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TryingMyBest
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| Posted: May 07 2013 at 7:03pm | IP Logged
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Our DD is 3 and a half. I'm still working and DD attends a wonderful little Montessori school. DH and I have discussed my desire to quit and stay home with DD. It makes him nervous, I think because we would be completely dependent on his salary. I can understand and respect that.
However, I haven't yet confessed my desire to homeschool DD. He's very happy with DD's school. I'm pretty happy with it but I'm not sure it's the right thing for DD as she gets much older. It's a secular school which is not a bad thing in and of itself. However, I think as DD will get older, she will begin to notice the differences between how we do things at home and what they do at school. DD's teacher is kind of hippy-ish which doesn't bother me too much but I think she bends over backwards to celebrate non-Christian holidays but there is no mention of Christmas or Easter.
Plus while I really like Montessori for small children I'm not as convinced it's the best educational theory for kids after the primary years.
Did you guys struggle with getting your husband on board with homeschooling? If so, what did you do to get him to see that it was the right thing for your family?
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mom2mpr
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| Posted: May 07 2013 at 9:03pm | IP Logged
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We did struggle. Dh was not for it.
We did a "test" year. Ds was a November birthday so in kindergarten would have been one of the older kids. The year before he should have gone to school, we did homeschool. It was kindergarten-easy, a blast to do, and they are just learning so much it was so easy for me  he was reading well, and just doing super at the end of the year. So, while dh still wasn't totally on board, he didn't see anything that would say we couldn't. And ds and I were just having the time of our lives. Dd was born and he should have gone to K, but he stayed home and developed such an awesome relationship with her. It was meant to be for our family. If he had gone off to school they would not have had a relationship of the quality they have now being 5 years apart in age.
And here we are...10th grade in the fall.
Each year we re-evaluated and each year dh was more and more on board. So much so that ds will attend a 3 day a week co-op for high school in the fall and dh is a little wary.  so funny. I am all over it and know it is the right thing and time for him.
Even if you are working you can still do those first few elementary years in a few hours on the weekends or even 15-20 minutes every evening. Don't buy curriculum, just one of those "What Your child should know in First Grade..." By Ed Hirsch, I believe, and pick a small section to read. There are so many simple things to do when they are little that "counts" for school.
Good luck and I know The Lord will help you determine what is right for your family!
__________________
Anne, married to dh 16 years!, ds,(97), Little One (02), and dd (02).
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SallyT
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| Posted: May 08 2013 at 7:04am | IP Logged
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No advice about convincing spouses, because my husband was on board from the beginning. Our oldest child (now a college sophomore) had been in school, and we had both been dismayed by both the lack of quality in her education ("When is it going to be more than OK?") and, increasingly, by her social experiences. By the time we brought her and her younger brother home (my two youngest have never been to school), he was firmly convinced. She was 9, her brother was 5, we had a baby and another on the way, and I had been researching and talking about homeschooling for a good year before we took the plunge. Homeschooling was the last thing we were ever going to do -- now I can't imagine living any other way.
One thing that helped was that we were already a 1-income family. I had ditched my last vestiges of a job when my oldest was 2, and when we made the decision to homeschool, we were already a graduate-student family living on grants and loans in an expensive foreign country, so doing things on a shoestring was nothing new to us when we came back to the US and began this whole adventure.
I've just finished rereading an excellent, very smart book on homeschooling -- Home Schooling: A Family's Journeyby Gregory and Martine Millman -- which might be of interest to you not least because the first step in that family's journey is their determination that their children should have the "luxury" of a mother at home. The decision to homeschool kicks in later, but by the time it does, they have already arranged their life so that they are able to survive on one, and occasionally no, steady income, with eventually six children.
As Anne points out, there are ways to balance work and homeschool (depending on what you do for a living). I do a bit of freelance writing, which pays well when I do it, though it's not steady, and can be done from home, generally in hours when I would otherwise be sleeping . . . :). But really the large, primary question is the balance of work and family life, which gets harder, not easier, in my view, as children get older, and as there are possibly more of them. In many situations, to have both parents working becomes an expensive cycle of child-care -- you start out working to support the family, but really who you end up supporting to a great degree is whoever is caring for your children while you work . . . not to mention the providers of work and school clothing and other requisites that attach themselves to the working life.
So to me it seems that the first questions to pray about in search of an answer are questions about general quality of life for your family: the financial good of your work vs. other possible goods of your not working, particularly for your child or children. What vision do you both have for your daughter's childhood, and that of any other children you might have? What vision do you both have for your life as a family? What do you both view as absolute requirements for family life, and what are extras? If you were going to pare life back to the bone, what would be expendable and what wouldn't be?
It is tough for husbands to contemplate carrying the whole financial load, particularly in a culture where that's no longer the norm. My husband is a college professor at a small school with a meager endowment and a five-year salary freeze, and even with what I'm able to contribute, and even though we're actually, in reality, more financially secure now than we've been in years, he still feels the pinch at times. The "family wage" is no longer a reality, so to live on one income takes some determination and creative thinking, and to contemplate that from the outside can be pretty scary.
It might help to think in terms of weaning yourselves off as many things as possible that your salary is currently helping to pay for -- I'm not assuming that those are luxuries, by the way! But while you have the safety net of your salary, start to re-budget as if that salary didn't exist: only so much for groceries, utilities, etc. You could look on the exercise now as a savings plan, to see how much of your salary you could just bank for a rainy day while living on his, and what larger adjustments you would have to make to get by without the second income. That might be an illustrative first step.
Well, other than the book recommendation, please don't think of this as advice! I'm just thinking out loud here. I will offer my day for the intention of your discernment, because these questions truly are huge, and they have to do with intangibles of childhood and family life far more than they have to do with money, though obviously everybody needs that. My own children are growing up and out seemingly overnight -- the babies I had when we began homeschooling are 9 and 10; the 5-year-old is 15 and taking college classes; the oldest, a homeschool graduate, is finishing a university semester abroad in Italy, and it has all happened so fast that I'm really grateful to have been present for it, and to have had time to know these people in a daily, all-day, best-and-worst-moments way. My investment of my own time in their lives is the single best investment I have ever made. No regrets.
Again, prayers for you today.
Sally
PS: In googling the link to the book, I've just discovered that the authors have a blog. I haven't checked it out yet, but here is the link.
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Castle in the Sea
Abandon Hopefully
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Maureen
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| Posted: May 14 2013 at 2:51pm | IP Logged
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If possible, I suggest taking your husband to a homeschool conference. That was what convinced my dh. 
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Maureen, mom to 8 treasures
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: Convincing DH?
