In my life journey, I have had so many moments of silence. So many moments of apparent inaction. Yet looking back, those are the moments during which I have endured the most growth. This is easy for me to understand in myself, in others it’s not as clear, and in my children… well that’s a whole story on its own.
Being a parent is one of the hardest jobs to do! There is no training, no specific education, every child is different and there is no scale to gauge whether you are doing an ok job or not. When my children used to attend public school, which they did until 1st and 3rd grade, I would use their mental stability as a gauge of my parenting skills. After all, they presumably were getting everything they needed academically from school, so my job was to nurture their mental health and growth. Once we started homeschooling, everything seemed up to me. We no longer had tests and therefore no gauge on how they are doing academically, and when you see someone everyday all day, gauging their mental health becomes more blurred. Needless to say there was a lot of winging it.
This left me with a dilemma, on one hand one of the best parts of homeschooling, unschooling, lifeschooling or whichever route you take is that you are able to be released from the restraints of the current educational system. You can, but do not need to, follow a set curriculum, and what they learn is of your choosing. This created for me a world of possibilities! But on the other hand, it also brought along fear. The fear of them not learning enough or the right thing or missing out, etc. Feelings that I am sure most homeschool parents can relate to, as I feel it is part of the journey. My immediate solution was to push my girls. I mean, I’m their mom! It’s my job! It was my perception at the time, that only if my daughters excelled at… EVERYTHING… was I doing the correct thing and a good job. But how can you live in the realm of child guided education and also push them constantly to do learning activities?
This dilemma became more apparent when my oldest daughter reached her preteen years and didn’t want to do anything. Simple tasks became points of contention, and deep analyzations of “why” were constant no matter what I was asking her to do. During our travels the solution to this was easy, as we would always be in situations in which participation was a must and a once in a life time opportunity. But during our breaks in which we would be surrounded by family and familiar landscapes that do not need exploring, the inactivity seemed like the biggest obstacle we faced.
There is such a fine line between facilitating action and being pushy. And after 3 years of homeschooling the line was still not quite clear. I knew for sure I didn’t want to be pushy as it sometimes makes kids feel inadequate or not good enough or even judged, so I would attempt to create a dialogue to assist them in working out their feelings of why they choose inaction over action. This is a work in progress, as I have a verbal communicator and another one that is much more reserved. But it has definitely helped me draw parallels between their inaction and my own.
For me inaction means sitting with myself attempting to make sense of the things that are occurring inside of me. I’m usually a run before you crawl type of person, but there are those moments in which I just don’t know what is right for me. So I sit or lay or read or do anything that will give me time to process and get to that place in which I’m ready for action. How is this different than what they are going through? Why do we see them as lazy “teens” instead of adjusting humans? I found my answer to this in my personal fear of failure. If I don’t push them, I’m I being a bad parent? If they aren’t knocking out school work diligently, was my decision to homeschool them wrong? If they are not ready to be quizzed by random strangers (LOL, if you homeschool, you know what I am talking about!), am I not providing them with the proper education?
This realization has helped me quite a bit to “chill out” and let them guide. Now I always look within myself to see where my drive to push is coming from. Sometimes they get in their heads or overthink things, which tends to cause them to hold back. In these situations they need to know I got their backs and support them. But sometimes, they just need time, to sit or lay or read or do whatever they need to so they can understand what is happening in those ever changing little bodies. And I have to understand that it’s about themselves and not a gauge on my ability as a homeschool parent.