A Peaceful Year
Every phase of our home education journey has been filled with seeking out a greater peacefulness in our home. The one thing that we overlook, or at least that I overlooked as a parent, is the impact that our home has one their home education. How can a child be expected to learn when they feel overwhelmed? That’s part of why our children are learning at home. The school system was anything but peaceful. Even when my children attended a great school they felt stressed, not by the difficulty of the work, but the lack of restfulness in their days.
In 2024, the global smartwatch adoption rate, (people who use one), is 21.7 percent.[1] That means that 1/5 of the world is paying attention to analytics related to their health or at least is being reminded about it on a daily basis. The number of times that my Apple watch has told me to take a deep breath is mildly embarrassing. As adults we wear rings, watches, and track on our smart phones our every activity so we know whether or not our sleep and activity levels were [fill in an adjective here that we personally find satsifactory.] Then why don’t we think about the same thing with our children?
Their brains are not even close to being fully developed and we allow them be overrun by a system that overflows cortisol production to the point that children can’t handle staying alive. In the last ~20 years, in the United States alone, 47,000 children have committed suicide.[2] That number is unfathomable. We can debate as to whether that is due to the rise in social media, online participation, global inundation at a young age, the ability to know more and sympathize with those suffering every range of darkness all over the earth, the decrease in time spent outdoors, the shift in absolute nutrition, or the wide-ranging shift in morality leaving children without a personal identity to instead be fulfilled by the forming of one through the words of their peers. We could just say, it’s because the world isn’t walking with God'; or we could be honest and say it’s all of it.
Just as we cannot eliminate the internet and protect our children from a highly mobile world lacking a root system for children to thrive, we also cannot pretend that everything is out of our hands. Children thrive in peacefulness just as adults do. Children thrive when they are in an environment that focuses on them as a whole person not just their mind or just their body. Schools on the hand focus on one thing at a time. Kid’s need to sit still and not move while their brain is expected to take in large amounts of information even though that process doesn’t align with cognitive or physical development guidelines for their demographics. They go to schools where bullying is rampant and every couple weeks another school makes the news for some horror taking place from assaults of every kind to fighting every day in the hallways. Even in the best Christian schools a parent cannot control who is around their child.
A child comes home from school to then sit down and do hours of homework. As they get older and head into the high school years, most youth will spend less than 30 minutes outside between the hours of 8 to 3 and then will finish homework in time for dinner. Those that do sports will finish their physical activity in time to eat and do homework before bed. When are they enjoying their life? When are they slowing down enough to remember that they are valued outside of what they accomplish? As parents have we completely forgotten that sabbath is not just for us but for our children as well? How can we possibly be maintaining that rhythm when we work on average 40 hours a week and a child spends more than that on their education from class time to required homework?
My goal this year was to remember that our children learn in the modern era is a modern thing. The history nerd in me could take you down a rabbit hole of the education system and trust me one day I will… but until then let’s just say that I figured it was time for me to “de-school” enough for my children to truly enjoy what it means to be educated at home. Now, before I keep going I want to be clear that I understand that not all families have the opportunity to homeschool and for those of us that choose it it definitely comes with a lot of sacrifices. From financial to personal, being a homeschool family takes effort and some major adjustments to priorities. I’m also not saying that parents who send their kids to school are dooming them to a miserable life or trying to fear monger by saying that kids who go to school will commit suicide. I don’t mean to draw any conclusions for someone else’s home or their children. I’m merely explaining the journey that I’ve been traveling on.
So I decided to throw out my old curriculum. Not really. I just didn’t re-order it this year. It mimic’d traditional school to a point that I wasn’t comfortable. Again, I know tons of people that use it and my children didn’t dislike it. There just was not time in our day for us to all live separate lives. Part of being homeschooled is feeling life your family is impenetrable, you’re protected, loved, and secure. My children have some built-in best friends that they thrive with when we do our days together. I stopped looking at learning like it was something that only comes from instruction and began looking into the way that learning has taken place for centuries before us. It came from living life with one another, reading together, and learning personal responsibility through personal accomplishments.
When I chose our new curriculum and began reading through it preparing for the year I came across a paragraph about peacefulness in the home. The curriculum was literally instructing parents that a turbulent home with parents that fight is stressful for the child and creates an environment in which they cannot learn. It said to take a break from learning and instead focus on fixing the home and only then to reintroduce lessons. What? Stop teaching? What curriculum tells parents to do less? To focus on the heart of their child more than their head? Peaceful Press. That’s who. And that’s how I knew I had chosen the right things for my children to learn this year.
I thought the Salt Run Schoolhouse was going to focus on education and it will, but the focus here will be home education. That means I will be sharing all things home and all things family and all things learning. Together, that blend, makes it possible for peacefulness to thrive.
Welcome back to school… this year is going to look a little different.
[1]. https://scoop.market.us/smartwatch-statistics/#:~:text=The%20global%20smartwatch%20adoption%20rate,smartphone%20owners%20now%20use%20smartwatches.
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-03-29/steady-rise-in-u-s-suicides-among-adolescents-teens