After 20 years of homeschooling and a few years of trying to adjust to NOT homeschooling anymore, I have decided to do what everyone around me has encouraged me to do for years. I am going to help other homeschoolers who will need it. There is a weight that comes with deciding to homeschool and that weight gets heavy. The help I want to give is more than just advice on how to find the right curriculum or how to deal with teaching different grade levels. When we decide we are going to homeschool, there is a certain gamble we are taking that will make us hide if we are having doubts because we don’t want to hear the “I told you it was a crazy idea!” responses our family and friends are just waiting to say. I’m not saying they are waiting on us to fail, but sometimes they are just supporting us because they love us and they secretly wish we would just put our children back in school.
Over the years I have given support to all homeschoolers, then I began to focus on families who wanted to transition to homeschooling, and then I decided to focus on black homeschoolers, and then the focus was single parent homeschoolers. Today my focus is on the children who are being homeschooled. Now that my children are all adults, they don’t mind telling me how their educational experiences have affected them and I can explain what my intentions were. It’s like knowing what I wanted to happen, seeing what actually happened, and then providing support to others based on my research.
I’ll be the first to say that I’m not for everyone. I’m the type of person that doesn’t believe what works for me will work for you. I encourage others to trust themselves and realize that other people are allowed to be different and neither person is wrong. This way of thinking is not just reserved for adults. I believe children know more about themselves than their parents. I will say that a son or two of mine has expressed that they wished I was a little more strict and had more rules because in adulthood they had to do things they didn’t want to and it was a new concept for them. Don’t get me wrong, I did make them do some things that they didn’t want to, but there was not much discipline when they didn’t do them. I was a single mother of 4 children and I couldn’t even force myself to do things I didn’t want to so that trickled down to my kids. I was never that type of mom that said, “Make me proud.” I would always tell them that it’s their lives and they should make themselves proud. They have to live with the decisions they made and they had to learn how to trust themselves. I started that before they were even school age. There were lots of questions about what they wanted. My boys would just make a choice, but it was my last, my only girl who would have to have my opinion. I remember her being 8 and trying to decide which shirt to wear and she was so fed up with my “which one makes you feel prettier when you have it on? And which one do you like the best?” She took a deep breath and said, “Mom! Can you just tell me which one you like better?” I said yes, she thanked me and I learned that day that it wasn’t the end of the world if I influenced her on topics I felt she could decide on her own. All that to say, even in my support of other homeschoolers, there is no one way to do it and what works for one child may not work for the next one so I ask a lot of questions and my guidance and support depend a lot on the answers I’m given. I don’t offer a One Size Fits All system, which is also why it has taken me a long time to offer access to myself on a larger scale.
But alas, here I am…..
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