And so comes the time to look back at the last few months and assess what has worked, what hasn’t worked, what to change and what to keep. I probably wouldn’t be doing this except that we tried to make a monumental change and I’m not sure we’ve managed it well. In my former career, “continuous process improvement” was actually part of one of my job titles. It’s something I fully embrace.
So let’s review… Continue reading The semester in review…
BigGuy is not what most people imagine when they think of someone with Asperger’s. They see my personable and extroverted kid who likes an audience and think I’m out of my mind because “THAT’S not Asperger’s”.
Oh contraire… but it is–I assure you. Not all kids with Asperger’s are the silent, introverted, cannot-look-you-in-the-eye type. Meet my guy… Continue reading How we handle Asperger’s Syndrome
So, here’s the thing: mean girls and bullies exist everywhere. If you think that those of us that homeschool are trying to shelter our kids from this stuff (or if you’re considering homeschooling in hopes of eternally avoiding it)… guess again. Continue reading Mean girls and bullies exist in homeschooling, too
So, I get this a lot. Especially since I run in unschooling circles (and please keep in mind that “unschooling” is, at it’s heart, about following the child). Just to be sure we’re all on the same page here: “Neurotypical” refers to a child who develops in a way that is free of disabilities of any kind.
That is not my BigGuy. Continue reading Applying neurotypical logic to kids in the spectrum
Last night, our BigGuy went off to his second performance with his boys choir; and his first in full regalia. I broke down and got his hair cut so he didn’t ACTUALLY look like that. I don’t care what other people think of his hair. It causes me physical eyestrain pain to see it hang in his eyes. Nobody’s ever said anything about his long hair (and dude–it’s been WAY longer than this. I’m not sure how I got through this stage when he grew it longer).
But my son’s choir sang with the American Boychoir (which is like the United States version of the Vienna Boys Choir). It was such an honor! Continue reading BigGuy had quite a performance
So, this came up today. I was with some other homeschool moms at a park where the kids played and the moms hung out. It’s great when there are more than two moms because then when a kid needs a mom for more than a question–like some dedicated one-on-one help, snuggling, working through a challenge, or showing us something they made that requires some back and forth questioning and interest–the remaining mom has someone to chat with. Score. Okay, okay, okay….
By now, in late 2014, when I tell people that we homeschool, I almost never get asked if I’m worried about socialization–which is a nice thing. I’m kind of tired of that one. (If you are someone that still wants answers to that, please see my guest blog post on The Innovative Educator called “How socialization happens in homeschooling”).
So there is no issue that homeschooled kids absolutely get socialization and social skills despite being homeschooled. There are certainly a couple of social challenges for homeschoolers. They are different than the social challenges of schooled kids, but challenges none-the-less. Let me share…
First, a major issue we have seen lately is that homeschooled kids integrate with others with pretty much no regard for age. If you can keep up, you can play–whether you are 4 or 14. What differs is that schooled kids seem to subscribe to a hierarchy based on age. We dealt with this with my own kids recently when they (current ages 5 and 10) were playing with another kid whose age was between the two (but closer to my younger). This child would change attitude the second my oldest was around–clearly trying to gain BigGuy’s favor and sometimes that meant being mean to Girly.
When this inevitably came up with the other parents, one of the comments the other parent made was that kids always want to be with the older kids because they think the older kids are cooler.
Hunh….
See, that’s not really the case with homeschooled kids. There is no perceived hierarchy among the kids based on age… for all kinds of reasons. In school, there is an apparent level of achievement with the moving up in grade that naturally comes with age. It stands to reason that kids want to be with those who have achieved something they are working towards. There is also undoubtedly a level of admiration that goes with someone that’s gotten through what they are currently working on. But homeschooled kids are not rarely separated out by age level. Their age is not relevant to any of their achievements; and in fact, their academic (or other) achievements may not even be visible to many of their peers. BigGuy’s friends have no idea that he’s working on high school level biology. It just doesn’t come up. They’re not in class together. Homeschooled kids are regularly thrown into a group of diverse ages (which often includes older and younger siblings) for any number of activities.
So when homeschooled kids are confronted with schooled kids whose attitudes change because their age becomes known and suddenly relevant to the relationship–most of them have no idea what’s going on. My daughter doesn’t “get” that this other kid was mean to her as a means of trying to show “rejection of little kids” to BigGuy. It’s a set of social politics that just doesn’t relate to most homeschoolers (and frankly, it only relates to schooled kids while they’re in school).
The other social problems homeschoolers have is learning to respond to other people who either don’t understand or don’t like homeschoolers. As parents, how do you even prepare your kids for this? It’s kind of like being a family of a minority faith (and one that is sometimes so misunderstood that people could get rather nasty) and trying to prepare your kids for the broad range of ways people can come at them because of it. When BigGuy was 5, we REGULARLY got “Are you excited to go to Kindergarten?” and sometimes it got as nasty as “Don’t you WANT to go to school?” as if it was my 5yo’s choice. We don’t get a lot of that anymore.
But just a few months ago, an innocent walk to the corner to see a dog that was the same breed we have turned into this dog’s owner chastising me in front of my children because we homeschool. We noted that we had just moved into the neighborhood and the woman asked if the kids went to the local public school (as opposed to a private school). BigGuy piped up that they were homeschooled, and this woman launched into a tirade that even took ME by surprise. In front of my children, she told me that I was creating social misfits that would be bullied into adulthood because of my overinflated sense of self.
This woman who knew only that I had just moved into the neighborhood and had the same breed of dog as she did. Nothing else. Not that anything else MATTERED really; but still…
How do you prepare a child to deal with people who will respond to them with such hostility? Especially since it’s pretty rare. It’s not like you want to prepare them for that kind of thing and scare them; but it’s not like you want them unprepared for it to potentially happen.
Last, homeschoolers are people, too. People just like schoolers to some extent. To that end, the parents can be just as persnickety, judgmental and clique-y as schooled parents. And that means if your kid does something they don’t like or is in some way, shape or form undesirable to them–they can pretty well isolate you (depending on their sphere of influence). At minimum, it can mean they just won’t hang out with you any more and if you’re in a place where homeschoolers are a minority–that can cut your playdates down quite a bit. Of course, this is not the end of social opportunities by any stretch (again, I refer to “How socialization happens in homeschooling”) but it can be a bummer and it can hit homeschoolers just as hard as being ostracized from a group in school and suddenly having nobody to sit with at lunch. The major difference being that it’s not in a homeschooler’s face daily because they’re not forced to be around the people they’re being snubbed by (although sometimes they are through community or church affiliations). But it still sucks.
Frankly, I’ll take this over some of the crap that comes with school. But just to let you know, our unicorns don’t all fart out rainbows in homeschool-land. Updated to include a photo someone sent me on this point. 🙂
Needless to say, a morning of scheduled schoolwork is bound to NOT go well in this house. Mama gets all panicky and goes into teacher/project manager mode rather than Mama mode. It’s like a flip of a switch. And then when BigGuy does anything other than sit at a desk and belt out work as if he were in a classroom, I lose it.
Suddenly, he is 20 years older and a bum or a prisoner or living with me for the rest of his life and I’m hearing everyone tell me all the things he could’ve been “if he’d have been in school”… as if this trajectory could be backed by evidence. And of course, if he enters now and fails miserably it will be because he needed to be in school earlier. Of course. Because ya know–it’s not like we had a reason to pull him out, people… right? People don’t see that. And those that do would say “But you could’ve put him back in before now.” No matter what parenting decision you make, it’s just going to be wrong.
Whatever. His complete lack of discipline or perseverance towards a goal (keep in mind that this was all his idea) make me LOSE. MY. SH!T. I know what makes a successful person and it’s the ability to face a difficulty and take it on. Even if you don’t overcome it, just having the ability to attempt getting through it is so huge. And he completely lacks that. And it’s so polar opposite to the person I am at my core that I cannot even understand how he will function in life. Ever.
BigGuy’s IQ puts him in the 99.9% percentile of human intelligence. This is beyond Mensa. There are organizations that I didn’t even know existed for this kind of intelligence. Sometimes, it’s hard to NOT see that he’s a bright kid. But he also has Asperger’s and sometimes the connections between work and reward/success or other relational connections are completely absent. I can’t bank on the neurotypical developmental trajectory that would say “He’ll get it someday… maybe at 22, but it will come” because for BigGuy, it truly may never come. When he was younger, the therapists were so lost because there was no consistent “currency” to work with him–no consistent motivator. There is no carrot you can dangle in front of him to bribe him; and nothing he loves enough to motivate him on his own. Truly. Now, at 10, there are definitely some motivators, but nothing that pushes him hard. Even his strongest interests do not push him to do simple things if he just doesn’t feel like doing them. So losing his Minecraft time is not enough to make him brush his teeth. I don’t think you can grasp the gravity of that statement. It will result in a one-hour meltdown with begging about his being willing to “do ANYthing” to get his Minecraft time, but the offer to let him brush his teeth to get his time back results in him running up the stairs and playing with a Lego or his stuffed Tepig or reading whatever text-based material is within view. And the reminder that this is what he needed to do to get his Minecraft time results in “OH YEAH!”, but no movement.
You cannot wrap your head around this. I know you can’t. And it’s not just frustrating–it’s scary.
I was so thankful to see Time put out an article that (at least a tiny bit) addresses this oxymoron. Even without Asperger’s at play. In their article “How To Make Your Kids Smarter: 10 Steps Backed By Science” they note that IQ is kind of worthless without self-discipline.
“Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”
How do you teach a kid to have self-discipline? Seriously? How do you instill perseverance? We are not indulgent parents and there is a good structure to how our house operates. We’re not helicopter parents nor permissive parents. We facilitate our kids making their own choices (and having to stand by them as long as the consequence was foreseeable and not excessively/downright cruel or harmful). Some kids are just not going to get it. Especially those with impaired relational skills (and “relational” doesn’t just mean “between people” it means “connecting less concrete things”).
I’ve watched other kids with these issues in the schools and I’m not going there. People like to tell me that I don’t know that MY kid will wind up like that, but ya know what? I’m not rolling the dice either. I’m watching a rather brilliant young man who is VERY similar to BigGuy pretty much fail out of high school for the exact same problems and a mother who has given up trying to find his currency. I’m thankful to be able to see how his life is unfolding and seeing how removing the things he lives for or holding them hostage are doing absolutely nothing to move him. Just like BigGuy. I feel like I can learn from this and feel confident that this is just not going to be the route.
But I don’t know what the route is yet for my guy. And part of me is heartbroken because I often wonder if the last 4-1/2 years of moving and my less-than-engaging/encouraging/supportive behavior have squashed any potential inspiration and motivation or willingness to chase after his interests with more fervor. I can’t think about it. That’s over. We were in survival mode. It happened and I can’t change it.
I just need to get back on my horse and leave it alone. I need to focus on Girly. I need to do more with her. If he doesn’t want to work, nobody’s going to make him. Not here and not at school. That Cell Biology lab motivated him and I just cannot find a place like that for him to be full-time. I ache for that for him. Explaining to him that doing this work would get him to such a place is too far out for him to grasp.
Maybe his sister surpassing his achievements will be the motivator. Because that kid’s going to knock it out of the park.
And really, if I go back and look at MY goals for my kids, I could give a rat’s ass about any of this crap. But trying to meet his needs as he has explained them has been rough and it means doing this kind of crap. Maybe I just need to change my attitude about it. I don’t know. I’m having “a day”. And I love him so much. I just want to meet his needs. And hers.
I actually like this week as the last of my Facebook friends list sends their kids back to school. Here in the Midwest, that happened last week and the week before. But back on the East Coast, that happens this week. Above is my “back to school pics”. A friend pointed out the quintessential homeschool part: bare feet.
It’s not that I love the back to school pics. I mean, I enjoy seeing their kids and all–but I see them in pics all the time. It’s interesting to see what they’re wearing, but it’s not the “milestone picture” for me that it is for them. What I enjoy is knowing that NOW all of the “I can’t wait to ship them off” posts are close to an end. At least until winter break.
Thankfully, I have more than one friend on my Facebook list that actually mourns the back-to-school departure of their children. I love them. I love them for standing up and saying “I love my kids and I will miss them all day” against a cultural tide of parents singing about it being the most wonderful time of the year and cartoons of blissful parents literally dragging unwilling kids to school. Oh my God… WHAT have we become?
People will say “We’re only joking” but it’s not a joke. Truth lies in jest. These parents are as bored as their children. They are worn out of the daily struggles and arguments that often take place between parents and children. They are relieved to minimize those interactions. They are especially relieved to know that someone else will impart the knowledge those kids need to get those kids out of their parents houses… quickly and efficiently with at least an average level of self-supporting success.
Some people will even say “My kids are as thrilled to be away from me as I am of them–they want to go back to school!” Really? And what kind of statement is that making about your relationship with your children? Or about how they feel knowing that you’re all that happy to shoo them off? Why WOULD they want to stay with you knowing you feel that way?
Long ago and far away, I was the parent with a child that I NEEDED to go to school because truly–the idea of dealing with him all day was a prospect I just could not handle. I was in survival mode every minute that I was in his presence. I was miserable and I was struggling. I never felt like I knew how to make it right–no matter how many books or blog entries I read. This photo pretty much sums up my days with my son… and this is the lightest of it (which is why I COULD capture it on film):
It was a daily exercise in knowing how badly I was failing at parenting and having that very in my face. I hated everything about life back then. I woke up with dread about what the day would bring. I worried about what might get broken, how much yelling might occur, if there might be physical interactions, if my son would tantrum for 45 minutes straight at some point, hoping that if he did–it would be in our house, how many looks I would get from people around us who would instantly judge me as a bad parent… the list goes on.
His going to preschool filled so many voids for me. I felt like sending him there might have been the only thing I was doing right for his future because they would at least be able to educate him to be a productive human being. I also felt like sending him there made me a better mother because I got a break from feeling so completely worthless that it kept me alive. During that time, I could do other things that validated my worth–even if that was just a matter of cleaning the dishes and doing some laundry. Low-hanging fruits that were signs that I was capable of doing SOMEthing right.
It didn’t change the problems. It just gave me a much-needed break from them.
We had gone through two years of intensive therapies with our son. Fourteen hours/week (we were offered 20/week and declined out of sheer exhaustion and overwhelm). Research, interventions (both therapeutic and nutritional), every moment being a “teachable moment”. It was exhausting. It was beyond most parents challenges of finding things for a kid to do because they’re bored. I was engaged with my son at almost all times for a long time… and not in a loving parent way as much as a therapist/practitioner way. He didn’t see me as a parent. He didn’t connect with people really (at that time). And we didn’t grow into a family.
I loved my son, but the situation was just a nightmare. I was doing what I could. Then it all changed.
In a nutshell, we found out that he was being mistreated/mishandled at his preschool in ways we really didn’t know about. We knew he was “having bad days” but we had no idea what the school’s definition of that was. This resulted in mutually agreeing to end a private school contract midway through the school year (for the familiar, you can see how bad it was). We sent him to a school with a different pedagogy for the second half of the year and that went better but not WELL. He was our only child at the time and I loved him so deeply.
When it came time for Kindergarten, the school situation was just NOT a good fit. You find that schools do this with kids in the spectrum: put them several levels below their academic capabilities for the sake of them gaining other “skills” like relational skills or following directions (which would be easier if they don’t ALSO have to figure out how to do what they’re being instructed to learn). It was horrible. And I felt it was a recipe for behavioral disaster beyond what we were already dealing with. Ultimately, a teacher I respected told us that we should just keep him home for his Kindergarten year.
I wanted to cry.
But I did it.
You hear over and over from homeschool parents about the profound behavior and relationship changes that come with homeschooling. It sounds too good to be true–so good that you insist (at least in your head) that they could not possibly be dealing with the issues you’re dealing with. But many of them are dealing with worse.
And you don’t have to homeschool to change this relationship. But you DO have to take an active interest in engaging with your kids. That doesn’t mean being in the same room with them. Lots of parents say that they’re “with their kids all the time”. Sorry, being in the same room as them does not equate to being ENGAGED with them. I don’t mean to say you should be their buddy. But it does mean taking an interest in them from THEIR perspective. It means setting aside your agenda for them and really HEARING them without recourse about what you’re hearing. It means spending one-on-one time with each of your kids–even if it’s just a dedicated 15 minutes each week (preferably each day) that they can bank on having with you to talk about whatever THEY want to talk about and you being actively interested in hearing them 100%. It means hearing about Minecraft and at least pretending to follow along sometimes. It means trying really hard not to say “No” unless you really have to. It means finding opportunities for them to pursue their interests (and not being angry at your wasted efforts if they don’t want to do it). It means respecting their input on what things they want to take on, and what things they feel they need to quit. It means giving them a hug when they’re crying before lacing into the reprimand. It means a lot of putting aside how we culturally handle our kids and seeing our kids and their tender hearts first. It means understanding that they generally only operate out of love or fear–and trying to get to the heart of which it is, and addressing THAT rather than how that came out/manifested.
Connecting.
It doesn’t matter how you school your kids. But your relationship with them or their behavior shouldn’t be the reason you don’t homeschool. And sending them outside of the home to school doesn’t equate to offloading the work or getting these behavior or relational issues resolved. They’re not in your face as much and it’s easy to let the goal of correction slip off your radar. But make it a goal.
Life changes when you homeschool. All of your life. It’s different from the mainstream in many ways; but in many ways that you grow to be thankful for. Especially where it concerns the bond between you and your child.
Educated Adventures 