Communication is critical in a marriage. 

My husband and I have been dealt some tough times since we've been together.  We've stayed together because we are able to communicate our feelings, needs and desires to each other. 

This section of Teri Maxwell's "Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit" bothers me because she teaches that homeschooling mothers should lie through omission to their husbands:

It is most likely when a Christian family begins to homeschool that both the husband and wife are in agreement that this is the Lord's direction for the family.  When homeschool becomes difficult, I encourage you, Mom,  never to consider quitting unless your husband is the one who says you are to do so.

Keep in mind: it is entirely possible that a loving husband, one who does not want his wife to "suffer," might suggest she quit homeschooling even though he wishes her to continue. This will usually be the result of the wife having regularly complained about her struggles, fears, and failures. Eventually, despite his heart's desire, the husband will decide that homeschooling is just too much for his wife. Therefore, consider well the possible consequences of not developing a meek and quiet spirit. (pg. 53)

Homeschooling with a Meek and Quiet Spirit: Phonics Frenzy

This section came from a chapter on anxiety. 

Mrs. Maxwell's premise is that telling others what to do is anxiety-provoking while following orders is anxiety relieving. 

I don't agree with the premise at all. 

I never feel particularly anxious when I tell others what to do because I give orders when I believe that I have information that will be helpful to accomplishing a task.  When I was helping with an autumn olive removal work crew, I gave some suggestions on how we could use the tools and people available to remove the most plants as possible in a short time period.   On the other side, I get nervous when someone tells me to do something that doesn't seem like it will work out well.

Mrs. Maxwell takes this questionable premise and adds a religious twist:

In a very similar way, when I can view myself as simply following the Lord's orders, then I don't have to own the responsibility for the outcome. When this is true, many of the fears and worries vanish. (pg. 49)

*blinks*

This is a strangely un-Biblical idea - and certainly un-Christian.  Does her Bible have Matthew 25? You know - the wise and foolish bridesmaids? The parable of the talents?  Dividing the sheep and goats?   The Bible makes it's pretty clear that Christians are expected to make choices and live with the consequences.

After laying this warped framework out, she dives into how it plays out in a homeschool setting.

It may be that you have begun your six-year-old on a phonics program, but it is going poorly at best. You start to worry that the phonics program was not a wise investment, or that your child has some kind of learning disability. How can you regain a meek and quiet spirit in this situation? You can take your thoughts captive and remember several things.

First, you prayed about your choice of a phonics program, and the Lord led you to this one. Secondly, much is learned in homeschooling aside from the actual targeted "academics." Perhaps the Lord has in mind some other learning through this problem. (pg. 49)

*rubs head*
Let's attack this from an educational standpoint where we accept that the goal is to teach the six-year old phonics first and see if that solves the problem before requesting Divine intervention.

With that goal, the cost of the investment is moot unless the program is completely inflexible.  (Hint: no program is completely inflexible because 30% of teaching is learning how to adapt materials to fit the students.)

Next, I brainstormed all the reason that a phonics program may not be doing well.  I ordered them from "most common" to "least common" based on my experience teaching HS students.  (I would love feedback from people on their experiences!)

• The teacher is learning the new program.
• The student is still figuring out the new program.
• The program's methods are a poor fit for the student who is progressing normally.
• The program-student interface is fine but teacher expectations are too high.
• The student is not developmentally ready for phonics.
• The student has a learning disability.

Honestly, if the program has just begun, the best solution for the parent-teacher to spend more time to get comfortable with the program while observing their kid's response to the program.  Give the program at least 10 contact hours (that would be about 2 weeks in traditional schools) to let the newness wear off before making any decisions.

If progress is still slow, try and adapt an activity.  Maybe the kid needs something more active like making the sound of the day out of play-dough or tracing it in shaving cream.  Grab a dry-erase marker and do the lesson on a window or mirror.  Pull out the Scrabble tiles and see how many words - real and imaginary - that the student can make with that sound.  Give creative options at least 5 contact hours to work.

Still not working?  Your kid may not be ready for phonics yet.  I'm assuming that the kid has mastered the sounds of the alphabet for both the capital and lower-case letters and can sight-read some common words.  If not, the program may be too advanced for your six-year old - and six is a bit young for detailed phonics lessons.  Keep working on basic reading and try again in a month or two.  (The freedom to focus instruction exactly to the student the biggest benefit of homeschooling, IMHO.  The biggest drawback is that the parent-teacher would need to track 4 subject areas multiplied by the number of kids they have...that adds up quick!)

Learning disabilities are more common than many people think - but the diagnosis should be done by a trained educational professional.  The local or regional school district employs professionals who do this for a living.  If you think your student has a learning disability, consider strongly re-enrolling the student in public schools for diagnosis purposes at least.   (Most public school teachers have a story about a home schooled student who was re-enrolled because the parent-teacher decided slow progress in an area was due to a learning disability...except that the slow progress was remedied in a classroom without special education services. The parent had been doing everything right - the kid simply performed better in a setting away from home.)

Regarding God's Plan - maybe the lesson is to be humble in regards to the decisions we make or to be diligent in carrying out the responsibilities shouldered by the parent-teacher.  

Maybe this is an opportunity for your child to learn to persevere through something that doesn't come easily for him. It could be that this is a time for you to develop the added patience while you gently and sweetly work with your child every day, even though the progress isn't visible. Rather than giving in to fear and worry, spend time with the Lord and your husband discerning if there are "bigger" learning projects in this trial that a 6 year old who isn't "getting it". Face your concerns with a meek and quiet spirit! (pg. 49-50)

Perseverance is an excellent "soft" skill to cultivate in children - but the goal that the child is expected to reach must be reasonable or else the child learns that hard work leads to nothing but frustration and despair.

Likewise, teachers must be patient and capable of regulating their own emotions.  They also have to judge the capacity of a student to learn the material.  I co-taught Chemistry with a certified special education teacher for two years; it was one of the best experiences of my teaching career.  I had one student who has a documented severe learning disability in reading combined with a mild cognitive issue.  Teaching him to find information on the Periodic Table took a great deal of patience and gentle humor to keep his spirits up -and it was amazing to see his pride when he mastered that skill. 

Now, I still possessed patience and humor when the class reached balancing equations - plus I had a strong relationship with the student - but that task proved to be beyond his capability.   He tried hard, I tried hard, my co-teacher worked like a demon - but balancing required a level of abstract thinking that was a step too far for the student.  We let that concept go and created a chemistry-based skill that was achievable for him.

Mrs. Maxwell has a strange faith in her husband's ability to suss out the problems in her home school from afar.  This theme reappears later in the book - but how does that work?  Mr. Maxwell was working full-time as an electrical engineer; he wasn't observing the dynamics in the school or the way his children were learning.  I'm sure he could give excellent emotional support but I'd be a bit leary of substituting a soft skill goal in lieu of learning phonics.

Oh, well.  I'm watching my son amuse himself on the floor while I write this.  He's playing with a plastic toy and he seems to be in the very first stages of using a pincer grasp.  When he was 4 months adjusted, I took a toy off his play-gym that was a plastic maze that had beads that could be maneuvered along the lines of plastic.  I did that because he would reach out for the beads with his fully extended fingers,  try to move the beads with his rigid fingers, fail repeatedly and begin to cry/scream with frustration.  Rather than face 5 months of a frustrated infant, I put the toy away.   Now that he's approaching readiness at 7.5 months adjusted, I'm going to put the toy back.  The toy might be a little frustrating now - but a little frustration is manageable.

ETA: Little guy is off oxygen 24/7 now - and has started hard-core rolling.  Time to child-proof everything.

Homeschooling With A Meek And Quiet Spirit: Mom's Reaction to Dawdling

In traditional schools, students arrive in a teacher's classroom with a variety of experiences, beliefs and aptitudes.  Building relationships with 100 students a semester takes practice and patience - but teachers benefit by learning that students bring unbelievably many different paths to success.  No two students are alike - and woe betides the teacher who makes too strong of comparisons.

Home schooling parents, on the other hand, have a much more limited group of kids to base their experiences on.  Deprived of a student teaching experience as well as classroom experience, they are limited to comparisons of their children to each other as well as close relatives and any other homeschool families they know well.

This difference in breadth of experience can lead to homeschooling parents labeling their child as having problematic behavior when the kid is behaving in an age-appropriate manner - but is perhaps developing a tad more slowly than an older sibling or has a higher activity level.

This example cropped up in Mrs. Maxwell's book:

"One of my children is much slower in his learning than the others have been. This son is my dawdler as well. When he sits down to do his school work,  he is immediately up to sharpen his pencil, pat the dog on the way, washes his hands for good measure, checks out what his sister is doing at the piano, and finally hops back to his work. My ingrained reaction is frustration and irritation. This one child takes so much more of my time and energy than the others. I am discouraged because of the slow progress we make in areas he is struggling with. Can you see my wrong thinking and focus? Unfortunately, my eyes are on myself. My spirit is not quiet. If it were, I would be content with the way God made this child, and there would be no turbulence inside me." (pg. 18-19)

Truthfully, "slower" isn't a diagnostic term in education.  There is a wide amount of variation between students when acquiring new skills.  When doing genetic problems in high school, some students reached mastery after a single day of practice.  Others took over a week of exposure before reaching mastery.  Did I worry about the students who were five times "slower" than the early mastery students?  No, as long as they were showing forward progress and didn't seem discouraged, they would get to mastery soon enough.

Next, let's discuss "dawdling" for a moment.  Humans have a wide continuum of levels of attention and focus to a task on hand.   Some people have attention that drifts when any new stimulus appears; the other extreme is nearly unbreakable focus on a single task.  Equally importantly, few students have levels of attention that exactly match the teacher's attention.  Yup, Mrs. Maxwell's son's attention drifts more than hers does; after all, she can list exactly what he did during a time period when he probably can't.  The difference doesn't mean that a problem exists - just that humans are not identical copies of their parents.

I also am a highly focused person - but I found that I was a much more effective teacher when I stopped wasting emotional energy on trying to get students to be on-task every moment of the class period.   The truth is that Mrs. Maxwell's son gets to make choices about how he uses his homeschooling time and lives with the consequences of those choices.  Mrs. Maxwell could save herself a lot of irritation and frustration by deciding what the consequences of not being on-task during school time are and enforcing those consequences calmly.  Most homeschooling kids schedules have a good size block of free-play time between the end of quiet time/nap and dinner/chores.  Personally, I'd let the kid keep 30-60 minutes of that free time to blow off some steam, but then the kid would be expected to continue working for the rest of the play time until he finished the assignment.  If he still was off-task, he'd have to continue working during a portion of evening play time. (I need to put a caveat here: this assumes that the assignment is age-appropriate, that the student understands how to do the assignment, and that I created an area that had an appropriate atmosphere for studying.  If any of these issues exist, forcing the student to spend more time spinning his or her wheels is an exercise in insanity building.)  My rationale for doing this is that many excellent home school graduates mention struggling with time management and completing tasks on a schedule when they move on to college.

As I was writing this post, I realized my main annoyance with that quote: good teachers are focused on positive academic and personal outcomes for their students while Mrs. Maxwell's main goal is maximizing her spiritual growth.   I've spent my time figuring out how to teach her son to modulate his attention; she's spent her time figuring out how to ignore her.

I probably would have forgotten that quote if Mrs. Maxwell hadn't decided to reference it much later in the book:

Remember my son who takes so much of my time and energy for his home schooling? It is very easy for me to have a frustrated tone in my voice when I am interacting with him. The Lord will convict me of this. When I respond with worldly sorrow, here is how my thinking goes, "This child is just more than I can handle patiently. I am not cut out for this task. I have prayed for patience. I have worked on being meek with him, but I keep failing over and over." My whole focus is on me. I have no real concern for this particular sin in my life. My sorrow is worldly because it wants to be right and good on its own efforts. (pg. 51)

Notice that Mrs. Maxwell conflates being honest in her thoughts with a form of sin.  Her thoughts are completely clear and lucid.  She's not being patient with her son.  She's not well-prepared or educated for teaching.  She's not patient or meek and she's failing repeatedly. 

The problem is that she fails to take the next logical step of "What do I need to change to improve my teaching skills with my son?"  Instead, she becomes more self-centered and self-involved by prioritizing her "worldly sin" over learning how to teach.

We do agree on one thing: Mrs. Maxwell's focus is entirely on herself - not her son.

The use of the verb "to convict" is a pet peeve of mine - see endnote 1.

"This is how I see godly sorrow handling the same situation, "Lord, you have said that man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that You desire. You have also said that love is patient and kind. I have not been obedient to You. Your fruit is not showing forth in my son. I am wrong, Lord. Please forgive me. Thank you for your forgiveness and working in my life. I submit to You and ask You to continue to teach me your ways." Then I quickly confess my wrong attitudes and tone of voice to my son and ask his forgiveness." (pgs. 51-52) 

See endnote two for a rant about capitalization in CP/QF prayers.

This is an excellent example of the belief that fixing the sin of one person can fix a completely unrelated problem in a different person.   Mrs. Maxwell implies that her son is progressing slowly in academics and dawdles because Mrs. Maxwell is impatient with him.   

That's reversing cause and effect. 

More problematically, Mrs. Maxwell denies any autonomous effort or action by her son.  Her son initiates behaviors - he works on his assignments, he wanders the house, he pets the dog, he checks in on his sister.  Her son controls all of those actions.  He's not a puppet who responds solely to the amount of meekness she shows in her life.  Heck, he may be completely unaware of how annoying she finds his behavior since he's one kid in a household of 8 kids and two adults.  Perhaps he's learned that being off-task is a consistent way to get her attention since negative attention is better than being overlooked.

I'm shocked at how many times Mrs. Maxwell can realize that her method of doing something isn't working - and then double down on making the solution all about her needs and wants.

Teaching is not about the needs of the teacher but the needs of the student.


1) CP/QF writers' use of the verb "to convict" is irritating.

There are two meanings of the noun "conviction".

• having been found guilty of breaking a criminal law 
• a strongly held belief or opinion

The verb "to convict" only refers to the legal proceedings meaning - not the act of having a strong belief or opinion. 

The paragraph would make much more sense if she stated that "God has shown me the truth of this conviction" etc. 

2) When capitalizing prayers, authors and editors need to chose if the pronoun "you" will be capitalized when describing Jesus/God and if possessive pronouns referencing God will be capitalized.   I learned to capitalize both - but I accept any combination as valid as long as it is uniform in a work.  In the prayer above, both types of capitalization are used for "you" and the possessive pronouns are all over the place in other sections of the book.