It’s the one thing homeschoolers don’t want to hear their kids say:
“Mom, I want to start going to a regular school.”
My daughter has been punctuating our conversations with this sentiment for the last few days.
She’s only six, and it’s been well over a year since she’s had to spend a full week in a traditional school setting, so it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. Like all six-year-olds, my daughter’s statements often mean something that adults would consider completely unrelated. To six-year-olds, it’s obvious!
So I have been questioning her further: “What would be different if you went to school?”
“Well, I don’t have any friends at my school now.”
Aha. A kid not wanting to homeschool is not always a kid not wanting to homeschool. It’s a kid wanting…something. The classic solution to this (I know from talking to homeschoolers and reading their blogs) is, “OK, dear, let’s enroll you in school.” You call their bluff, and go on. “Of course, next week is the week where they spend EVERY DAY taking tests and filling in bubbles…”
If they don’t blink, maybe you even go through with it. Generally speaking, homeschool is pretty much non-stop fun compared to regular school. Some kids go back and forth, taking as much public school as they can stand before they go back to homeschool.
In my daughter’s case, it’s not so simple. First of all, her idea of going to another school is going to her brother’s school, which is, in many ways, as non-stop fun as homeschool. It’s also a school that we can’t afford two tuitions at until I can work full-time. And I can’t work full-time, because my daughter’s in homeschool.
Why do so many parenting challenges seem to bite their own tail?
To a certain extent, what my daughter is saying is not that she actually wants to go to school full-time. She’s saying that she sees that she hasn’t developed friends the way that other kids in her homeschool program have, and that’s frustrating for her. She’s a child who doesn’t miss many details, but how she puts them together doesn’t always match what we call reality. I know from experience (boy, do I know from experience) that being with her all day, every day, can be exhausting. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. One day while I was watching her gymnastics class, another girl in the class came out, put her head in her mother’s lap, and sighed, “I don’t like [insert name]. She’s annoying.”
Her mother sighed in agreement. “I know, dear.”
It’s a hard life being the high energy, big-personality person. Even a gym is not big enough for her personality to expand into without bumping into other kids. And when she’s in a classroom? Let’s just say that there’s a lot more bumping.
I am reading Raising Your Spirited Child Workbook by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, which was recommended to me as more useful than the book, Raising Your Spirited Child. (So far, I agree, but I’ll post more about the book when I’m done.) The first thing she does in the workbook is have the reader work on translating her child’s “negative” characteristics into positive attributes.
So my daughter is: energetic, enthusiastic, a strong leader, and passionate. Not…um…annoying! But from the mouths of babes… Having my daughter in school is a full-time job for me to attempt to translate her behavior so that she can get along. The last two times we tried it, we ended up with a self-hating little person who wet her bed, so I’m in no hurry to try it again.
She is slowly learning to modify her behavior so that it’s easier for others to get along with her. I find this wish to go to a school where she can find a friend poignant and positive: she is starting to see that something needs to change in order for her to fulfill her desire.
And when my energetic, enthusiastic, passionate strong leader decides on something… let’s just say she’s going to get it done!
