The Baby IS The Lesson
One morning on
my daily walk, I was fretting and stewing over what I could possibly do with
my one-year-old during school time. I was feeling
some despair
with a new baby on its way. I couldn't see any end to the disruption of babies
in my home school for many years to come. I was praying and scheming at the
same time: I could wait until the baby's nap to teach school, I could rotate
the children with baby-sitting chore away from our schoolroom, I could get
a playpen, etc.: all solutions that didn't feel right—babies needs
their moms!
As I walked and
pondered, suddenly the Spirit spoke one sentence to my mind and (as is usually
the case with personal revelation) revolutionized
my mindset
entirely! "The baby IS the lesson!" I thought I was trying
to teach Math, but in reality I had been teaching, day by day, how an adult
values the precious gift of children. My children, by watching how I deal with
the frustration of a crying baby or keep a toddler happy and busy with some
of his "own" pieces while we play a math game, are soaking up "the
lesson". Unfortunately, I had occasionally been teaching that the baby
interrupts our learning.
How to be a Christlike
person is the most valuable lesson a child could ever learn! The lesson is
learned moment by moment; watching
a parent being patient,
handling frustration with kindness, pressing on for the goal in spite of numerous
interruptions, valuing each child's needs regardless of inconvenience. That
valuable insight—how Mother handles the baby is the real lesson—has
dramatically changed how I view my home school. I am teaching foremost my values:
godly character, kindness, respect for others, individuality, sacrifice and
a host of other Christlike attributes. Teaching them reading, writing, math,
etc. is very important to me but my perspective has been altered. "Mimic
me, follow me and I will show you the way a Christlike person acts and what
he values". That is the message every parent relays to their children
whether they are aware of it or not. Children try to copy everything anyway
(our mannerisms, our daily activities, etc.). We must be certain that we are
providing a correct pattern for them to copy, not only in our daily activities
but in our attitude, our tone of voice, and our facial expression. We need
to conduct our lives so that we can say "follow me". If our children
are to "buy" our values, what a tremendous responsibility we have
to make sure we are living our best so the lesson is clear and well learned!
What more could you ask for from your homeschool than to produce Christlike
people?!
Teaching your children basically means getting your own personal life
in order and striving daily to be the leader for them to follow. Of course,
we fall
short and they must look to Christ for the perfect being but they need to see
daily how one acts, speaks, lives, solves problems. We are acting as a proxy,
in a sense, for Christ. Since they can't have his daily role model, then he
has given his children parents to be an example, to point the way. Along with
lesson preparations, we need to prepare ourselves by asking: is the pattern
I live the way Christ would act? Can I say today that I have marked the path
for my children to follow? Children learn from seeing their parent's role model.
Watching an adult make a simple mistake (such as being too punitive with a
child) and go through the process of repenting is 100 times more effective
than your Family Home Evening lesson on repentance. This means children must
be intimately involved with you in your daily life. A few hours a day after
school won't do it.
Children should be involved in the adult's life rather than
daily life rotating around the children. Research has shown that children who
have grown up to
be productive well-adjusted adults are those who have been drawn into the parent's
world; their daily activities, work, and interests; rather than having parents
who centered their world on the child. When I began home schooling, I never
could find the time to do the things I felt were important for my life; such
as writing in my journal, corresponding with relatives, studying my scriptures,
and more. Somehow, in my busy-ness of trying to teach the kids how to write
in their journals, I was neglecting my own journal writing. Thankfully, we
now have journal writing time in school daily, and we write letters to relatives
together as a family on Sunday. Homeschool life should help parents do the
daily necessities, rather than usurp the time needed for them. Home maintenance,
chores, food preparation, gardening, food preservation, budgeting, clothing
care (mending and sewing), planning family social relationships, caring for
small children, record keeping, quilting, wallpapering, etc. are all wonderful
life skills that can be done together that enhance a child's education!
The
parent's joyful task is to lead and guide the child into the real world—not
set up a contrived pseudo-world to teach skills that the children would easily
learn if they spent their time around adults who were striving to live good
lives. What constitutes an adult trying to live a "good life"? Following
our prophet's counsel alone could be a full-time curriculum! Plant a garden,
read good literature, serve the needy, be politically aware, keep a journal,
vote for honest men, develop your talents, etc. The exciting part about leading
a child into the real world is that they are self-motivated. The moment I sit
down to play the piano, all my children want to play and want me to teach them
to play something. No sooner than I begin typing on the computer, I have the
whole family "needing" to type. My efforts at writing have, humorous
to me, stimulated the production of "books" from my youngest children.
Modeling is so much more effective than lecturing.
Studies show that
the biggest determining factor for a child's success in reading in school
is if they have
seen a parent reading in the home on a regular basis.
This is especially true for boys if the parent who reads is their father, rather
than their mother. Somehow, the example says far more about the value of reading
than endless hours in school reading groups.
In every area,
it takes instruction to teach skills to little people. Children need to master
the basic academic
skills (reading, writing, arithmetic), social
manners, music competence, and a host of other abilities and that does take
focused concentration and time from mother/teacher to accomplish. It isn't
realized just by living in a family. But shared family life practices and
contributes to those skills. Having taught my little girl the numbers and
the plus, minus
and equal signs and how they worked, she jumped right into figuring out how
many plates she needed to set the table using her new skills: ("We have
9 and Mark is on a mission, and the boys are at BYU so that is minus 3, so
we need six").
When we think
of homeschool, sometimes we get tunnel vision, and think "academics", "keeping
up to speed" and other worrisome concerns that don't really tell the whole
story. Homeschool is the growing and nurturing of fine, upright people. So,
how we treat and value the baby really is the lesson.
Class never dismissed.
—Diane
Hopkins
