Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[jhasp]

34. How many homeschoolers do you know?

The group that we hang around with generally have very outgoing kids. As I mentioned above, there is a large 4-h group where the kids (of all ages) participate in elections and make decisions for the group-without parental control.

Yes, we do have a little more control over what our kids do. It's funny to watch my kids (6 and 7 years old) when they see commercials, they take them very seriously because we generally don't let them watch regular TV. They also don't beg and scream and cry when they don't get the hottest new toy on the market. My 7 year old son loves Legos, but today at the store he saw a set that he wanted (and he had the money for) and he made the decision on his own to save his money for something better.

The homeschool kids that we know interact a lot with other kids in and outside of their age groups and also have disciplinarians that are not their parents. My wife is an AWANA (kids' church activity) director and part of her task is to keep eight 5, 6, and 7 year olds in line. Kids come over to my house to play with the kids and my wife and I have to set and enforce rules for them.

I think that a lot of people that aren't involved with homeschooling get this idea that homeschooled kids live in a bubble who the only adults that the kids come into contact with are their parents. I've rarely seen this happen. At least once a week my kids go over to someone else's house to play and we usually have kids over at our house every week or so. Every two weeks, several of our families get together. We hire babysitters and send them off with the kids so the adults can have a potluck dinner and enjoy spending time together. Usually, once per week my wife takes the kids on a field trip, sometimes with other homeschool families, sometimes not. The last one was two weeks ago (this week is my spring break so we took a mini-vacation), when she took them to an owl education program. They got to see all kinds of owls, dissect owl pellets, do some art projects, etc. Usually every week, she takes the kids to a pottery class. She often just drops them off and they work one-on-one with the owner of the pottery store to make projects. The kids are signed up for a city soccer club (non-homeschool, but a lot of homeschool participants) that starts in the spring.

We do take a greater interest in being good disciplinarians because we do spend a lot of time with our kids and we don't want to spend time with brats, even if they are our kids. My daughter (6) is going through an early-diva phase and we had her fill up a bag of her toys (that she can earn back) every time her inner diva got out of hand and then set her bedtime earlier for the days that were especially bad. So far it's been working well, we haven't had any extreme diva outbursts for a few days.