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.
I wholeheartedly agree [thunderous applause]. You have written this blog post so well. It is much more coherent and reasoned than my scream-obscenities-at-computer-screen rants every time I see someone asking for curriculum advice for a 2-year old *bleuchh*.
But… but… all those extra points on the crunchy test for “currently homeschooling” versus “thinking about it.”
I have been homeschooling 21 years. With three graduates DD ( 21), DS ( 19) DS (18), who are still learning every day.And two little ones just starting out, my youngest are 3.4 and 1.6. I identify them as homeschoolers. We have a curriculum of books to read, and tons of hands on things.
Learning is fun ! Learning should be for a lifetime! Learning starts at birth, and ends with death!
Just my two cents !
I tend to look at it as home “schooling.” I’m not looking for a curriculum to implement with my toddler. Just one to review, to play around with a little and see if I like it for when he gets bigger. Given that the next door neighbour girl is already loaded up in her mom’s minivan and driven off to a pre-k program, and she’s about two weeks older than my little boy, and my 2 year old nephew has been going to school (in a formal school building and everything – pre-k to 6!) for the last eight months… it seems that perhaps the title ought to be “schooling” is the new parenting – regardless of in home or out. It’d be one thing if these other little ones were in day care. KinderCare or whatever. But they’re not. They’re in these little driven programs that push them. Granted it’s pushing them to learn “green” and “round” but the point remains.
I call what I do home “school” because of a few things. I know I don’t have any basis for calling my kid ‘in school,’ but if you listen to the folks around here, it’s practically criminal to not have him in a learning program by the time he’s 8 months old. So we set up a routine, which I wouldn’t ordinarily do, and we call our organized chaos and pretend pre-k ‘program’ “school.” It keeps the neighbours from calling CAS (AGAIN, BASTARDS), and gives us a bit of structure – so when we *do* start formal schooling it’s not so much of a shock. It’s, essentially, preschool in the house. Is it stuff I’d do anyhow? Damn straight. Is it stuff other people seem to send their kids out of the home for nowadays? Sadly, that one’s a yes answer too. And I think that might be how you get people like me who classify themselves as homeschoolers, even if their kids aren’t doing anything you wouldn’t teach them at this age normally.
Hopefully that made sense. It’s early for me. o.O;;
This is my tenth year of homeschooling. I try to keep the eye-rolling down both on and offline when people refer to “homeschooling” their toddlers and preschoolers. I also try to keep my opinions about “curriculum” for the under 5 age group to myself as well. When my kids were that little, the Experts ™ were all wild that the little ones must have an “enriched environment” to prepare them for school. By this they meant having a lot of craft stuff, picture books, learning toys, dress up clothes, puppets, etc. etc. etc. available to “stimulate” the child’s desire to learn. Personally we went for the sorts of toys that enable imaginative play and embarrassingly huge amounts of reading material.
Today, if the little ones aren’t learning advanced geometric shapes before they’re able to control their urge to chew on those $$$$ “pre-Math manipulative” blocks, you’re a Bad Parent. I feel a great deal of sympathy for the parents and sympathy and worry for the kids. IMO the under-five set should be out eating bugs and getting filthy in the mud (learning about the physical world through direct experimentation). Learning is not equal to/same as “school”. Thankfully!
I agree! I understand the enthusiasm and desire to commit to a way of life from the beginning. But it’s not the same, and one just won’t understand until actually schooling begins.
I think a lot of relaxed homeschoolers would have a hard time identifying a set date where it changes from parenting to homeschooling. I joined a homeschooling group when my oldest was three because I wanted to get to know people in the area and have some local support. I wasn’t bringing them to field trips or co-ops, but I did go to moms nights out and talk to the other parents. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to say I was homeschooling, but when people wondered when I was going to do preschool at when he was only 3 and 4 years old, it was helpful to be able to say we’re going to homeschool, and we’re starting now. Even if our homeschooling was just good parenting. I totally agree with you though about the silliness of buying curriculum for toddlers.
I can see how that would be the case, definitely, but that doesn’t exactly explain away “homeschoolers” of 16 month olds.