Chapter 1
That’s Homeschooling . . . Right?
Matching outfits, polite toddlers, award-winning students, fifteen-passenger vans, and family Web sites.
It is easy to think homeschooling families are “perfect,” but what
if you want to homeschool and your family isn’t perfect? What if you’re already homeschooling and there are days when you aren’tsure if what you did actually qualifies as “educational hours” under your state’s requirements? A typical day includes a trip to the store
in the same car you had when you met your husband in college, and
you realize just as you enter the store that one of your children isn’twearing shoes, and then your toddler has a meltdown the moment
you run into your critical neighbor in the produce aisle. If your
family did have a Web site, it would look more like homeschoolingwith
The Three Stooges
than
Leave It to Beaver
.With the pressures placed on homeschoolers to be perfect andthe commitment required to successfully teach a child at home, it’s
no wonder many families throw in the towel before they have an
12
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Homeschooling for the Rest of Us
opportunity to develop their own rhythm or experience the benefits
of teaching at home.Frequently, information for homeschoolers or those consider-
ing homeschooling concentrates on perfect families, perfect chil-
dren, perfect curricula, and even perfect schedules. Or at least they
appear perfect. Although this type of material
is appealing (who doesn’t want to be perfect?),it’s impractical for the average household. Evenif perfection could be achieved, what’s the costto your sanity?
Magazines tell homeschoolers to relax, yet
they consistently have photos of families in hand-
made matching clothes that the sixteen-year-olddaughter designed when she wasn’t volunteering
at the local hospice center.
Books present one extreme viewpoint or another: If people
don’t homeschool, it’s a sin. Anyone interested in homeschooling
for religious reasons is a fanatic. If you simply follow the suggestions
in the book, it will fix all your problems.
Moreover, as society places pressure on homeschoolers to be per-
fect, media reports can perpetuate myths about how homeschooling
is harmful for children. They tell stories of homeschooled studentswho have been locked away from society and are abused. Yet many
of these stories are unfounded and involve truancy cases rather than
actual homeschoolers. Homeschoolers are also portrayed as ultra-intelligent freaks that have been drilled by obsessive parents livingout their academic-achievement fantasies through their children.
At the other end of the spectrum, we see on TV how the Duggars,
a homeschooling family with eighteen children (at last count), livean idealistic, debt-free, non-voice-raising, godly child-training lifein Arkansas. I have great respect for any family who seems to have
We are a new home-school family. The first half of the year was difficult. Ididn’t know what kind of ahomeschooler I was tryingto be and I was impatientto learn the “right way of homeschooling” for my chil-dren. There is often no “rightway,” but just a constantsearch for a better way.
—Tamiko C.,British Columbia
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Homeschooling for the Rest of Us
An excerpt from Homeschooling for the Rest of Us: How Your One-of-a-Kind Family Can Make Homeschooling and Real Life Work, by Sonya Haskins, published by Bethany House Publishers.
It's time to break a myth: Homeschooling families… (More)
It's time to break a myth: Homeschooling families… (More)
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