Homeschooling is About Cultivating Relationship
Supermom?
I recently read an article in a parenting magazine about how parents today spend too much time directly attending to our kids and trying to be super-parents, and it's wearing us out. How in the past, parents could send their kids out to play and not see them until dinner time. And I got this flash of understanding as to why so many parents can't understand why in the world I would choose to homeschool. Why they often feel slightly threatened by my homeschooling. They think that by homeschooling I am spending even MORE focused attention on my kids, and they are already tapped out with the homework-driving-to-practice-school-drop-off-plus-quality-time rigamarole. How do I possibly do that plus teach them and be with them ALL DAY LONG???
I don't.
Learning Through Living
What people don't realize is that homeschool is not business-as-mainstream-usual plus being their teacher all day. The moms (and dads) who try that approach burn out pretty much instantly. We mostly just spend time living in each others' space and learning about the world together. This article I read didn't count time "around" your kids, like when they are reading or on the computer, or time at meals. That is the majority of my time, spent "around" my kids. They play together, they play outside, they play computer games, we go to activities like homeschool skate and homeschool day at the Botanic Gardens, where I talk with my friends and our kids run around (or skate, as the case may be). I can whip out the microscope and we can look at pond water samples and look up the creatures we find. We do chores. We read books.
It's About Connection
A non homeschooler reading this is probably thinking: "How is that homeschooling? How is that learning anything?" I know my kids are learning because I have a relationship with them where I get to talk about all the things they are thinking and wondering. I get to see them drawing pictures, I hear them throwing fun twists into their imaginative play that they picked up from somewhere. I can hear their vocabulary grow. I see them doing math when we cook, garden, or shop. I don't need to organize lesson plans, usually, because we humans learn by living. I get to see it used, explored, and developed. And I don't need to test them because all that learning gets used all the time, and through my connection with my kids, I see it. The key here is connection, rather than "hours spent" or some other external measure of "efficacy" or "goodness" or "success." It's just about connection. It's about creating meaningful relationships in and outside the home.
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