Transcript- EP11: 10 Reasons You Can Homeschool – The Overview
Amy: I had so much fun putting together this series for you.
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. Today we’re gonna recap on those Top 10 Reasons Why You Can Homeschool. You are brave. First of all, you are able to do this and able to jump in even if you don’t have all the answers. Next, we’ll talk about the influence you are in your child’s life, and then the history of public education and why it is not for your child.
Next is spending time together and the importance of play, the importance of fine arts. Avoiding comparison for the safety of your children, your qualifications as their parent, and finally, how you show your love to your child. I hope you enjoy this episode.
We’re gonna start with you are brave. Homeschooling means you’re going against the grain. And anytime that happens, you have to jump in with both feet despite what your previous experience says and despite what people may be telling you. You may be absolutely terrified that you’re embarking on a journey that you don’t know where it will lead.
You don’t know how to begin. You even may think that you are gonna wreck your child’s education or wreck their lives. But trust me, you can do this. You don’t need a degree in teaching to intuitively know. That you were the one meant to influence and teach and direct your child in their future. Let me tell you that you are more equipped to teach your child who you love so fiercely than any 22 year old, fresh out of college or seasoned 60 year old who genuinely loves her job and may be very good at it.
You are more equipped than those people. Your brave decision to homeschool will open so many doors.
And this episode is gonna focus on you are the influence in your child’s life, and you want to be the influence in your child’s life, morally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically and cognitively. I’ve heard it said that children need to be quote unquote socialized. And what about socialization? That’s a big buzzword that people like to denigrate homeschool for. But just think, who do we actually want our children to be socializing with? Do we only want them to be with their same aged peers or only spend their days in all their hours of their waking time with one or a very small handful of teachers? And those teachers may or may not have the same moral and spiritual convictions as us.
It’s really amazing that people use this as an excuse that homeschooling or homeschoolers are weird or it’s even wrong. We have been programmed to think that it is normal for children to be in a room all day with 20 to 30 other kids of their exact same age, and that is actually a very new concept. For centuries children have learned at home.
Last episode, we talked about bravery, and it is brave to acknowledge these things and acknowledge that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your homeschool, but you’ve got this. You can take them out of the cog of public school and just spend time together, going to the park, going to the zoo, reading stories, reading aloud, and that can be enough for right now.
You don’t have to have it all or know it all to make that choice.
Today, there is an emphasis on process over content in our failed educational system. Today we’re going to be talking about the public school system and how that is not for your child. But we want children to think, but we are not giving them the knowledge and the wisdom for what to think about. If they are not taught basic, general knowledge, then what are they actually learning?
Educational consultants swoop in and tell lawmakers the changes in transformations that are needed to make progressive reforms. Usually emphasizing the latest trends or having an increase in critical thinking skills. The educational system takes our tax dollars, constantly improves things while the actual students are not learning.
Reform after reform, tax after tax, our children’s hearts and minds and futures are at stake, and they are so, so compromised. And to what end? I know that as a parent, I’m not going to allow my child to be victim to these reforms. Today we face far more difficult challenges than ones in the past. Not only are we refuting absolute truths, We are now in our public school system.
In our culture, we are completely reversing truths. The educational system can do that. Society can do that because the groundwork has been laid in the last century. I am so grateful that we have a choice. We still have the choice of what we want our own children to learn. If you send your child to Caesar, he will end up a Roman.
The choice though can often be exceedingly difficult, but it is up to you
Spending more time together. You don’t wanna miss those moments. When we homeschool together, there’s lush rushing around. Life is lived together and life is enjoyed, and everything in life is learning from when my kids were babies and toddlers a trip to the grocery store could sometimes be the only thing I did that day, but that was okay because we learned as we picked at our apples or as we weighed our grapes. Or a trip to the doctor or any car trip in general. Real life spent together with all the emotions and all the learning moments and the love and the tenderness. You grow and learn together. You are your child’s greatest influence in spending your time with your children will never be a regret.
Today we’re gonna focus on play during those early years and delaying formal lessons until your child is developmentally ready. A child does not need formal lessons. They need play. Your child is not behind if they’re not doing their handwriting lessons at four and five years old, or they’re not reading phonetically those three letter words, or they don’t have that sight word list memorized and reading that, that’s okay.
Just take a breath. Let your child have the sense of wonder that play can bring them, take away that pressure. And truly, if your child isn’t in school, they won’t know any different. They won’t know that other children are obligated to learn these things so soon. I hope that’s an encouragement to you that you can slow down childhood and indeed, I think that is what’s best for a child in their lifelong development.
Today we’re gonna talk about sharing beautiful literature and arts with your child, children in homeschool, they can be exposed to composers, art, they can learn about botany and zoology and do hands-on activities. They can read good and powerful, beautiful literature. They can paint, they can learn all about God’s truth from these wonderful things in God’s world.
They don’t know what they don’t know. So when we expose children to beautiful literature and to the music, and to the great pictures and great artists, for them to see different types of art. That is helping them to cultivate in their own little brains, “What am I interested in?” And that wisdom can be brought into the rest of their lives.
We don’t give them enough credit. They want reals topics. They want a liberal arts education where they’re learning about the Greeks and the Romans and Egyptian times, and then going into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and Reformation. Children wanna learn about these things. And they will make connections from knowledge of God, knowledge of man, and the knowledge of the universe.
And we should never hold back from the great art and the great literature and the great music of Old and of today,
Avoiding the comparison trap in school and online. Now it is a natural tendency for children to compare themselves to others, but through homeschooling them and through getting them out of those situations that can happen at school or on the bus, we can save them from the detriment that these things can cause.
So, at our core, we do compare ourselves. It’s what do we do as a result of that happening? Where does our mind go? And we have to help our children with comparing themselves with others, both on receiving comparisons or if they are thinking them or giving them out. We want our children to be safe of these things.
We want them to learn at their own pace, and this is where homeschooling is connected to these ideas. Names on boards, knowing where to stand, behavior traps, things like stoplights. All of those things are really negative and can imprint on a child’s soul in a negative way. So can the state testing and those national tests that the child has to sit through.
And now I understand a lot of ’em are on computers where a child has to log in. That’s a big time waster, but it also can be high pressure for some children. And I know parents can put the pressure on their children too, but I just, I don’t see a benefit to that. I don’t see a benefit to putting your child in that situation.
How do we help them avoid those things? I truly believe it is to take them out of the equation, to take them out of that situation. I know that that’s easier said than done, but when there’s a will, there is a way so we can align ourselves with the good things that we want with those beautiful and noble and true.
Ways that we want to cultivate in our children and influence them with, but also with our own goals. We can fight that desire to compare ourselves with others and focus on that growth mindset rather than fixing ourselves on that. We can teach that to children, and children can, if we continue day by day to help emphasize that growth mindset.
The safety of our children. We absolutely want our children to be physically safe, and children deserve to grow up in a fearless environment. It is our job to keep them safe, so they are cautious of strangers. So they look both ways when they cross the street, but they don’t need to know about every danger that lurks around the corner.
As adults, it’s our burden to bear. School violence unfortunately is a factor in our world today. Severe bullying is also a huge problem in schools today and these poor children who are experiencing these terrible times with bullying. My prayer for them is that they will have a defender and truly the defender.
Is you parent, you were the one who fiercely loves them the most. I would implore you that if your child is experiencing anything like the offense of bullying, that you would pull them out of school. I know that that’s a strong statement, but I don’t believe that things could get better because it is such a prevalent thing in our society.
You can’t control the actions of another student or another parent, but you can control your response. There’s another thing that I wanna touch on about the safety of our children. Unfortunately, in several states, schools are allowed to keep medical or psychological health, mental health information from parents.
Our children deserve to be morally safe in our corrupt society, and they’re being pulled every which way. From our societal norms and in the government schools, there are many things taught today that I can’t align with. I want my children to be influenced by the word of God and by me as the parent rather than the schools and what their desire and their influence.
You are the most qualified person to teach your children, and the reason for that is you want more for your child and for your family than anyone else. You love your child more than anyone else, so therefore you are absolutely the most qualified. You know your child, the best, you love them, and I just want you to please.
Just sit in that, that you are qualifying to teach your child. You don’t need a fancy college degree, you don’t need a PhD or anything like that. Remember the first principle that we talked about in this You Can Homeschool series was that you are brave. You are brave because you will stand up to all those naysayers who are just simply misled about what your qualifications are or maybe they think they should be, and you’re going to stand up.
God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called, and that’s a saying that I don’t know who to attribute that to, but let me say that again. God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called. So my dad has said that schools are basically like prisons. They keep kids locked up physically and mentally.
Then prepare them for jobs that are also basically like prisons until they retire and go to their final prison. All of these decisions and all of these choices are ways for you to show your child that you love them the most in all the world. You want them to succeed the most, and God will equip you because you are called to do so.
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. 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. 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. So what you are 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.
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 languid 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. 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 love onto our children.
I had so much fun putting together this series for you, and my prayer is that it’s helpful for you to jump in to homeschool if you haven’t already. If you’re already in the trenches and doing your education at home, that this is an encouragement to you to keep on going. We certainly have tough days over here and we need to expect those, but to know that you are doing kingdom work truly, and that you can homeschool your child.