You see, I am a homeschooling mom of four. I have been homeschooling children for 15 years. Though I am by no means an expert in the field, I do consider myself an expert in the dangers, mostly because I fell into the dangerous home school traps and wallowed in them for years.
Talk to just about any home school mom and you will quickly learn some of the benefits of educating your child at home. They probably also have some good come-backs to combat the dangers of homeschooling that you hear about from those that do not home school. But you seldom will hear us moms talk about the dangers from within. So today I'm gonna just be frank with you...homeschooling can be DANGEROUS!! It can be dangerous to your children, to your spouse and to yourself.
Danger #1 Affection Affliction
Victim: Spouse
This danger will effect not only your spouse, but your children and yourself as well. You see, getting focused on homeschooling is easy. Open up Pinterest or go to a book/curriculum fair and you have entered the danger zone!
There are soooo many totally cool and amazing ideas and supplies out there for us that sometimes it occupies too much space in our brains and we start to leave out someone.....that someone is usually your spouse. I mean, you are there day in and day out planning, teaching, prepping, researching, and it is sooo easy to let one day just melt into another and then BAM!!! You start to neglect the needs and desires of the one you were created to share life with.
There are a few things that will help here. First, and don't roll your eyes at me, but stop everything when your spouse comes in the door. Better yet, take about 30 minutes before he gets home to calm everyone down and call upon the Lord to change your mindset from one of teaching and mothering to being a wife and a lover...Yup, you heard me LOVER!!! :) (I'm not gonna write on it, but you can't neglect that part either!!)
Also throw in a weekly date night. It does not have to be anything fancy...you don't even have to leave the house. Sometimes we just are not in a stage in our life that we can leave. So have a nice dinner after the kids are asleep, or read the Bible together. If you can get out but you don't have the money to do much, just go to Sonic and grab drinks and talk in the car!!
And last but definitely not least...pray together. There was a study done that shows that only 7% of couples that pray together have serious thoughts of divorce. This should be the very first thing you implement in your day to protect your family from danger #1!!
Danger #2 Drill Sergeant Drain
Victim: Children
Okay, we all know the dangers of not schooling....you don't learn. Whether you unschool, classically school, World Views, or co-op dues, we all know that in some form or fashion we need to teach them. But when you get in a group of moms and they are throwing out scary words like Latin, Logic, Calculus, and Pythagorean you might start to feel like you don't do enough.
Then comes the dreaded....family meeting to discuss curriculum! You drop it, you add it, you change it, you rearrange it and little by little your day goes from ending around 1 to ending around 6 or 7 because you are trying to meet some expectation that you have put on yourself. And if you really want to be honest, those moms that throw out the scary words are most likely only covering those subjects 50% of the time. I know....I was one!!
The danger here for your children is that you slowly, yet surely begin to drain the fun out of learning! You go from hands-on projects and field trips to more and more sit at your desk work and any chance your child ever had of actually enjoying chemistry and Algebra II drains right along with it. And we wonder why our high school students turn into stressed-out, brain-drain messes!! We take subjects like math that show us examples of God's glory in the form of earthly patterns and we wrap it up and present it like 30 problems a day 5 days a week followed by a test!!
Don't compare your schooling to anyone else's. You follow the Lord's lead! And just because something isn't working the way you think it should or someone else thinks it should doesn't mean you are wrong!! The absolute best way to plan your curriculum and school year is by spending more time praying about it than you do researching curriculum's, walking around book fairs and talking to other mom's about it.
God knows what your year will hold, what your schedule will look like and which ways your child learns best for each subject. He wants to reveal Himself to our children through His creation so don't you think He will guide you in the best way to do that?
Now, don't go all hater on me thinking I'm saying don't talk about it or go to book fairs! I AM saying that if you are going to walk around a book fair for 5 hours thinking and looking at stuff for next year, ya might want to pray about it for at least that long. God kinda rocks at giving good guidance!!
Danger #3 Losing It All
Victim: The entire family
The final danger of homeschooling is the biggest and most threatening. It is also the one that will sneak up on you and suddenly you have grown children and you realize you have lost it all. I want to introduce it to you with cold, hard facts....
In high school let's assume you spend 2 hours a day on math including homework. In a 36 week school year you will spend a total of 360 hours a year on math. If you calculate the time you study math throughout high school it will be upwards of 1440 hours.
Now, do you think most students who have 1440 hours in math are equipped to take on their adult life math situations? What about coming up against someone who is passionate about math...could they hold their own? What about a math pro? Could they even last five minutes?
Nah...we probably all can pretty much agree that 1440 hours of secondary math hours is enough to get by only if they are not challenged.
Now let's look at the average number of hours our children spend at church. Let's say they are there three hours a week. That's two on Sunday and then one on Wednesday. That will give us a total of 456 hours per year. Think they can hold their own?
My friends, the statistics are staggering....70 % of young adults between the ages of 18-22 stop attending church for at least one year. Of those 70%, only 20% planned to stop before-hand.
As believers, we raise our children to go out into the world and spread the Word of God, but we are not equipping them and because of that they fall away from their faith. How can you serve and give your life to someone you don't even know.
Fellow moms, if you neglect anything in your homeschooling day, please do not let it be the study of God's Word. If you get nothing else done during the day, spend time with the Lord. We can't depend on our church to carry the load of educating our children in the Word of God and we can't expect our children to leave home and carry on a faith that they do not own. They must know God, not just know about Him.
If we raise them and they come out of high school with perfect SAT scores and can speak 3 languages fluently, yet they walk away from the Creator, they have lost it all.
"For He established a testimony in Jacob And appointed a law in Israel, Which He commanded our fathers That they should teach them to their children, That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, That they may arise and tell them to their children, That they should put their confidence in God And not forget the works of God, But keep His commandments,…"
Psalm 78:5-7
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