Smrt Lernins

Danielle at Merryment and Mayhem asks, “Can you expound more on socializing as a homeschool parent/student? I would like to homeschool and this is my husband’s main argument against it. He thinks there are things that ’school teaches you that your parents can’t teach you’ though he has yet to tell me what exactly these things are (we’re working on this, as we don’t even have kids yet!).”

For starters, Danielle, is your husband’s concern about socializing or socialization? I think that’s at the root of many misconceptions about homeschooling right that, that socializing and socialization are the same thing. They aren’t, however, and they don’t serve the same purpose. Socialization is the process through which a child learns the customs, behaviors, and expectations of certain culture/society. Socializing is getting together for a social/common purpose. It’s an activity, not a process. My children, homeschooled though they may be, have opportunities for socialization and socializing.

As far as socializing go, my children do get to spend time with other children of roughly the same age group. We are involved in the homeschool soccer league and Math Olympiad. We have playdates with other families, homeschooler and otherwise. Patchfire and I have set up a weekly family get-together for Thursday afternoons, now that soccer is over for the season. My children also have friends in the neighborhood (and in my mother’s neighborhood) that they play with several times a week. They get invited to birthday parties. They hang out and play video games with buddies. I don’t keep them in a bubble and they don’t lack the ability to strike up friendships and conversations with peers. I’d say that means they’re reasonably good at socializing.

Socialization is an ongoing process and it’s not a concrete one. There isn’t one way to be socialized. Socialization starts at birth and is developed in the family setting. I certainly can thinks of aspects of popular culture and commonly acceptable social behaviors to which I do not want them socialized, and that is one very strong reason why I choose to homeschool. “Socialization” in an of itself isn’t inherently good or bad, but your culture’s rules and expectations can certainly be good or bad, moral or immoral, and I want to have that additional level of control over the culture into which my child is being socialized. I don’t want my children well-socialized to the bullying culture common in so many public schools. I don’t want them to be a part of the Lord of the Flies behavior common in some peer groups. I don’t see anything wrong with eschewing that particular aspect of socialization.

My children are, however, being socialized in the aspects of decent and polite interaction with others. That isn’t something you get from peers solely or even primarily. It’s modeled by the adults around them. It’s practiced through controlled social interaction. It’s experienced through interactions with intellectual or interest-based peers, rather than age-based. I don’t feel a large group of often poorly-supervised 10-year-olds has a lot to offer Captain Science in the way of the particular brand socialization that I’d like to see him develop. I do think he is being well-socialized into a culture of mixed age-groups, where he spends time with older and younger children, adults, teachers/coaches, family, and social groups assembled based on similarity of interest and personality. I think he’s developing ways of interacting with the world that will do him much better than the pack mentality I have seen evidences in many institutional (public or private) school settings. He’s different socialized, but that’s not a bad thing. He’s very social and he’s able to deal with a wide variety of people, at least as well as any slightly-surly prepubescent kid can be.

The issue of socializing/socialization seems to be a major sticking point for people who are against homeschooling, but I can’t figure out why that is, exactly. Are they really so threatened by the idea of someone being different? Is this the only thing they can specifically come up with to explain their otherwise hard-to-pin-down concerns about homeschooling? Of all the questions I’m asked about homeschooling, “are homeschooled kids socialized” seems to be the one I hear the most. I like this little video. A little heavy-handed (most people aren’t so dense that they can’t eventually understand what we’re talking about re: socialization), but sort of a nice representation of the sheer onslaught of concerns expressed over socialization. Just pretend that this one clueless mom represents ALL clueless people.

Anyway, the [Smrt] Homeschooler thinks she’s doing a pretty good job with socializing her children and allowing them plenty of opportunities to socialize. I just don’t think they’re exactly the same thing or that my children need to be socialized in the way deemed best by people who don’t live our lives.

Do you have a question for the [Smrt] Homeschooler? Email them to
smrtmama@smrtlernins.com

Homeschooling has its many obvious upsides: customized curriculum, flexibility of schedule, ability for students to advance at their own pace. I have also discovered many benefits I hadn’t expected, however. These are some of the benefits that have revealed themselves over time.

1. Fewer lice scares. What public/private school student hasn’t brought home at least one “We have lice going around! Oh no!” note at least once during their school years? This isn’t much of an issue w/ the homeschooled student. Sure, they could pick something up at co-op, but where are those kids going to get it? With smaller groups (and, admittedly, the hippie homeschool tendency to wash hair a little less frequency) in a carefully controlled setting, lice isn’t going to be spreading through the homeschool community like wildfire.

2. No (social pressure-laden) fundraisers. I know that some co-ops or homeschool groups do fundraisers, but not like public/private schools do fundraisers. Fundraisers are serious business in public and private schools. Wrapping paper, candy, cookie dough, frozen pizzas, flower bulbs: the list goes on and on. Note after guilt-inducing note letting you know all the prizes your child will be missing by your failure to adequately pressure your friends, neighbors, and relatives into buying multiple items from your little darling. You don’t want your baby to be the only one who didn’t get the key chain and teddy bear, right?

3. Ever-ready errand boy/girl. There’s something to be said for having a child in the house who is big enough to respond to, “Go grab the whatever-it-is-I-need from the car.” Sure, this isn’t something you, as a homeschool parent, should abuse, but it’s nice to not constantly be running up and down the stairs all the time. Besides, it’s lots of extra physical activity for your child. Mark it down as P.E. and you don’t even have to feel guilty.

4. Also, ever-ready manual labor. The kids are home during the time of day that I’m doing chores or running errands, which means I’ve got extra sets of hands when it’s necessary. Sure, doing the grocery shopping may have been easier with just the baby, but that meant balancing both baby and bags of groceries to get into the house. Homeschooled kids are there to help you carry in those bags! If you haven’t figured it out yet, household chores are also a great way to break up the monotony of the school day and to drive home the valuable lesson of the careers to which one may aspire without finishing a decent education. In other words, kids who pitch a fit over doing math or writing can scrub a bathroom or rake a yard to get the full experience of why we pushy parents think learning is so important.

5. Fewer birthday party invitations. If you don’t realize what a blessing this is, you have never had a child in public school. The obligatory birthday invitations mean hundreds of dollars spent on impersonal gifts for children your child doesn’t even play with outside of school or risking the possible social ostracism that comes from failing to appear at all the right parties. The other upside of this is that you are equally freed from the obligation of inviting 19 near-strangers into your home or rented bounce house facility once a year. The controlled social sphere of homeschooling means smaller, more intimate parties. Be happy about that.

6. You do not, in fact, gotta catch ‘em all. A controlled social sphere also means your child’s exposure to the “kid crack” phenomena of Pokemon, Bakugan, Yu-gi-oh, and all other collectible card games is significantly more limited. Few parents really want to get their kids started on these games (Which the kids don’t even know how to play. It’s just about the having), but they’re aware that knowledge of games like these (and ownership of the cards/toys) is like currency in a public school, and they don’t want their kids to be the socially impoverished ones, begging for little Pikachu scraps off the elementary lunch table. As long as you keep them off of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, homeschooled children don’t have the same exposure to these games, and aren’t as likely to get caught up on the frenzied need to have them. Homeschooling, I choose you!

7. Minivan Expectations. No one will make “oh, you poor, unhip thing” faces over your choice to drive a minivan. Everyone knows that homeschoolers drive minivans, even if they only have one or two kids. Homeschoolers are not expected to drive SUVs, Camrys, or muscle cars. If anything, there might be some confusion as to why your van is a mini and not a conversion.

8. Floods. Not the natural disaster, but the pants length. By the end of the season, pants are hanging a few inches above the shoes and shirts are cutting off a few inches above the wrist. In a public or private school setting, this means either replacing the garments for the few remaining weeks of cold weather or dealing with the disapproving looks and comments directed at your slightly bedraggled-looking offspring. When you’re homeschooling, no one cares if your kid is wearing floods. Being slightly ill-dressed is part of the social expectations for homeschoolers, so you’re disappointed nobody by meeting those expectations and rising above expectations if your kid is wearing pants that fit come March. It’s win-win.

9. Never again be perceived as idle. While a stay-at-home-mom may be perceived (incorrectly and unjustly) as “not working” or “doing nothing all day” or “getting to stay home and play with the kids all day,” a homeschooling stay-at-home-mom is perceived as undertaking a momentous and time-intensive task, one that most parents of public/private schooled children believe they could never, themselves, manage. Fewer people will make assumptions about your availability (“Well, you don’t do anything all day, so you can do this favor for me!”). Lackadaisical housekeeping will be viewed, not as a sign of laziness, but as a natural byproduct of the tremendous effort expended planning lessons, directing learning, and grading and filing papers. Don’t disavow anyone of that belief; You’ll ruin it for the rest of us.

10. An excuse for weirdness. When your child does something unusual, socially awkward, or just plain bizarre in public, you can easily soothe observers’ distressed looks with a slightly dismissive hand wave and an, “Oh, don’t worry. They’re homeschooled.” This also works pretty well to explain weirdness in homeschooling parents. A woman muttering to herself in the aisles of Borders book store is creepy. A homeschooler muttering to herself in the aisles of Borders book store is just planning for next semester.

Nana (my mother) used to work in our county’s public school system — first as a substitute teacher, then as a parapro, and finally as a PE teacher (before “retiring” to help take care of Captain Science while I finished my undergrad). She often referred to the children at her school as the “bubble wrap children of [NanaSchool] Elementary” due to overt helicopter parent over-protectiveness exhibited by the majority of the [s]mothers (and some fathers bothers) at the school.

One great example of this is during the Presidential Fitness Challenge. The children had to run a short distance in order to meet the standards. Apparently, many of these kids had never run before, because they were stopping in the middle of the run, completely freaked out, because…

Their hearts were beating fast and it was hard to breathe while they were running!

They would then go, wailing miserably, to the front office to call their mommies, who would come snatch their fragile darlings up out of school to take them home, declaring that they MUST have asthma (undiagnosed, of course, and oddly enough, completely asymptomatic otherwise) and should therefor never be made to do any hard physical exertion.

Whenever someone makes a comment to me about the sheltered existence of homeschooled children, I think of the bubble wrap children of [NanaSchool] Elementary, and I smile.

Yes. Sheltered. That’s totally us.

We think Babypie has rubella. She woke up on Wednesday with slightly rashy cheeks, a runny nose, and a very mild fever, but by lunch time, she had developed a rah over her torso, which started out lacy, but quickly turned to full-coverage. Over the next three days, the red, itchy rash got much worse and began spreading down her arms and finally her legs. We had two trips to the pediatrician, where she had blood work (normal WBC and platelets) and a strep test (negative) and ended up with a vague diagnosis of “viral rash.” Viral rash seems to be the medical term for “I have no idea what I’m looking at, but she’s not dying or anything, and I can’t come up with a solution.”

Because I’m one of those moms (the kind who Googles symptoms), I started doing some research. Now, I’m not a hypochondriac. I am, however, pretty great at accurately diagnosing unusual illnesses. For example, I figured out that the strange circular welts on Captain Science’s back were nummular (discoid) eczema patches, which are quite unusual in a child (they’re common in the elderly, mainly old men) — the pediatrician was impressed and confirmed I was correct. Babypie’s symptoms and her rash are a perfect match for the descriptions and pictures of rubella. I’ve compared her rash to pictures of every other possible type of rash I could think of, from Fifth disease to chicken pox to system thrush to eczema to hives — the only one hers looks like is rubella. It’s also called “three-day measles” because it’s bad for three days and then starts to improve — yesterday, her third day, was miserable, but this morning, she woke up with her rash beginning to fade and feeling much better.

On the third night of her illness, she was rolling around and crying because she itched so badly, and I was holding her and crying because I felt so helpless to make her feel better. Today, my mother said, “Now you understand why, when vaccines were introduced, parents were so eager to immediately start giving them to their children.” I do understand — at 3am, I probably would have given Babypie anything I could have to make her comfortable, without researching or second-guessing, and damn any long term consequences. My motherheart would have overrun my logicmind.

Now, I’m not saying that people vaccinate out of fear or that it’s illogical to vaccinate. I understand why parents would make the choice to vaccinate fully, and I respect that. We are selective vaxxers. Captain Science is almost fully vaccinated, partially due to a prior enrollment in a private school that didn’t allow exemptions. The Tank is on a delayed course, starting at age 2, and has so far had the Hib and the DTaP series. Rubella isn’t one we would have vaccinated against anyway, with the exception of Babypie at puberty if she hadn’t caught it naturally. We’ve based our vaccination choices on research, consultation with our pediatrician, and our children’s reaction to prior vaccines. We’ve been very conscientious about the order in which we give vaccines.

The thing that’s hard about choosing not to vaccinate, though, is having to tell your heart to quiet down when your child is suffering through a potentially preventable illness. The efficacy of preventing that illness may certainly be debatable, a vaccine is no guarantee that your child will not catch the illness, and the immunity from the vaccine may be impermanent or incomplete, or but in theory, you could have prevented the illness and chose not to do so. Some people think that’s a horrible, irresponsible choice, so you have to be prepared for a negative response when people hear your child has chicken pox, rubella, or another vaccine-preventable(ish) disease. Choosing to delay or decline vaccines is so…theoretical. It’s research-based. It’s not based on being IN THE NOW with a sick child. Even if you know the choice was the right one, IN THE NOW you wish you could go back in time and prevent it. Of course, in Babypie’s case, she wouldn’t have been vaccinated against rubella anyway, as she’s only 7.5 months old, but that didn’t really alleviate the worry and guilt at 3am.

Does this have anything to do with homeschooling? Well, there’s the obvious factor of homeschooling being in the home, around illness and other family events. There’s the factor of homeschooling making vaccination a little less relevant — you can continue to educate during illnesses and your child is also less likely to be exposed to them. I also think it’s relevant because both issues are about acting outside the acceptable social norms. Vaccinating your child is a social norm. Sending your child away to school, especially public school, is a social norm. Both are decisions that need to be made, not on a whim and based on a tender motherheart, but through careful research and the use of a logicmind. Plus, “Why we don’t vaccinate against [that disease]” makes a great topic for a discussion about things like science, society, and history.

This is all sort of rambling and odd, but I’ve been up with a rashy, itchy, possibly rubella’d baby for several nights now. Maybe I’m grasping at straws, but something in all of this did feel relevant to me. Maybe you can see it, too? Maybe I’m just seeing spots where there are none.