Susan notes that her homeschooling lifestyle is just naturally green (i.e. environmentally beneficial). I think she's right. I think ours is green, too. We don't use individually packaged anything either. We don't need to, because, like Susan's family, we eat using plates and silverware at home.
What do you think? Is your homeschooling lifestyle green, too?
I've written before that homeschooled kids tackle adult life with great gusto. At least that's been my experience. My adult kids have eagerly embraced their schooling and/or work. In today's world, that means lots of work hours and steady commitment to the job.
My son and his wife both have jobs that they love and in which they're successful. Work takes up enough of their lives that they have to commit to spending time together. It doesn't just happen. This is a lesson we all learn sooner or later, but they're learning it right now; so far they appear to be keeping up with the balancing act.
But at some point they're going to want children, and that's when the balancing act becomes more complex. Men in particular feel the need to excel at their jobs in order to feed, clothe and shelter their growing families. But sometimes they can become so involved with their jobs that work takes priority over their families, and they can't see it.
That's what happened to Sir Richard Attenborough, the acclaimed British actor and director. Over the course of his life, he achieved fame and fortune while staying married to one woman (for over 60 years!) with whom he had three children.
While on vacation in 2004, his daughter and granddaughter died in the tsunami that hit the areas around the Indian Ocean. This tragedy forced Sir Richard to reassess the way he spent his life (as excerpted from his recently released autobiography):
When I look back, I see the whole of my adult life crammed with ceaseless activity. But in all my roles as actor, director, producer, charity fundraiser, chairman of this, president of that, I've always been aware that it was Sheila, not me, who held us together as a family.
Yet, eternally optimistic and, to a degree, selfish and egocentric, I always believed in a future when I would make it up to the children. In determining the allotment of my time between public and private, work always took precedence.
Supposedly, weekends were set aside for the family. But not as conscientiously as I would now wish. If it needed a Saturday morning to conclude some business, then I took it.
When we lost Ginny - my nickname for Jane - and Luce, that opportunity was gone, never to be recovered. And that has changed my relationship with those who are left to the extent that I will do anything to be with them and we spend much more time together.
I can talk to people about Jane now, although sometimes I can't get the words out. I can also see her. I can feel her touch. I can hear her coming into a room. She comes in laughing or excited or determined, but always full of commitment. That was the very essence of Jane - commitment.
And music. After they died, I started to hear music in my head all the time. Handel is Jane; Puccini is Lucy. I can no longer turn on the radio or listen to CDs because they clash with their music in my head.
Just thinking about Jane now, I am listening to the Messiah: I know that my redeemer liveth. How about that? Me, an agnostic.
I have, I know, been one of the privileged creatures on this Earth, not just slightly but hugely privileged. Even as early as my mid-20s, I was aware of leading a charmed life.
I won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Then, unlike many of my contemporaries, I survived the war unscathed and went on to marry the most wonderful girl in the world.
My career blossomed in so many different areas. I had fame, fortune and good friends.
I became a knight, an ambassador, a president, a commandeur and a chevalier, several kinds of chairman, a university chancellor and latterly a lord. And although I now have hearing aids in both ears and my heart is ticking courtesy of a pacemaker, I have made it to my mid-80s.
Before the tsunami, I had always thought of myself as a sort of ridiculous male Mary Poppins, the eternal optimist whose glass is always half full. But, after the loss of my daughter and granddaughter, nothing would ever be the same again.
In case you're wondering, yes, I did send this to my son :) And as a side note, isn't it interesting that Sir Richard hears "The Messiah" in his head....how do you suppose that got there?
Maybe I’m just getting old. But when I open the many homeschool-related e-newsletters I receive, and when I visit homeschooling sites, I’m often overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of curriculum now available to homeschoolers.
One homeschool magazine in particular sends me oodles of offers, to the point where my eyes start to glaze over. I wonder, does this cacophony of curricula overwhelm other people too? Or is it just me?
I run the risk of being seen as hypocritical here, because I, too publish homeschool materials. But I don’t work fast enough to produce anywhere near the vast amount of homeschooling products being produced elsewhere. (I’m still homeschooling and caring for my family, and those things have to come first.) I also don’t send out mailings every other day, because I don’t want to add to people’s already overstuffed email boxes. A good portion of Cardamom’s sales come from word-of-mouth recommendations anyway, as far as we can tell, and we’re grateful for that.
The bottom line? I’m glad I’m not a new homeschooling mom these days. Too many choices overwhelm me at the grocery store, much less when flipping through my doorstop-sized Rainbow Resource catalog. When I first started homeschooling, there weren’t that many choices of what to use, so I just used what was available. Since then, I’ve learned that what you use isn’t nearly as important as that you spend time working one-on-one with your children when they need it.
As children get older, they can be trusted to take on more responsibility for their learning. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t assign them things that we think will be good for them. But the mass quantities of curriculum available now could make people, and especially newbies, think homeschooling means buying a lot of stuff and pushing it all on their children. I’ll be interested to see how that works for them as time goes on.
The photo of the little munchkin that accompanies this article just breaks my heart. It's the middle of the night, and she's being comforted not by the parents she doesn't see during the day because they're at work, but by the night nanny they've hired so their sleep isn't interrupted by their adorable baby.
The article explains that Mom and Dad are tired from their day jobs and need their rest. Before Congress gets wind of this and votes to offer taxpayer-subsidized night care, I'd like to point out who's driving the demand for night nannies:
The bulk of Nocturnal Nannies’ clients are dual-career, professional families, Ms. Seveney said, and revenue has been increasing 25 percent a year.
So this is not an economic necessity. The fact that there are actually agencies with names like "Nocturnal Nannies" for the convenience of parents who don't have time for their kids at night much less during the day is really depressing. Poor kids. Why have children if you don't have any time for them?
(By the way, ours is not the only country where babies are often seen as an inconvenience. In Australia, they're saying that babies are a drag on the economy!)
Perhaps you've heard of Tony Snow. He was a journalist, a radio talk-show host, a musician and a past presidential press secretary. He was also a husband and the father of three children, and he died a few weeks ago after battling cancer for several years.
My husband and I admired Tony Snow immensely. His wit and charm made even his political opponents his friends, and he spoke and wrote clearly and winsomely about his life and faith as well as his political beliefs.
Here's a transcript of a speech he gave last year at a college graduation. I don't know of many people who could pack that much wisdom and love into one brief talk, but he could. One of my favorite parts:
American culture likes to celebrate the petulant outcast, the smart-aleck with the contempt for everything and faith in nothing. Snarky mavericks. The problem is these guys are losers. They have signed up for an impossible mission. Because they’ve decided they’re going to create all the meaning in their lives. They’ve either decided that no moral law exists or they will be the creator, the author of those laws. Now one road leads to complete and total anarchy. Life is solitary, nasty, brutish and short. The other is to insanity, since it requires playing God. We know in our hearts, intuitively, from our first years as children, that the universe unfolds with a discernable order and that moral laws, far from being convenient social conventions, are firm and unalterable. They predate us, they will survive us. Rather than admitting our weakness a lot of times, we just decide we’ll try to get by. And maybe rather than giving God credit, we’ll try to look for a cheap substitute.
Walk into a bookstore, you’ll know what I mean. The shelves are groaning underneath the trendy tomes promising salvation — medicine balls, herbs, purges, all sorts of weird stuff. In politics, there’s a variant that elevates government to the status of God. It says that it is the source of love. It ought to be the recipient of your tithes, but government, while it does pursue compassionate ends, cannot be loving and personal. It treats all of us as completely equal rather than uniquely divine. The point is you can’t escape the question of God and you can’t escape the question of commitments.
When it comes to faith, I’ve taken my own journey. You will have to take your own. But here’s what I know. Faith is as natural as the air we breathe. Religion is not an opiate, just the opposite. It is the introduction to the ultimate extreme sport. There is nothing that you can imagine that God cannot trump. As Paul said “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” And once you realize that there is something greater than you out there, then you have to decide, “Do I acknowledge it and do I act upon it?” You have to at some point surrender yourself.
Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.
A recent thought-provoking article at a British newspaper's Web site caught my eye. It laments the rise of the child-centered world, where keeping Junior’s self-esteem intact becomes Job 1. The large number of comments after the article makes it clear that the writer struck a nerve with a lot of people. Apparently, there’s a bumper crop of self-absorbed young people around these days.
It’s easy to bash schools where teachers aren’t allowed to correct students’ work in red pen because it could make them feel like failures. It’s natural to lament parents in the store who fall all over themselves trying to make their children like them by buying them presents (yes, I have actually seen mothers begging their child to choose a large toy. It’s an amazing thing.)
But it’s also tempting to think that it won’t happen to us when, as homeschoolers, it could easily happen to us.
I mean, homeschooling takes over your life. You find yourself poring over curriculum catalogs, spending hours on the phone signing your children up for co-ops and lessons and staying up late planning upcoming learning experiences.
And that’s just in the summer! Then there’s all the time you put in working with your children, reading to them, making sure they understand concepts they’re having trouble with, taking them to zoos and museums ….add in feeding them and clothing them and making sure they live in a healthy environment, and you can easily end up living in a child-centered world. And that’s not a good thing.
In a child-centered world, kids are the center of the universe. That’s how they come to believe that their needs are more important than anyone else’s, and often turn into adults who continue to believe that.
Over the years, I’ve struggled to maintain a balance between giving my kids what they need in order to grow and develop properly, and giving my kids what they need in order to learn that they are not the center of the universe. I haven't always been successful.
Being sensitive myself, and having been hurt in childhood by some adults, I wonder now if I protected my children’s feelings too much. As they’ve ventured out into the world of work, they’ve sometimes gotten their feathers ruffled over things that aren’t the end of the world. Maybe I should have been tougher on them.
There were also times when I wondered whether I’d gone overboard in creating a learning environment for my kids, because once they discovered an interest in something, they took off with it on their own, with no encouragement from me. Perhaps some of the time spent making lesson plans would have been better spent on a dinner date with my husband.
Oh, yes, him. That patient guy I married. He worked to pay for all the books and educational games and craft supplies, and he never complained about how much time I spent with my nose in the Rainbow Resource catalog. Sometimes I think we should have carved out more time for ourselves.
But on the other side of the scale, there were times when I managed to make my kids understand that the world does not revolve around them. We limited their outside activities so we could have time together as a family. Occasionally, they’d find me on the sofa with a good book or having fun using my sewing machine and they knew that anything they asked me to do right then would be denied. Of course they had chores and responsibilities that they had to do, whether they were in the mood or not. And then there were the evening walks-for-two that were reserved for their dad and me.
As they say, hindsight is 20-20. The end result is that my kids, while not perfect, are doing fine. But looking back, I can see that if I hadn’t struggled with maintaining a balance between their world and ours, they might not have turned out so well. That’s why even now, with only two children left at home, I keep fighting to maintain that balance. Because it’s when you’re not aware that you need that struggle between your world and theirs that you fall into the child-centered universe.
Five years ago, Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers was first published, and since then I’ve gotten many email messages from readers who used the curriculum with their kids and were pleased with it.
Sadly, I’ve also been asked why I chose to include girls in my target audience for the book.
Now, I realize that many homeschoolers are even more conservative than I am, enough so that they plan to keep their daughters at home until and unless they marry. But to keep them in the dark about financial matters seems so misguided to me.
In the past, many women were uninformed about their finances. Men kept track of the money, and their wives kept track of the cooking and cleaning. But if their husbands died before they did (which is statistically more likely to happen), they often found themselves wondering if they were rich widows or poor widows, because they didn’t know. They had to rely on other male family members to help them find the paperwork needed for probate and figure out where they stood financially.
Unfortunately, marriages also break up, and women who are unaware of financial matters can find themselves left with children to support and no idea of how to prudently handle the income they now need to bring in. The pain of an unwanted divorce is thus compounded by the need to learn about money. It’s hard to learn something new when you’re emotionally distraught.
My grandmother raised four children as a single mom during the Great Depression, and the stories my dad told me about what she went through made it clear to me that girls need to know about finances every bit as much as boys do.
Recently, I was reminded yet again of that when I read this article about women who find themselves losing their homes because they were not knowledgeable about the mortgages they applied for when they bought them. The combination of ignorant consumers and greedy mortgage companies has resulted in some single moms also losing thousands of dollars that they really can’t afford to lose.
In the stories quoted in the article, the women now losing their homes didn’t understand that buying a home without putting any money down is a warning sign that you’re going into a loan with some danger zones. They saw it as a lucky break, when it was anything but that. It usually means that you have an adjustable loan, and in the current climate, your house payment will continue to rise, even if the value of your house does not rise (or worse, drops.) You are responsible for the amount of money borrowed to buy the house no matter what the house is now worth.
Even if her loan did not have an adjustable rate, the first woman seemed like a great candidate for a house because of her income level. She also thought she was making a good purchase because she didn’t borrow as much as she was approved to borrow. Big mistake! Pneumonia and then a broken wrist made her miss work, and she was forced to spend what cash she had paying bills. But she ran out of money, and could no longer make her mortgage payments. She not only lost her house but ended up owing the bank $32,000.
These women were also apparently unaware of how stressful it can be to have a huge house payment when you’re the head of a single income family. Had they been taught about financial freedom and the joy of being debt-free, they might have never become homeowners, but they wouldn’t have lost their homes, either. When you look at everything through the mindset of minimizing debt, you have more control over your financial situation, especially as the years go by and the good habits you’ve developed bear fruit.
Reading the sad stories about those women has reminded me yet again how important it is that we educate our girls as well as our boys about how to handle money and how to aim for financial freedom. Judging by what’s going on in our economy right now, this kind of education is more important than ever. We homeschooling parents have the time and the opportunity to do it right.
Our country's economic situation illustrates what happens when large numbers of people are financially illiterate and thus fail to live within their means. People bought houses they really couldn't afford using mortgages with payments that would increase dramatically over time. Worse, many also borrowed against the home equity that developed as the bubble inflated. Now, they're losing their homes because they can't make the payments, and the repercussions of so many foreclosures as well as the subsequent decline in prices are affecting the entire economy.
Lack of financial literacy is a real problem. Public schools have failed to teach kids about money, but more importantly, many students' parents have failed to teach them about money. It is our responsibility to take the time to teach our kids about financial matters while they're young, so they will make wise choices when they grow up.
That's what Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers is all about, and I'm thrilled to be using the curriculum again, this time with my third child. This past year, she worked through most of the reading list. This fall, she'll begin with the projects. Since she just got her first "official" job (beyond babysitting), it's the perfect time to do these projects, as she'll be able to use the financial principles she's learning in her daily life, now that she'll have a steady paycheck.
I was glad to hear that some parents are teaching their kids to be financially savvy. HSLDA reports that a homeschooled boy is one of the high scorers in this year's National Financial Literacy Challenge. If you'd like to be notified about the next challenge so that your own child can take it, sign up here.
In Scotland, a parent-teacher organization is blaming the Internet and specifically Wikipedia for the falling test scores of Scottish children.
Let's set aside the discussion of test scores; that's a huge issue in itself, and one I don't want to go into right now. It's the rise of the Internet and the way kids have figured out how to use it to their perceived advantage that interests me.
When I was in college, one of the so-called advantages of the Greek (fraternity/sorority) system was that its members had access to the completed tests and essays of past members. Thus they could memorize test answers instead of learning what was presented in class, and re-type the essays of others inside of writing their own. This saved those students all sorts of work; we who were not "Greek" felt it was an unfair advantage. But the bottom line was that these students didn't learn anything because they didn't have to read the assigned books, nor did they learn via the process of assembling information and giving it back to their professors in the form of essays.
I imagine that frat house filing cabinets are collecting dust now that kids have the Internet. There are sites where they can go to find prewritten, high-graded essays that they can pass off as their own, thanks to the cut-and-paste function.
And for the times when they actually have to do their own research and writing, there are sites like Wikipedia. Savvy teachers probably check Wikipedia's take on the assigned topic before they correct the essays so that they can tell who's been playing cut-and-paste there. But this doesn't solve the problem, which is that kids are wasting their time and not learning anything, at least not much that's accurate.
One solution to this would be to require kids to write their essays while in the school library or classroom, using the books and materials available there, with no Internet access. With a tool like the Neo (which I own and highly recommend), students could type their essays and never get near a computer.
For homeschoolers, this is much simpler. We can supervise our kids more easily than a teacher can keep tabs on thirty kids. By requiring our kids to use printed matter only for research, they will learn the material and develop writing skills in the process, because we've removed the temptation of the Internet.
But printed matter can be dated, and we've become accustomed to the immediacy of the Internet. Isn't there some way to take advantage of that immediacy?
The good news is that there is. By requiring our kids to use primary sources and reputable secondary sources, we can avoid the problems that are going on where kids are allowed to use Wikipedia and other sites that have proven to be inaccurate.
On the Internet, primary sources are sites where the information is first generated. For example, for the activities of our president, kids can visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/. Further government info can be found at http://www.usa.gov/. For government statistics on employment and information on the labor market, go to http://www.bls.gov/.
Secondary sources are trusted entities that access primary sources. A large city newspaper like The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune is considered a secondary source. Newspapers are not as trusted as they once were; recent cases of lying reporters have tarnished their image, and budget cuts have forced them to reduce the number of editors who check on the sources used by reporters. Still, quoting a large newspaper should be considered fairly accurate, and certainly much better than Wikipedia.
This is not to say that Wikipedia is not useful. I've allowed my teen daughter to use it as a jumping-off point, as it gives her a quick briefing on a topic. But she is then required to back up what she finds with research from trustworthy sources.
I know, you think I've lost my mind. I'm the one usually posting articles about abusive, crazy or pedophile teachers. And yet today I'm offering sympathy to teachers.
There certainly are bad teachers out there. I suffered through many of them during my years of incarceration, er, public school. But I'm aware that there are some good teachers who struggle to help kids within the framework of a flawed system.
A couple of them are friends of mine, and the one consistent thing I hear from them is that parents can often be harder to deal with than students or administration. One friend has actually gotten into shouting matches with angry parents who want her to raise their children's grades even though the children have not put forth the effort required for higher grades.
But even if some American parents cross the line when it comes to being obnoxious to their children's teachers, apparently Japanese parents are even worse. Read this article and see if you don't feel even a little sorry for teachers in Japan.
Are we raising children with common sense?
The ability to think for yourself based on what you see going on around you is not as common as its name would suggest. And when it's purposely snuffed out, as adjunct college professor AWR Hawkins suggests in this essay in American Thinker, the result is this:
Our society as a whole seems to have accepted the mental framework which holds as a maxim the idea that we are not allowed to know what we know; rather, we are only allowed to know what we are told. As a result of this, although common, decent, everyday people see their beloved culture eroding and intuitively sense that something is not right, they dare not declare that this downward cultural slide is wrong. Instead, they just keep their mouths shut, without realizing they are keeping their minds shut as well. In the end, others speak for us, and this explains everything from our over-reliance on the judicial system to our dependence upon experts for many everyday decisions.
If Hawkins is on target, then raising kids with common sense is simply a matter of what you don't do: you don't snuff out individual thought, but instead encourage it. You don't insist on going to experts but instead urge your children to educate themselves. And you can't insist that B is true when all the child has to do is open his eyes and look around to see that, in fact, A is the real truth. By doing so, they won't end up like Hawkins' students:
My students, and with few exceptions the students of my colleagues, are the fruits of a garden planted with the intention of producing only identical fruit. As a guarantee to that end, the plants in this garden have been pruned of their trust in innate knowledge, i.e., common sense.
Common sense used to be common. I'm hoping that homeschoolers will help make it the norm again.
Homeschoolers have developed quite a reputation for being smart. After all, they're winning spelling and geography bees, and colleges are actively recruiting them.
But it's not enough to be smart. I think a look around our society these days shows there is a great lack of good moral character. Think of the people who make the news with their bad behavior: celebrities having affairs and using drugs, corporate CEOs making off with millions while leaving employees and shareholders to suffer, and politicians spending their spare time misbehaving in public restrooms.
Once in a while, the fact that these are immoral behaviors is pointed out. Take an excerpt from this article, for example, describing what happens when a GM stockholder attends the company's lavish annual meeting:
According to an Associated Press calculation, GM chairman and chief executive officer Rick Wagoner received compensation valued at $15.7 million for 2007, up 64 percent from the previous year.
"I came to scold you for your greed," Mary Ann Wiley of Seattle told Wagoner.
Wiley, 77, said she has owned General Motors Corp. stock for 70 years, but that Tuesday marked her first annual meeting. Wiley said afterward that GM has moved far too slowly in developing new and better products and embracing next-generation fuels, and that management should not receive higher salaries and bonuses when the company is struggling.
"If the company does not do well, management should take an equal hit, and I don't think they've taken an equal hit," she said, adding that GM has grown so big that it has lost its humility and its "sense of democracy," not caring about shareholder concerns.
"This was a charade," said Wiley, looking out over the ornate Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont, where GM has held its annual meetings for more than a decade.
"I would suggest they have a stockholder meeting at a factory," she said. "They don't need to rent the DuPont hotel."
Mind you, this is a company that sustained a $38.7 billion loss last year, and just today laid off thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and yet its CEO had no qualms about accepting a 64% raise. Bravo for people like Mary Ann Wiley, who is not afraid to confront this man and this company.
We need leaders in business and politics who do not put themselves first, but instead try to make things better for everyone. If we can educate our kids to be ethical and moral as well as great spellers, we will have done right by them, and also by our country.
They're paying kids to go to school again.
Seriously, this is pathetic. A Connecticut high school's Advance Placement (AP) classes are not attracting many students, so it's decided that the way to get kids to take these harder classes and pass the AP tests is to pay them for doing so. A $450,000 grant from the National Math and Science Initiative will be providing the cash for these kids.
How much are kids likely to really learn if they're only there for the money? The root of this problem is not being addressed: what happened to kids' inborn desire to learn? How can that desire be nurtured instead of snuffed out?
Not that I approve of bribery, but since NMSI is going to spend this money anyway, I think they should start a program that offers parents some "hard cold cash rewards" to start reading to their kids and taking them to libraries and museums instead of giving them DVDs and video games from the time they're tiny. Seems like that would be more productive than bribing the kids.
The British press is a lot different than the American press. Across the pond, they tend to be much more liberal when it comes to things like nudity in their newspapers. But oddly enough, they can also be quite open, more than we are, about what they see wrong in their culture, particularly when it comes to social mores.
Take, for example, this article written by Melanie Cantor, a judge on one of the many performance-based reality shows on British television. As she puts it, “I'm billed as the tough celebrity agent” on the show. Of the contestants she sees, she says:
“Everyone feels they have the right to fame because they know that talent is no longer required. The cult of Big Brother has made it possible for the most stupid to make millions simply on the back of being stupid.
…We live in a country where our children no longer aspire to be doctors, nurses, lawyers or teachers - they want to be famous. To them, celebrity is an easy escape from the mundane, a quick route to riches based on no particular skill or effort on their part.”
Isn’t that the truth? And since American television is no better, I wish there were more Americans willing to admit that many, though not all, of the contestants on these shows have no talent and know it. They just want to be celebrities. That’s their only goal in life.
Instead of pointing out how useless the goal of celebrity is, American culture celebrates it. Little girls are given Bratz and Barbie dolls that come with guitars and microphones, not to mention limousines. In school, children are taught songs like “I’m a Star!” that are supposed to build their self-esteem.
But the elusive goal of becoming a celebrity will likely destroy self-esteem instead of developing it. Ms. Cantor makes it plain when describing today’s culture:
"Celebrity is all - Fame is held up as a God to be venerated. Never mind the emptiness, ignore the public scrutiny that might tear your life apart, better to be famous for nothing than to be nothing.
The joy of anonymity has been lost to this next generation.”
Britain is not the only country with this problem. We have it, too. And it’s up to us as parents to present our children with good examples of achievement, not celebrity, if we want our culture to let go of the worship of celebrity status.
Twenty years ago, British journalist Valerie Grove decided to interview women who “had it all” for at least 25 years. She defined having it all as:
"...they had to have been married for more than 25 years and have had three or more children, as well as a brilliant career."
She turned her findings into a book, The Compleat Woman: Marriage, Motherhood, Career - Can She Have It All? Her conclusion was that it was very rare for a woman to be able to successfully juggle a husband, children and successful career.
Now, a British newspaper has marked the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication by going back and interviewing some of the women whose lives were chronicled in it to see if they think it’s gotten any easier to “have it all.” The very interesting (and lengthy) article is worth reading, but if you’re pressed for time, I’d like to share a couple of key points these women now make, as they look back on their lives from the vantage point of old age.
1) Women try too hard to give their children the perfect childhood.
Author Faye Weldon, 77 and the mother of four sons, says:
"Today, we try to fight that destiny and give our children the perfect childhood in the hopes that it will make them perfect. I think children are the better for a little healthy neglect. Mine certainly were.”
I don’t think she means neglect in a bad way. What she’s saying is that if we give our kids more autonomy and stop trying to micromanage their activities, they’ll do just fine and we’ll be less exhausted. This is a point we homeschooling moms, who are already involved personally in our children’s daily education, need to take to heart.
2) Women should realize they can have a career while raising children, but it won’t be easy, and the children must come first.
Shirley Hughes, 80, the mother of three children and a well-known children’s author, recalls writing at home with children underfoot:
“…despite publishing more than 50 books, Hughes managed without a nanny.
"I would have been too jealous of her relationship with my children," she explains.
"We did have au pairs to help out domestically, but I would never have left them in sole charge of the children all day…..But fractured concentration due to interruptions from children is the bane of a working mother's life, especially if you work from home as I did.
"But it was the right thing for me. I was able to be there for my children, and so glad I was self-employed and did not have to disappear off for long days away from the home."
3) Women expect to have too many material things that don’t matter in the long run.
Sheila Kitzinger, 80, a mother of five grown daughters and honored by the British government for her years of work for the National Childbirth Trust, says:
"Women now think they need so much more. Everyone must have a second car in the family.”
She also seconds Ms. Weldon’s concern about providing a wealth of perfect educational experiences:
“But also, we feel the need to do so much more with our children. There are constant educational trips - must see the Tutankhamun exhibition, must see the Chinese warriors at the British Museum.
"It's relentless, exhausting and very expensive."
Ms. Hughes agrees:
"Perhaps women think today they need to have too much. We all say we work because we need the money, but are there sacrifices to be made.
"Perhaps not having a second car; maybe moving to live somewhere cheaper.
"It's very sad when people think they cannot afford to have more children. What do you regret at the end of your life? Is it the expensive stuff, or not having a child?"
According to the article, these women with such successful careers look back over their lives and see where their time was best invested: in their husbands and children. As Ms. Hughes put it:
"My only regrets are that I got too bogged down with getting the shopping and household chores. I should have let it all go to pot a lot more than I did.
"What I wish I'd done more of is sitting and talking to my children round the kitchen table.
"And conversations with my husband, too, now that I'm widowed. Once your husband dies, that is what you long for above all.
"But when you're young and busy with work and family, you are always rushing on to the next thing. That's life."
We can all learn from those who have come before us. And with that, I’d better go make dinner and spend some time enjoying it with my family :)
An Israeli researcher has declared that Moses was high when he thought he heard God issue the Ten Commandments.
Benny Shanon, a professor in Jerusalem, does not believe that great Biblical event actually happened. I think the explanation behind Professor Shanon's ridiculous proclamation lies in this sentence from an article about him and his beliefs:
Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush," suggested Shanon, who said he himself has dabbled with such substances.
Drug users....is there anything they don't know? (With apologies to Homer Simpson)
So China is starting to rethink its one child policy. In case you didn't know, for years China has used forced abortions to keep its population at one child per family in the city and two children per family in the country. Since boys are considered more valuable than girls there, baby girls are often found lying on the roadside, left to die, while parents try again for a boy before they reach the limit.
This quote from an article about the possible policy change has got to be the understatement of the year:
China says its policies have prevented several hundred million births and boosted prosperity....
"Prevented"? That's one way to say it.
So, the Chinese government is obviously ok with murdering several hundred million people in order to become more prosperous. Let's all think about that the next time we buy something made in China. We're supporting a murderous regime.
I'm sure glad we're not paying overpriced tuition at UNC-Chapel Hill to finance the salary of a biology professor like Albert Harris. He's the guy who recently told his biology class that babies with Down syndrome should be aborted.
Some of his students had no problem with him sharing that opinion, but others did, including a young woman who has a brother with Down syndrome. Hearing her professor say that made her physically ill, she says.
I completely empathize with her. People who don't have a loved one with special needs are often completely clueless as to what it's like for us to hear other people says cruel things about them.
Several years back, dd24 was working at a cash register when she overheard a customer say about a customer ahead of him who had Down syndrome, "They shouldn't let people like that out in public." My daughter got so mad she had to leave the area (otherwise, I probably would have had to bail her out on an assault charge).
You see, we know what most of society does not: people with Down syndrome are people we love, and they deserve life. Even though their presence in our homes and families often makes life more difficult in some ways, it makes life better in other ways. I can honestly say that our lives are better for having dsds14 in them, and we consider him a gift of God, just like his siblings.
As for Professor Harris, I think he's full of it:
Harris says he wouldn't follow his own moral position.
If he thought his wife was going to have a child with Down syndrome, he would still want to have the baby.
And he faced that situation.
His wife, then 34, was pregnant with their third child when she suffered major bleeding. Doctors told the couple to prepare for the worst.
"If our child had been born with Down syndrome as we expected, we would have cherished her," Harris said.
Beans. There are a lot of situations that can cause the mother to bleed, but Down syndrome isn't one of them, as far as I know. The baby has an extra chromosome, not the power to cause hemorrhaging. The mother must have had some other problem.
And as for "prepare for the worst," some of us see the worst as the death of a baby, not the birth of one with Down syndrome. Geez.
BTW, if you'd like a great, honest read about how God can bless a family by sending a child with disabilities, try The Dance Goes On by Roberta Bandy. We know the Bandy family, and their story is inspiring.
I was raised knowing I would go to college, and I did. My parents and I split the cost of it, and I worked throughout my college years to pay for my half. I graduated with no debt.
My dh was also told he would be going to college, and he paid for most of it himself, working summers and coming out of school owing a whopping $1000 or so, which we paid off in a couple of years at $30 a month.
Today, more kids are going to college than ever, but the price of a college education has risen so dramatically that it’s pretty much impossible for someone to work their way through school as we did. As a result, many kids are coming out of school owing tens of thousands of dollars in college loans, plus several thousand more in credit card debt.
If they were making big bucks once they graduated, this would be a problem with a short shelf-life. But wages are stagnating*, and we now have more college graduates than we need for the number of jobs available in this country that require a college degree.
Paul Barton writes about this in the current issue of Change Magazine:
The absolute demand for college graduates is also overstated when whatever percentage of the workforce that has gone to college is equated with the percentage of jobs that require college-level learning—or when the assumption is made that the knowledge gained in college is required to perform that job. For example, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), in a committee hearing in March 2007, said that when he graduated from school, just 15 percent of jobs needed some postsecondary training, but "today the number is over 60 percent and rising rapidly." But while over 60 percent of people in existing jobs have "some college" or a postsecondary credential, according to the BLS only about 3 in 10 jobs require a postsecondary certification of some sort.
Yikes! The BLS, of course, is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the primary source of employment statistics in this country.
Pretty depressing stats, but let’s try being more optimistic: Is there a possibility that there will be more jobs in the future that require a college degree? Sorry, not according to the BLS. Barton includes BLS charts forecasting employment growth in his article, noting that
The jobs that require postsecondary education credentials total 29 percent for 2004 and will rise to 31 percent by 2014.
BTW, the term “postsecondary education” refers not only to four-year and Master’s degrees, but also to two-year degrees and even one-year certificates. So that seems to indicate that the lion’s share of jobs in the future will not require a four-year college degree.
Does this mean your child should not go to college? That depends on the child. Young people who excel in science and want to be neurosurgeons should definitely be encouraged to go to college. But those who don’t know what they want to do, who don’t want to go to college but are feeling pressured by society, or who want to major in a field that doesn’t pay much more than a job at Starbucks might want to head off in a non-college direction, unless you have a money tree in your backyard.
And all young people, whether they go to college or not, should be given a good education in personal finance, because with stagnating wages and rising food and gas prices**, the young people who know how to stretch a dollar will be the best prepared of all.
* the most recent government figures show a 0.1% increase in inflation-adjusted earnings from Nov. 2007 to Jan. 2007. That trend has not varied much over the past ten years.
** current annual inflation rate is over 4% as seen here.
