Here’s something that we* have noticed cropping up on the Well Trained Mind forums: mothers of toddlers, especially babies or very young toddlers, with no older children, who refer to themselves as “homeschoolers” and to the interaction they have with these small children as “homeschooling.”
Ok, mothers (or fathers) of the wee younglings. Let’s lay this out on the table. What you are doing isn’t homeschooling; it’s parenting. Whether you plan to educate your kids at home, send them to private school, or put them on a bus to public school, regardless of the method you might be planning to use in the future, what you are doing right now with your 6 month old, 1 year old, or 2 year old is not homeschooling. Staying home with little Mackynzie and Skyler, teaching them their ABCs, coloring, playing with play dough, teaching them shapes and colors — that isn’t homeschooling. That’s mothering (or fathering) and I would hope you do that regardless of your future educational choices.
You don’t have to justify being an involved parent by calling it homeschooling. You don’t have to validate being a stay-at-home parent by calling it homeschooling. Parenting your children is inherently justified, inherently valid. It is a good thing, a virtuous and noble calling that is practiced around the world without any need to introduce the degree of formality that you get when you try to label it “homeschooling” just to make it sound like you’re “doing something.” Parenting is doing something, an irreplaceable something, and helping your child learn in those early years is a facet of parenting.
How will you know when parenting begins to cross the line into homeschooling? Think of it this way: If you had never heard of homeschooling, would you not read to Mackynzie? Would you never help Skyler differentiate between blue and green? Of course you would, because that’s part of parenting your child. You don’t have to have even the vaguest concept of what homeschooling is to know those are things you should probably be doing with your child. As your child gets older, however, and his/her contemporaries are starting to be loaded up into minivans to sit in carpool lines for their twice weekly preschool, but you’re sitting down with Mackynzie to work on phonics or playing math games with Skyler, you’re starting to get into the homeschooling arena. You’re beginning the process of formalizing, or simply crystallizing, that parental guiding and modeling into educating. That parenting in the early years was laying the foundation for a child who will love to learn, but now you can begin to lay down some bricks and beams (and yes, the house metaphor will end here).
In short, your one year old isn’t homeschooled because she doesn’t need to be homeschooled. She needs to be mothered (or fathered). She needs parental attention, interaction, and guidance. She needs to be shown which things are important and set on the path to education. She does not, God help us all, need a curriculum. She doesn’t need an educational methodology applied to the time you spend together. There is no Classical Parenting, no Waldorf Parenting, no Montessori Parenting, no Unschooling Parenting (or if there is, there shouldn’t be) — there’s just a child and the adults who love and guide her. Let her be a baby and a toddler before you try to make her a student of anything but the world. Revel in motherhood or fatherhood, and if you look to a time when you will also be a teacher, do it without envy or haste.
Just because you aren’t homeschooling yet, it doesn’t mean you won’t. Just because you aren’t homeschooling yet, it doesn’t mean that what you’re doing doesn’t have a most remarkable purpose. A mother or father really is exactly what your child needs you to be. It’s not sub-par, less-than, or requiring additional titles to make it a worthwhile profession. Parent now; homeschooling will come later.
*Not meaning the royal “we,” but Patchfire, Snowbird, and me. It would be disingenuous for me to say that I noticed it, because I’m not the one who pointed it out in conversation today. That was Snowbird.
