Have you ever noticed how well Dads fit, naturally, in your homeschool?
Dads fit, naturally. It really is like their purpose waits in the wings while you raise up your young children. Teaching them to tie their shoes and make their beds goes hand in hand with addition and spelling and learning to read. It all takes patience, care, and I think it happens best when taught by you. You are the one who is always there to reach out and give them a hug, or wipe a tear. Your responsibility is first to make sure they are safe and cared for. And for some reason learning to walk seems to take the same kind of caring as you give when you are teaching them to read.
I really am not sure why it is this way.
My husband likes to think of it this way: The husband’s job is to keep an eye out on the horizon. To watch. And to be ready to provide and protect. Changing diapers and teaching spelling gets in the way of keeping an eye out.
This is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I think there is a certain level of truth to it. Your husband takes on the responsibility for providing when you homeschool, especially when you homeschool. While there are moms who manage to work and homeschool, most of us do it from home on a part time basis and while it does help with finances, we cannot match the earning power of our husbands. And why would wee want to? I often feel that my husband gets up each day and goes to work in order to give me the gift of staying at home with our children and doing the best work I could ever have: teaching and raising them.
Regardless, this all seems to me to equate to moms being really good at teaching our children in those early years.
A lot of homeschooling moms I know are terrified of the high school years. But we are not dummies. We all, or most all, made it through high school successfully. Many of us even went further and learned more. And if we homeschool we actually are still learning every day, as we teach.
So why do we fear the high school years?
Well I think it might be that a teen interacts so differently with their parents than a child. There is a lot of questioning and challenging. That is actually what we hope for as homeschooling moms. It means they are thinking. But it also means that teaching can be harder. You have to be on your game. You need to be focused ALWAYS as you teach. You cannot time out and think about what you are making for dinner while you are doing algebra lessons with your child. He will ask a question and need an answer and it won’t just be “how do you do that” It will be “why are we doing it this way when I can see a perfectly good, faster way to solve the problem.”
I have a background in math and physics. I went as far as I could go in the educational system and came out with an acronym to put behind my name and a title by which I can be addressed if I wanted to force people to admire me. I know math and I know physics. Really well. But I have a really hard time teaching Trig and Calculus to my son. Why? Because in the homeschool environment I cannot focus that way. I can do it in a lab or in a lecture hall, but in my dining room with life swirling around us, I cannot focus on his probing questions.
And that brings me to the title of this post.
Dads fit, naturally, into our homeschool to teach those subjects to older children that need that kind of focus that they put in at work every day. They are practiced at it. Doing it at home with their kids is a wonderful way to extend themselves into the homeschool and become a critical piece to raising their children.
And so my son does Trig lessons with his dad every evening. They both look forward to it. They both work the problems and they both chuckle together when one finds the other’s mistakes. It is a beautiful time between them. Time spent learning and getting to know each other as teenage son to father. That is not something I could ever do for my boy.
In your homeschool it may not be math, but in many homeschools Dad takes a role that you cannot fill, even if you know the subject.
Your role is keeping them safe and sound and clean and fed. Filling their minds and souls with all the faith and empathy you can muster, and along the way getting them ready for adulthood. Yes spelling and math facts and geography are all a part of that.
