You’ve seen them. The large, immaculately dressed, smiling, home school families on the covers of various home school magazines. Who wouldn’t want to home school if the result is such happy, beautiful, respectful and intelligent children.
Years ago, I’m talking in the previous century, one of the magazines had a regular column where families like yours and mine would write up a little piece describing a typical day at their house. I pored over these articles when I first started home schooling. I wanted to see how my typical day stacked up against other home school families. I became frustrated, wondering why my family did not seem to be as excellent as these families.
The problem was that no one wanted to share the truly normal, mundane day in their lives. They all seemed to choose the most activity filled day that presented their family as super industrious, super academic, super hospitable, super athletic and just an all around super family. After reading these articles over a period of several issues, I began to feel like we were anything but super. We didn’t rise at 5:00 AM to milk the cow and feed chickens, exercise and do all our chores before eating a full breakfast that had been prepared the previous night, fully dressed and ready to begin our school day at 7:30. We didn’t spend the afternoon building teepees or sewing costumes for the play all the children had lead roles in. I began to look at our feeble attempts at being the perfect home school family and learned a very important thing. We are not perfect. No one is perfect. While I don’t doubt that these families were industrious, athletic, hospitable, and academic geniuses, I don’t believe that any of these families could keep the kind of schedule they were sharing with us everyday. Something has to give.
Once I gave myself permission to be less than perfect, I relaxed, which caused everyone else to relax. Trying to do what I perceived, based on what others were doing, to be the right way to do things just didn’t work. We do not live on a farm. We are city folks and we do city folk things. Having a picture perfect house is not high on our priority list so we don’t always get chores done before we start school. We don’t always have a balanced meal and the kids always grab whatever is in the kitchen for breakfast. We attempt to keep things reasonably clean, have a healthy amount of outside activities and to educate our children the best way possible.
As we officially start our 2014/2015 school year, I need to remember what I learned many years ago. This is our 23rd year of home schooling. Each year, I struggle to maintain the proper balance between outside activities and home bound activities, between serving those outside the family and serving each other in our family, between requiring the children to excel in what I think they need and allowing them excel in what holds their interest.
You would think this year would be easy. We just have two boys at home. The four older boys are out on their own with their own families or furthering their education in college. In some ways, things are going to be a lot easier. For the first time in several years (could it be 14?), I don’t have a high school aged child. While home schooling a high school student is not difficult, it does require some extra attention that the younger years don’t demand. I plan to take advantage of this one year of freedom from high school and enjoy just learning along with my boys whatever we have chosen to learn.
We won’t be the perfect home school family I read about in those magazines. We’ll just be doing what needs to be done and hopefully have some time to relax and enjoy whatever interesting things may come our way.
Wonderful post, full of truth. I remember those “Day in the life of our homeschool” articles. They probably were the least helpful part of that magazine. I remember one of those, where the parents had their boys wearing slacks, shirts and ties everyday.
You are a “perfectly” wise mom, home schooling or other wise. Great article. I STILL need to take to heart that it is ok to not be perfect in the eyes of the world. Thanks, Diana.