What Makes People Think They Are Qualified To Teach Their Own Kids?

[JoePhilly]

21. I know 2 home school families very well ... and they are like night and day.

The first family is one in which the mother had a degree in teaching and had been teaching elementary school for about 5 years or so. She decided to stay home with her first child, got into home schooling, and then had a second child, and continued home schooling both. Their kids are nice, well behaved, they play with other kids in the neighborhood, they are very sociable. You's never know they were home schooled. The wife plans to return to teaching when their kids get a little older.

The second family is different. The mother in this family has a degree in communications. No prior teaching education or experience. My wife and I knew this couple before any of us had kids. She hated her job. She tended to have a bad work attitude. Everything was some one else's fault. When they had their first child, she took a leave and started to home school. They had a second child a little over a year after the first. They continued to home school. I learned from the husband that the mother had decided to have a "family bed", so they all slept together. She'd read that you could teach a child sign language long before they could read or talk ... and so she developed a sign language that only she and the first child "knew". When we saw them, every random move of the infant was actually a "sign", and usually the "sign" meant that the infant needed to be picked up. She decided that the child was afraid of the ceiling fan in his room, so the dad had to remove it. The blinds on the windows might have lead in them ... they replaced all of them (she though my suggestion of moving the crib away from the window was absurd). The child can't walk or talk at this point. She breast fed both children well past the age of 5. She dressed them both exactly the same even though one was a boy and the other a girl. She gave them the same hair cut, a lot like her own. When they played with other kids, she would take them aside if the kids began to do anything active, running games like tag and so on, she'd stop them ... she didn't want them to get hurt ... and she could "tell" they weren't really having fun. These kids don't speak, except to her, and then only in whispers. I can't even imagine how they will respond out in the real world. They are kind of creepy.

So the first family is very normal, a home schooling success story ... the second family is (in my opinion), and example in which a control freak is micro managing every second of her childrens' lives.