What We're Lacking

I stood in the educational materials aisle at the local bookstore with my head cocked sideways, trying to take in all of the titles, looking for one that would change my life.

I do this to myself. Often.

I can't help it! I see all of these incredible books that promise my children will have FUN learning the math they so hate to learn, or actually ENJOY learning to conjugate verbs and diagram sentences, and I get the fever. All of those bulletin board ideas and reproducable worksheets fill me with new hope. New passion. New direction.

But I wasn't looking for any of that.

Lately, I've been feeling as though I've overlooked a very important part of my children's education. For years, I've sought materials to help them with their math skills, to give them an appreciation of history, and to guide them towards writing well in order to communicate well. These are all important, but they really aren't the reasons I chose to allow my children to learn at home.

One reason I chose to homeschool was so that they could pursue the paths of education that are most interesting to them. I want them to be able to focus fully on where they feel God is directing them in their lives without having to wade through all of the twaddle they would encounter in a public school setting.

Another reason I want them learn at home is so that they can learn lessons that are truly valuable, things that will be necessary for them to know to carry them through their lives, things that will contribute to their happiness and well-being, things that don't always get fair air-time in a public education setting.

I found myself staring into the spines of books that made me want to grab them and take them home and change my life forever. I also scanned over others that just made my head ache with their temporality and evanescence.

I found books that covered how to pass proficiency tests, how to build self-esteem, and tons of advice on how to handle students with special needs. There were books on Art History, Geometry, Foreign Languages and Theater Groups. There were books that informed teachers what was wrong with the system, how to handle smoking in the bathroom, and why our children can't read. There were books on very broad subjects, like providing a classical curriculum, to very narrow subjects, like how to use Lord of the Flies as a teaching tool.

But I could not find what I wanted.

It became clear to me that there is really no priority given to teaching children the skills they need to operate a home. I could not find a single book on teaching home economics.

Somehow, I always believed that my children would just learn homekeeping skills by osmosis, but as they have grown, I have realized that this hasn't happened. It's my fault, really. I'm usually too busy or too stressed to let them make the bread or to teach them the proper way to do laundry. I've always focused more on language arts and fine arts than the art of keeping a home.

I was recently reading a blog (forgive me, I can't remember where or whose it was) that talked about how ill-prepared we are for motherhood, how the Christian mothering market, especially, puts such a sweet spin on mothering in order to try to sell it to as many women as possible that many women walk into motherhood completely unprepared. And then we get blindsided.

Sure, there are a lot of heartwarming aspects to parenting, but I have to say that I was definitely blindsided. While my mother could knit, crochet, sew, garden, cook, can, clean and launder, she never passed these skills along to me. My high school struggled with budgets, like every other high school, so the football program stayed while the Home Ec. program got canned.

So, growing up, the most I ever did was mix the meatloaf, feed that cat and take the clothes out of the drier.

Now, here I am with five kids, and I'm still trying to figure out how to keep a home.

Yeah, I guess I'm a little preoccupied with it. But, hey, I live in a community of Amish and Mennonite women who begin passing their skills along to their daughters from the time they leave school at the end of eighth grade.

One of my Amish neighbors gave birth to her fifth child. For the past month and a half since the child was born, I have been transporting one of Katie's neices to her house several times a week so that she can care for Katie's home and children. When I pick Leah up at the end of the day, I ask her how her day went. Her self-satisfaction is amazing to me. Without a sense of frustration, rebellion or embarrassment, Leah tells me about the laundry she washed, the meals she made, the rooms she cleaned and the dresses she sewed. "Do you like to sew?" I ask her. "Oh, yes," she says. "Sewing is my favorite."

Leah is not just content. She is happy.

Now, I'm not saying that my daughters will only grow to be keepers of a home. But, let's face it, they will most likely have to keep a home. After all, very few of us escape this lot in life, and while I believed growing up that I would marry a man who would share all of the homekeeping chores, it just didn't work out that way. I can spend every day of my life reflecting on my liberal schooling, telling myself that Marlo Thomas was right and that mommies and daddies should both share the chores, but it won't change where I am in my life. It will just make me bitter.

I am the keeper of my home.

So, while it may be beneficial for my children to learn quantam physics and algabraic equations, I would be a fool to believe that they will never need to learn how to get stains out of a dress shirt or make a healthy meal for their families.

I think the thing that pushed me over the edge to begin my search for a home economics curriculum was reading this post about the Duggar Family and all of the post's responses. I was floored by the superficiality and shallowness of the opinions expressed there. My eyes were opened wide to see the kind of people who believe it's "wrong" that a fifteen-year-old can make a MEAL for a family as opposed to throwing a mug of ramen noodles in the microwave for herself, or can SEW AN OUTFIT as opposed to spending the day at the mall with her daddy's credit card.

I believe that I was ill-prepared for adulthood, and I believe that I struggle with this every single day of my adult life. I want my children to have all of the tools necessary to be productive members of society. Yeah, my daughter may marry a rich guy who shares all of the homekeeping responsibilities between the days their maid comes. She may become a famous author, have tons of servants and never marry at all. She may be a marine biologist or an astrophysicist or a neurosurgeon. But she'll still need to know how to mash potatoes.

We can continue to live in denial, or we can prepare our children for life.

Here are some of the materials I've found that may be beneficial for teaching my children--an myself--some of the life skills that would make everyone's lives a lot easier:

Keepers of the Faith
Christian Light Education's Home Economics Course
Home Comforts : The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson
LifePac Home Economics

I haven't chosen any of these, and I'm still trying to think of ways to incorporate living skills into our daily lives. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I do own 401 Ways to Get Your Kids to Work at Home by Bonnie Runyan McCullough, which gives a checklist of skills that children can strive towards and the ages at which they can feasibly have mastery. This is a book I've wanted to look into more closely for many years. Maybe it's time.