Sidenotes - Homeschooled Kids are Weird.

 Parenting and homeschooling are similar in that they are both living, breathing human experiments.  Sure, put your kids in public or private schools and you are hopefully guaranteed an educated young adult as the end result.  But choose to homeschool your kid?  Now you are at the mercy of criticism from all sides.  

Homeschooled kids are weird.  Homeschooled kids are socially inept.  They are too independent.  They are not independent enough?   They don't know how to accept criticism.   They can't function in society.

It takes a strong sense of self-confidence and common sense to make your way in the homeschooling world.  Every fear of screwing up your children now falls into your domain.   Before you could blame the childcare center or the school for your childs inadequacies.  Now its all on you!  Frightening maybe, or maybe it is just brillant.  

I'm trying my best not to go down that anxiety road. Take the path less traveled, perhaps kids could really get to know themselves better in a more relaxed learning environment.  Life has changed so much in the past 50 years but traditional school has not.

Experts say that jobs are changing so rapidly that our children need to be curious, creative and inventive to succeed in the modern world.  The most valuable skills will be  3D visualization,  out of the box thinking, and empathy leadership.   Is this what your school is teaching?

I live in a wealthy town, I see every child getting whisked away to mandarin class, classic ballet and violin after school.  They go to learning academy tutors and spend their weekends crammed full of soccer games and ski trips.  Their parents take second mortgages on their houses, so their kids can go to the finest private schools and colleges that money can buy.   

 Once out of college these kids get the best jobs and prosper, right?  Well, not for a majority of them.   I know many of these parents, they scratch their heads when their prodigy child gets their Ph.D in art history and then goes off to build treehouses or wait tables.  What happened?  Was the first 25 years of their life inauthentic?  Why do they fail to launch?

I recently took a career transformation course.  The instructor asked us a fundamental soul searching question, "Go back to when you were a kid,  what did you want to be?"   

Can you remember when you were a kid?   What did you want to be?  What did you like to do? Was it what your parents organized for you? For me,  I really just wanted to go play in the woods alone or with friends, ride horses and redesign my doll house furniture.  

Todays kids don't get a lot of free time to just wonder or be curious.  They are constantly shuttled from one adult led experience to another.  Sometimes riding the coat tails of others until the day they escape institutional learning and then try to figure out their dreams.  

So my hope for homeschooling is to explore learning in a way that is fun for all of us.  Homeschool doesn't have to look like school at all.   It can look anyway you envision it.    Make it fun.  Make it memorable.   Let your kids take their interests to the next level.   If your kid like to draw,  let them draw for hours a day.  If your kid loves Minecraft,  find activity books and math problems that support their learning and interests.   That to me is the beauty of all this crazyness called homeschool.