Should I Keep Homeschooling This Fall? Part 4

Share Now

While trying to decide if she should homeschool again in the fall, one thing that worries many a mama is whether her children need to be with children their own ages.

I don’t think that God thinks so. Since Adam and Eve had their first baby, He has usually given babies to families one at a time. Sometimes He gives two, but it’s a bit unusual. One of my great-grandmothers had triplets, but that is really rare.

Even schools didn’t put children into groups of twenty or twenty-five children of exactly the same age until fairly recently in the history of the world. Before that schools had multiple ages in the same one room and before that not many children went to school at all (their parents taught them what they needed to know at home — imagine that!).

Homeschooling taught me the importance of our children spending time — not with kids their own ages, but with people of varying ages.

Here they are ten years ago with their extra-special friend, Irene — Irene who taught them to play Star Reporter and Hide the Thimble and took them out for pizza and played croquet with them in her backyard when they were young. Then, when she decided she wasn’t able to stay in her own house anymore, she sold it and moved into an assisted living facility, where she lived until her death in her late nineties. But, when she was about ninety, she bought a computer and learned to use it. When our kids were in their twenties, she began to email them.

So, one reason I hope you do continue to homeschool your children this fall is so they won’t have to be with lots of kids their own ages and will have time to be with people who aren’t — beginning with the ones who live in your house.

You shall rise up before the grayheaded
and honor the aged,
and you shall revere your God;
I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19:32

Share Now