Peaceful, Pleasant, Positive

One of my goals as a parent is probably shared by every other parent: I wanted a peaceful, pleasant family life and positive family relationships.

Rumor has it that the social atmosphere of public schools is rife with problems. Bullies, cliques, peer pressure, gossip, racial self-segregation, playground roughness—and these are just the problems between kids! Add to the list the mutual disrespect, mistrust, and us-against-them mentality that can poison the relationships between students and teachers, and the whole idea of “socialization” at school begins to sound like an oxymoron.

Well, let's not get carried away. There are lots of great social interactions to be found at schools, too!

Basically, avoiding the social problems found at schools was never a primary reason for my choice to homeschool my kids (although it was a fringe benefit). Also, in acknowledgment of all the good stuff to be found in schools, I tried pretty hard to make sure my kids got lots of positive interactions like those that they would have had at school—with other adults and with lots of different groups of kids as well.

Still, the bad rep of social life at schools gave me some pause as I chose homeschool. For one thing, I wanted to make sure that adding “schooling” to our home life wouldn't cause tensions and problems between mother/”teacher” and kids/”students.” For another, I hoped that my daughters, being together so much more than ordinary siblings are, wouldn't have a proportional rise in sibling rivalry as well.

In other words, as I said before, I wanted our home to be mostly peaceful, pleasant, and positive. Looking back, I think I achieved that general goal—but of course with a lot of little blips-and-bleeps of non-peace, negativity, and unpleasant times.

The really bad stuff tends to stand out in my memories. Like the shameful time that I finally got Mindy and Lindsey to stop hitting each other by hitting them myself—and, get this, I was saying, as I slapped their legs, “We [hit]—do not hit [hit]—in this house [hit]”!

Still, my memories have a general “good-stuff” glow, and I'm pretty sure it's not just rose-colored glasses when I say that the peaceful moments outnumbered the pitched battles. Also, my daughters are and almost always have been pretty close friends. They share a lot of childhood memories and even friends, and that provides a shared context like no other relationship either of them has...

Looking back at this homeschooling journal confirms that, although we suffered many blips of non-peace, the general tone of our days was pretty darned peaceful, pleasant, and positive.