Diapers in Kindergarten

It would probably surprise my stepmom to know that there is a piece of parenting wisdom she shared with me years ago that I call to mind almost every day. Well, that fact might not surprise her (she’s got a lot of golden parenting nuggets stored away), but I bet she’d never guess WHICH piece of wisdom it is that I think about so often. Here it is…

I was struggling to potty train one of my boys, at age 2 or so, and in response to my despair and frustration, she said,

Well, he’s not going to go to kindergarten in diapers.

Let that sink in for a minute. It’s a lot more profound than it first seems.

Are you with me? This is about more than just diapers, people. This is DEEP.

It looks like just an offhand comment with no greater purpose than to make me feel better, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Let me explain why this is the BEST PARENTING ADVICE EVER GIVEN:

In this particular situation, what she meant is that when it’s important TO MY SON to not be in diapers anymore (because how embarrassing would it be to be the only kid in class wearing diapers?), he will figure out the whole toilet thing on his own. I backed off on the potty training (potty bribing, more accurately), and by the second week of his 3-year-old preschool class, he was out of diapers. Not only did he do what I wanted him to do, but I didn’t have to do any begging or threatening or sitting in the living room all day feeding him juice boxes on the potty chair to get him there. Thanks to his grandma (and the preschool class of 2007), he did not, in fact, go to kindergarten in diapers.

I have found, over the years, that not only is this advice useful in thinking about potty training, but it pretty much applies to every situation in which I’m trying to get my kids to learn something that they aren’t ready for or think is stupid/pointless/boring. Sure enough, every single time, when the child is motivated, they learn whatever it is I was agonizing over seemingly overnight, with little or no help from me. Or they don’t learn it and choose to face the consequences instead (a powerful learning experience in itself). Either way, letting go of my urge to control them and get them on MY timeline pays off for both of us. I can save my time and energy (and vocal chords) for something else, and they learn how to set – and achieve – their own goals.

Case in point:

I have an almost-3-year-old named Stephen. He is adorable, sweet, smart, and obsessed with motor vehicles (mainly police cars and bulldozers). He greets me every morning with a slow-motion “Hiiiii Moooom” and a smile and a big, leg-squeezing hug. He counts the basement stairs and his dad’s fingers, and he knows all the letters in the word “police”. He also loves peanut butter, play dough, LEGOs, peeling the wrappers off crayons, and hanging out all day in his pajamas. And YouTube, although I like to pretend that we’re too busy doing enriching and educational activities (and then journaling about them in our sketchbooks – don’t you want to be that kind of family?) to waste our time on electronics.

Stevie gets a hold of the camera:

Up until two months ago, John and I were concerned about Stephen’s speech development. Because there was no speech development. He said two words: uh-oh (is that even a word?) and bye-bye. None of my kids were early talkers, and several of them didn’t say much until they were three, but I don’t remember them saying SO little for SO long. Finally, I decided that we needed to get some kind of expert involved, so we went to our family doctor. She recommended that we call the AEA (Area Educational Agency: http://www.heartlandaea.org/) and have him evaluated, which we did. The VERY NEXT DAY after the evaluation, before anyone started giving him any kind of speech therapy, he started saying words. Lots of words. All of a sudden, within a week, he was saying all of his colors, numbers up to ten, and a bunch of other words, like “car” and “pancake”.

Phil and Stevie taking a pretend nap:

Now, a couple of months later, he’s putting words together, like “blue car” and “my truck.” I seriously think he understood the AEA visit and thought that he should probably start talking to get us off his case about it. Which brings me to the point of this whole post: as parents, especially homeschooling parents, we tend to think that it’s our job to take information and skills and cram them into our children’s brains, according to OUR schedule (or one we found on the internet). Our job, we think, is to gather all the workbooks, worksheets, enrichment activities, and tests, and administer them, and then our children will know and apply all of that information forever after in their daily lives. The more we cram into them, the better off they’ll be. Left to their own devices (like Stephen with his speech development), they would never learn anything of value, eventually becoming leeches on society and draining us of all our money and energy in our old age. I know I’m not the only parent who has two different visions of her child’s future – one in which he’s an astronaut heart surgeon; another in which he spends 20 hours a day in the basement eating Oreos and trying to master Call of Duty. Surely, without our constant intervention, they’ll choose the latter. Right?

Real life experience has taught me that kids actually learn best when they’re in control of what they learn and how and when they learn it. They fiercely resist being taught, and the mere act of trying to teach something tends to kill their interest in that particular thing.

Camping. A great way to learn things. And get really dirty.

Here’s what Stevie, and my other kids, have taught me about the way they learn:

1. You can’t make someone learn. The student has total control over whether they actually learn something, because learning happens in THEIR brain. The sooner you accept this (especially you, homeschool moms), the better your relationship with your kids will be. What they learn, and how much/how well/how fast they learn, is on THEM, not you. You are not a better teacher because your kids learn more quickly and easily than others. You are not a failure because someone else’s four-year-old can read and yours can’t. Let your children take credit for their academic successes and be accountable for their failures.
2. Kids learn best when you let them decide when they’re ready for a certain subject or skill. I tried to teach Esme to read twice. The first time, she was totally bored by it and made so little progress in 3 months that we gave up. We tried again 6 months later and she practically taught herself. She is now in 5^th grade and, according to some weird test the school gives, reading at an 11^th grade level. The timeline our American schools are on is totally arbitrary and not scientifically related to how a child’s brain develops. Go at your own pace and don’t freak out if other 5^th graders know who Marie Curie is or how to do long division and yours doesn’t.
3. If a person – of any age – is not interested in a particular topic, they are probably not going to learn much about it, no matter how much information you give them or how many worksheets they complete. It will stick in their brain long enough to pass the test or finish the workbook, and then it will be gone. And slime recipes and video game hacks and jokes about poop will reclaim that corner of the brain.
4. Learning happens best in real life situations. Baking actual bread is better at teaching math than a worksheet about baking bread. Going on a nature hike is better than reading about local wildlife in a textbook. Watching you help an elderly person get their groceries out of the cart is better than reading a story about being helpful.
5. We have to stop obsessing about preparing kids for the next step. Much of the logic I hear from school people goes like this: Kids need to do X now so they’re ready to do X next year. If you think like that, where does it stop? When I was in school, preschool was optional and left to the discretion of parents. We basically started school at age 5 in kindergarten, and we didn’t learn how to read until first grade. Now, 2 and 3-year-old preschool is the norm, and if you don’t know all the letters and their sounds by kindergarten, plus a bunch of sight words, you’re behind. Let your kids (and yourself) enjoy the stage they’re at and stop worrying about what comes next. Focus on right now, and the future will take care of itself. If you’re always thinking about the future, you miss out on all the potential of the present, and life starts to feel like a very long, unsatisfying waiting game.
6. Kids are interested in things that their parents are not. If you give kids control over what they learn and how they learn it (even just a little bit of control), you will be annoyed and frustrated by their choices. They might spend an entire year reading books about elephants, and nothing but elephants. They might spend all day either talking about or playing a video game that makes absolutely no sense to you. You might have fantastic memories of your mom reading you a certain book as a child, but your kids run from the room every time you try to read it to them. They are not you. They are not blank slates or lumps of clay. They are people, and they have unique interests, personalities, and dispositions that will not always (or even usually) jive with yours. Accept that. Embrace it! Stop trying to turn them into your vision of the perfect human, because you are not God, and God already has a (better) plan for them than you do.
7. You can kill a child’s curiosity. If you constantly bombard a child with information and force them to “learn” what you want them to, they will stop trying to learn on their own. For one thing, they don’t have time to pursue their own interests. For another, most kids want to get along and go with the flow. They will figure out what the adults want from them and follow the path of least resistance, so they will do the worksheets and study for the tests and try to make the teacher happy. And we teachers are generally not happy when kids interrupt us with a bunch of questions that aren’t in the textbook, or make suggestions about what topic to study next.
8. You can also kill a child’s natural interest in something by trying to turn it into an educational experience. My older boys were really into Minecraft when we were homeschooling them. So, when I found a Minecraft homeschool program online, I thought I had hit the homeschooling jackpot. I can teach the boys math, reading, and history using Minecraft? Sign us up! Well, they were excited about it until they realized that they had to build what the school told them to, on the school’s timeline. There may have even been quizzes and writing assignments. Not only did we eventually drop out of the program, they never enjoyed playing Minecraft again.

My basic point is this: the more you can leave your kids alone to discover their own interests and learn what they want, how they want, the better.

Maybe you’re brave (some would say foolish, I say brave) enough to watch from a distance, giving them help only when asked. Maybe you teach just a few subjects and let them handle the rest. Or maybe your kids are in school, but this post gives you a new perspective on how much value you place on straight A’s and perfect attendance and making the teacher happy. Maybe you take a few non-school-sponsored field trips throughout the schoolyear or work on an art project at home together while the teacher’s assigned busywork sits undone.

Be radical.

Remember, they probably won’t go to kindergarten in diapers.

Heck, maybe they won’t go to kindergarten at all.

And, if you see my stepmom, tell her thank you.

But What About Socialization?

The most common concern I hear about homeschooling is, “but what are you going to do about SOCIALIZATION?” It’s a notorious and difficult-to-answer question that homeschooling families hear ALL THE TIME from people who, for the most part, mean well and are genuinely concerned. What I think most people mean when they ask it is, “How are your kids going to turn into ‘normal’ adults if you’re not sending them to school like ‘normal’ kids? How will they learn to make friends? How will they learn to deal with bullies? How will they learn to take tests, and sit at desks quietly, do things they don’t want to do, and think the way ‘normal’ people think? Won’t they feel like outsiders? Won’t they be lonely? Won’t they think and act in strange ways that we don’t really approve of?”

Most of us have our modern educational system so ingrained in our conception of childhood that we really struggle to imagine growing up outside of it. School prepares you for the Real World. School teaches you how to Get Along and Obey Instructions and Sit for Long Periods of Time. School teaches you things like English Grammar and Trigonometry and other subjects that seem boring and irrelevant but must, somehow, be absolutely necessary. School is the shared experience of childhood that bonds us together and gives us something to reminisce over and talk about as adults. It’s the foundation for College, for pete’s sake. Boys who don’t go to school won’t be tough enough for life away from their parents and will grow ponytails and play video games all day in the basement and pick their noses in front of girls. Girls who don’t go to school won’t have any friends or learn how to make themselves look pretty or be able to hack it in the competitive corporate world because all they want to do is get married and stay home and have babies.

To many parents (like me, when I was younger), a “normal childhood,” is the best childhood – better, even, than one they would design themselves based on what makes them and their children happy (or good people). When my older kids were younger, I felt most successful as a mom when my life, and theirs, looked just like everyone else’s. It was okay if we were unhappy, as long as we were about as unhappy as everyone I was comparing myself to. Most of the adults I know (myself included) didn’t like school, and most people will readily admit that. And most people don’t remember much of what was taught there; instead, their memories are of being teased and abused by students and teachers alike. But despite these facts, or maybe because of them, we tend to think school is a necessary preparation for life, which is often (like school) difficult, boring, discouraging, and painful. Do kids really need that kind of preparation?

Our culture thinks that it promotes independent thinking, creativity, and problem solving, primarily through mass education in the public school system. Does it? Is that what you learned in school? I’ve always accepted this as true, even though it isn’t true of my own personal experience. Why have I spent so long believing something that I know isn’t true – or at least, isn’t always true? The older I get, the more I’m confronted with issues like this, where I’ve accepted an obvious lie as truth just because “everyone” believes it.

For the most part, our culture also thinks that denying children the experience of school will stunt their growth and turn them into misfit, unproductive adults. Really?? One thing I’ve learned from my homeschooling journey that most of us don’t think very deeply about our opinions. We pick them up from school, news stories, social media, and people we know, and we figure, who am I to question any of this? If they believe it, I believe it too. This should give you confidence when talking to people about homeschooling issues, including socialization. You can be almost 100% sure that you have thought more about the issue than the other person, and you certainly know your children and what they need better than the other person. Make it your goal to plant a tiny seed in their minds – not to argue or bully them into your way of thinking. Don’t be intimidated, and don’t assume that people are personally attacking you. They are probably just genuinely surprised to come across someone who is doing something different. Try to respond with patience and avoid becoming angry/defensive/condescending/sarcastic (I’ve already done all of those and can tell you, they are not effective).

If I were asked, today, what I am doing about socializing my kids, here are some things I might say:

1. What exactly do you mean by socializing? I’ve found that different people are worried about different things – some are worried that my kids won’t or don’t have friends, or that they don’t know how to act around other people, or that they’ll be weird and unlikable. Some people worry that if my kids don’t go to school, they won’t learn how to work well with others as an employee. I don’t worry about any of those things. My kids have friends, they know how to treat others, and are on track to becoming great human beings.
2. Can I ask you a question? How are you socializing your kids?
3. Whose job is it to socialize our children? I think it is primarily the responsibility of parents, not schools. I like being in charge of their socialization, because I can choose role models and situations that I think will lead to proper socialization. I’m not leaving it up to someone else who may or may not share my values.
4. I am teaching them how to be other-focused, rather than self-focused. I am teaching them the Golden Rule. I am teaching them about the life of Jesus and what he had to say about how to treat other people. I am providing them with opportunities to interact with kids and adults of all ages, in many different settings throughout the community. I take them to church, to the library, to the store, to the bank, to the post office, to my friends’ houses, and to their friends’ houses. We go to the park, the Rec Center, and a weekly homeschool co-op, as well as two different monthly homeschool groups. I think that limiting kids to a classroom full of their peers all day long, 5 days a week, severely limits their opportunities for real socialization.
5. I don’t think kids learn appropriate social skills by spending their day at school surrounded by peers. I think they learn these skills by seeing them modeled by their parents and other people of all different ages in real social situations, like at a dinner party or baseball game or while playing at the park.
6. I don’t worry about socialization.
7. If you mean, how will they become normal, I guess I’m not interested in them becoming normal.
8. I actually think that socialization at school is harmful. I remember the lessons I learned about how to interact with other people at school; all of them are very negative, and they don’t apply to real life as an adult. I learned that if you’re very quiet and try not to draw any attention to yourself, the mean kids will usually leave you alone. If they don’t, you just have to let them say or do what they’re going to do and try not to cry or talk back to them. I learned that the best ways to move up the social ladder are to make fun of the people who are lower on it than you are and to do whatever the people above you tell you to do. I learned that if you are an athlete, people will admire and like you; if you’re not, they generally won’t. I learned that friendships are about what other people give and do for you, not about what you give or do for them. I learned that teachers and adults in general don’t like kids and aren’t interested in them as individual people. I want to spare my kids from that kind of socialization.
9. The best thing I ever did for the socialization of my children is to stop sending them to school. (Ouch.)
10. I’m glad you asked! Maybe we can both share some strategies that are working for our families. I’ve done a lot of research on socialization, and I’m always looking for new information.

Above all, be kind, and as I tell my children daily, give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they are being curious, not antagonistic. Your body language and tone of voice will speak louder than what you actually say.

If you have any thoughts on socialization or any other homeschooling issue, talk to us in the comments!

We are no stranger to radical ideas. I mean, our blog is called Radical Motherhood. We challenge the conventional wisdom about motherhood. We do life differently than most families and we are proud of it.

Our first radical idea was that being a SAHM is the ultimate calling for women and that no matter the age of our children, we should be home supporting and nurturing them.

We believe in the importance of keeping a home and trusting completely in our husbands.

We challenge the notion that two incomes are a necessity and our only choice.

Today, I am going to tell you about how we are radically changing our children’s lives.

If you are a regular reader, you know that I (Emily) have three teenage daughters. They are currently in 11th, 8th, and 7th grades. They started school at a small Lutheran school until fifth grade and transitioned to public school for middle school. We discussed homeschooling once when they were young, however, my husband was reluctant because he was worried about socialization (like many people are). We really didn’t consider it an option.

Our kids left the private school because their class size was dwindling, and the appeal of the programs at the public school was strong. We thought that more kids meant more friends, and that more friends meant a better experience and happier kids. The transition from a fairly strict, small private school to a large public school was eye-opening though. Our innocent girls gradually learned and believed the ways of the world.

Every parent knows that each of their children is unique and that sometimes they are so different from each other that you wonder how they are all yours. One home produces three totally different girls. That’s how it is at school, too. One place influences them in very different ways- not all good ways either.

Most public school families don’t ever consider homeschooling as an option because their kids are so involved in activities and the school system. They don’t know where to start and maybe don’t even feel like it is an option.  Even homeschool families often find the teenage years more challenging than elementary or middle school and send their kids to school for high school.  Parents are intimidated by teaching more complex subjects and often kids are more interested in having peer relationships and doing typical high school activities.

Our radical idea?  We are going to homeschool high school.

Not all three girls, because they are all so different and it’s not the best choice for all of them. But the ones who want to; probably our youngest two.

Homeschooling high school will give our girls the time and freedom to study subjects they are interested in. It will allow them to get ahead or work at a slower pace. They can escape the anxiety of the standardized test culture. We can learn anywhere, anytime. We can teach from a Christian perspective. Their main influence will be their parents, not their peers.

I have thought that maybe the years for me to influence them in any way are over. I once read that kids personalities and value systems are developed by the time they are 10 years old. But I don’t think that’s true. I hope and pray that we will continue to be an influence in their lives for many years to come. We are going to try anyway, and homeschooling is how we plan to do it.

I will be honest, I’m a little nervous about making sure they are ready for college. Meeting state graduation requirements and college admission expectations and finding out their interests will be a challenge. There are a lot of things to think about, but we are trusting our guts and God to guide us.

(Homeschooling is not new to Allison! Read about her story here. I am a little slower when it comes to figuring this stuff out.)

Have you ever considered homeschooling your high schooler? Do you have any advice to share? Let us know in the comments!