Transcript – EP 10: 10 Reasons You Can Homeschool- Reason 10: To Show

Amy: We want to bestow this love onto our children.

Hi friends, and welcome. I’m your host AmyElizSmith. I’m a homeschool mom of three and have homeschooled each from the start. While I have a master’s in elementary ed, I want to teach other mamas that you don’t need a fancy degree to have the passion and knowledge to successfully educate your children from home.

I hope to bring you encouragement to jump in and start your homeschool journey and provide my absolute best recommendations to help you begin your homeschool journey. Thanks for joining us along for this crazy, messy, grace-filled homeschool ride.

Hi friends, and welcome back to our 10th episode and our 10th reason why you can homeschool, and this I would arguably say is the most important. Homeschooling your child shows great, great love for your children. Last time we talked about how motherhood is a calling and it can also be a job. And though difficult running the race will be so worth it in the end.

And here showing your love for your children day in and day out can reap so many rewards. Homeschool is a sacrifice. Your children are with you day in and day out. So this can be exhausting and I can speak from experience, but boy does it make me so sad seeing memes on social media, about parents who are so excited to get their kids out of the house or the buses come to take their kids away.

That just, I grieve those messages because while children will see them or can see them, and that can be detrimental, but also that that’s the attitude of parents. Children are just the biggest blessing. They are truly the most joyous blessing that we could have, and our God gives us these amazing children to love and to nurture.

And just to know that that’s the attitude of some people, that we just want our children out of the way. It just grieves my heart so much. Our children, they need to be fed and bathed and clothed and warmed and loved by you, by their parent. You love them. Therefore, we spend our days with them. We work with them on their schoolwork, educating them, or we read them books.

We bake together. We live life simply together. We gather together to learn simple skills like knitting or sculpting or cutting things, or first time art. So many things that you can do together, and if you don’t do all those things, that’s okay too. I’m not a knitter. I’m not a sew -er I don’t do all things, but I can outsource those things.

And there are many older women or groups that can teach your children the things that you don’t know. For example, my daughter had learned to crochet from her grandmother, and now she takes a crocheting class through our co-op, and it is her favorite thing to do. It is her favorite class to take, and what a joy that is.

Just a note on co-ops or groups is you don’t need to do these things right away. They do take your precious time away from you, and you always have to think about, is this worth my time? Saying yes to something means you’re saying no to something else. So keep that in mind that your time is precious and taking care of your child’s direct needs and true needs are what’s most important.

That means maintaining your home and putting food on the table. Grocery shopping takes a lot of time. It’s not sometimes not our favorite thing to do, but making that nourishing food and going back to the basics is so important and that love day in and day out will be felt from your children. There was a brain study done by Dr. Bruce Perry, and this is so sad. Neurologist did a brain study on two different brains. One from a child who had been loved and cared for, these are three-year-olds, and the other brain was scanned, was another three-year-old that unfortunately had experienced significant neglect and was perhaps even in the foster care system.

And there was a sizable difference between the two brains, just in the size of the brain and how the brain had developed and the size of the brain of the child that had experienced extreme neglect. That means that they’re gonna be more vulnerable to things like addictions or incarceration or needing to be on government assistance in the future.

All of those things. And so what you’re doing, you are fighting the good fight and you will finish the race and you will have kept the faith because your children need you and that love for your children is so strong. That was from 2 Timothy 4:7. But even in those days that you are having a rough time, you can take those breaks.

And we talked about this a little bit last time about your mother culture and what you’re consuming. So having books to read that edify you and encourage you can be so important. Having children with us all the time is hard. Children with diverse needs, child, children with special needs, disobedient children.

I’m raising my hand for all of these things. It is not all roses, but the bouquet I’m building is beautiful. It has thorns, it has dried dead flowers in it from the mistakes I’ve made. But I’m cultivating our family’s life together and we are all growing together. Ultimately the hope for my own family is that they will know they are loved by both of their parents.

And that daily, I want to love and cherish them. So that mother culture time, sometimes we have babies and toddlers and it’s very difficult to have even a moment alone. But we can help train our children. We can give them maybe a special bin of toys that they get only in the afternoons when mom gets to read or special sticker books or activity books.

A little sensory time perhaps with some special Play-Doh. But if you cultivate that time right now we’re trying to, or we have a afternoon quiet time and I say trying because it’s not always perfect, but we have a reading time in the afternoons where the kids have to be quiet and read and sometimes I put on an audible book and the kids really love that.

Those are moments where I’m showing love for them again cuz they’re creating habits of routine. But parents are the authority and children ought to be an obedience to their parents in a loving home and a loving environment. This is the natural order that God ordained and it is good.

Wordsworth wrote, “We live by admiration, hope and love. And even as these are well and wisely fixed indignity of being, we ascend.” So in that we can admire those who are admirable. We can read books that are part of mother culture, just as children ought to recognize and admire the righteous, the pure, the heroic, the beautiful, the truthful, and the loyal and their educational life, so should we. I have a quote that was a bit of Charlotte Mason, but again here is more Charlotte Mason here that I wanted to share. It’s a long quote, but it’s so beautiful. It is, “We live by love and the love we give and the love we receive by the countless tenderness that go out from us and the countless kindnesses that come to us by the love of our neighbor and the love of our God, as all love implies, a giving and a receiving. It is not necessary to separate the waters of love, that flow. We do not ask what makes us happy, but we are happy abounding in life. Until some single channel of love and goodwill is obstructed. Someone has given us a offense or received offense at our hands and at once life runs low within us we go langwood and devoid of pleasure.

We are no longer fully alive because we live by love. Not by a consuming and unreasonable affection for any individual, but by the outgoing of love from us in all directions and the intaking of love from all sources. And this is not a state of intense and excited feeling, but as calm and continuous as the act of breathing.

Thus, we receive into us the love of God, and thus our own hearts go out and answering love.” We want to bestow this onto our children. So that is my prayer for all of you today and my hope that these episodes has encouraged you in that we love our children and we want the best for them, and we are the best equipped to teach them and raise them up in the Lord.