Homeschool Foundation?

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Homeschooling Moms, what do you think of this article?



If someone had asked me 11 years ago, when I first began to home school, if Christ was our schools foundation I would have responded, "Well, of course HE is! We study the Bible each morning, memorize scriptures daily, read Christian biographies and work on character training plus all of our textbooks and curriculum are Christian based." Over the past two years the Lord has slowly began to unveil the truth that, even though we were ‘doing’ a lot of the ‘right and godly’ things in our homeschool, our foundation was not in Christ as much as my own works, effort and curriculum.

This seems to be a common trap amongst home schooling families. We want so desperately to 'do it right', to be the very best parents that we can in order to raise godly children. We want the perfect curriculum or the idealistic schedule to guarantee that our children will become all our hearts desire them to become. We can go for years building a foundation that we believe to be Christ while all the time depending on our own efforts to bring about godly character in our children. As the storms and trials of life beat against this foundation we will begin to see if our faith truly has been Christ or our own efforts .

These are four common symptoms that may reveal a wrong foundation.

1. Confusion: Which curriculum do I use? What is best? Do I use unit studies or workbooks?

2. Overwhelmed: How do I do IT all? How do I homeschool, sew, grow my own wheat to bake bread, birth 20 children, memorize scripture, use only unit studies, run a home business, etc. in order to produce a godly home?

3. Fear- what if I miss something? What if there is a big gap in their learning that I could have prevented? What if they never learn to read? Am I training them up in the way that they should go or is there something else I should be doing? What will happen to my family if my husband makes decisions that I feel are detrimental to our children? What if I train my children wrong and because of it they never become a Christian?

4. Anger and Frustration- "Help, I'm suffocating under this load of things I have to do!!" The mother is angry because of everything that has to be done. She is resentful towards her husbands requests or demands, short-tempered with the children if they mess up the house or request her help with school work. She wakes up with a frown and goes to sleep with one. There is no joy in the home or her heart.

Fear seems to be a common denominator in many of these symptoms. It may be the fear of failing at home schooling our children. We may fear that they will not be able to meet the college requirements. Or that they will never become a Christian. We may even give into the fear of man by comparing ourselves to those who seem to have it all together. We see the pictures and stories on the front of homeschooling magazines and we know that our families fall short of this ideal. A lot of homeschoolers are burdened by an enormous amount of peer pressure. Have you felt it? Do you hear that imaginary voice whispering, "The perfect homeschool mother rises at 5 a.m. to spend time with the Lord, she bakes her own bread from the wheat that she grows on her 10 acre homestead as her 9 children are doing their unit study in the home that the family has built?" Or how about this mindset," The perfect Christian family has a father who leads devotions, a mother who never loses her temper while the family watches no television, and trains their children consistently by the "Growing Kid's God's Way" method. As we compare our family to theirs we see that we fall short of this ‘perfect’ model and live in dread that our children will never reach heaven because of it.

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