Parents and Sons and Daughters for a Lifetime
When we had little babies, I thought about the 18 years we had with our children. However, homeschooling taught me valuable lessons about family. One lesson I learned was that family is multigenerational. We are not parents for only 18 years. We are parents for a lifetime, and we are sons and daughters for a lifetime.
Daddy with his 19-year-old mother and his grandmother Mama Head
The family lessons God has taught me through homeschooling has made me a more attentive parent of adult children, a more loving grandparent, and a more humble daughter.
My brother and me with my mother’s mother
I hear very little discussion about how homeschooling parents should treat their own parents, but I want to encourage you to treat your parents the way you want your own children to treat you when they are the age that you are now. You are their example.
My aunt (right) and me with her dad and my grandfather
My aunt and me with her mother and my grandmother
While you are living the priceless, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of homeschooling your children, you are also living the priceless, once in a lifetime opportunity of blessing, honoring, and serving your parents.
Me, my dad, our older daughter, Daddy’s mother, and Daddy’s daddy
Both of these opportunities are brief. I encourage you not to miss either one.
You shall therefore impress these words of mine
on your heart and on your soul;
and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand,
and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.Â
You shall teach them to your sons,
talking of them when you sit in your house
and when you walk along the road
and when you lie down and when you rise up.
Deuteronomy 11:18-20
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.Â
Honor your father and mother
(which is the first commandment with a promise),Â
so that it may be well with you,
and that you may live long on the earth.
Ephesians 6:1-3