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The Homeschool Diner's Guide to
Homeschooling Basics
Family Matters

When your parents don’t support your decision
to home educate your children

By Misti Anslin Delaney with Rodney Bell Smith
owner of the Life at Chez Smiffy blog

We'd all love our parents to support our choices (parenting choices,
especially) whole-heartedly. When we make the decision to home
school, we would love for our parents to see that we are doing the very
best thing for our kids and share our enthusiasm.

As both grandparents of two and parents to a four year old, our
experience suggests that blanket support of that kind is pretty rare.
Conflict with our parents over parenting decisions is something many --
maybe most -- people face. Sometimes our disagreements are about
school decisions, sometimes about discipline, sometimes about nutrition,
or television or ...well, you name it. If it’s a decision we have made, our
parents can find something wrong with it.

Some of our parents’ reaction may be based in insecurity. They may
feel that we are judging the way we were raised when we make different
choices than they did, especially if they had some reservations
themselves, but never had a better answer available to them. Sometimes
their reactions may be the result of having done a great deal of research
themselves, but not having kept up with what's happened in the world
since, so that they don’t realize that the "best available choices" when
they were making their choices are no longer best.

There is also the matter of habits. If you think about how often you
instinctively care for your children and how often their new
independence startles you, you may come to understand how your
parents can know full well that at 35, you are an adult and completely
capable to making these decisions for your family, but may still have
trouble internalizing it. It’s true. No matter how old we get, we are still, to
some degree, small children in the minds of our parents. Some parents
handle the emotional dissonance more gracefully than others, and all of
us handle it better at some times than at others, but the dissonance
continues to be there for most of our children's lives.

Parents are, after all, humans first. We are insecure about some things
and judgmental sometimes, occasionally we are passionately
misinformed, and heavily invested in some things that just really don't
matter.

So, how do help our parents to deal with their concerns about our
decision to home school?

My two big suggestions are:

1. Don't get terribly invested in convincing them.

You are the parent and in the end, it is your decision how your children
will be educated. If you're too invested in your parents or in-laws
opinions, you risk getting defensive if they are slow to accept your
decision and that won't help anyone.

2. Don't take your campaign too fast.

A slow steady drumbeat of information, each building on the last, will give
a much better impression of serious research.

With a sudden flood of information, you risk overwhelming them and
denying them a chance to absorb the information, so each new
onslaught seems more radical than the last. For example, however sold
you might be on John Holt’s ideas, sharing his books with concerned
grandparents may not be best place to start. First the books are not
written in an approachable manner that’s easily accessible to those who
aren’t particularly interested in being sold on the idea. Second,
regardless of the method you eventually choose, most wary
grandparents will find Mr. Holt's ideas pretty radical.

Once they think you may be on to something and are interested in
learning more, you can share your detailed information with them, but it’s
best to start out with something more general and less ‘challenging’.

To some degree, the rest of what you do depends on your
situation and your parents' objections.

If you're just getting started:

If you’re just starting to home school and your parents don’t yet know,
but you suspect that they will object, you are, in some ways, in the best
situation. You can lay the groundwork carefully and increase the odds
that they will eventually come around to see that homeschooling is the
best answer for your family.

Share media reports about the troubles in the schools, especially your
own local government schools. If your own children are already in a
school system, share your own frustrations or concerns with your own
family's experience.

Share research that shows how well most home-schooled kids do, as
compared with their government schooled counterparts. Share the
documented advataged homeschool has for families and for children.
Introduce the idea gradually by recreating your own thought processes
for them in simplified form.

It might help to get a copy of The Core Knowledge Curriculum for your
child’s level ("What Your ..... Grader Needs to Know") and have it
conspicuously around the house. Never mind that it may have nothing
to do with what you have in mind for your home education plan, it will
reassure your parents that you are paying attention to what the children
would have learned in school, so you won’t leave out anything critical. If
they’re open to it, it might also help to share with them a copy of a book
written specifically to reassure the extended family and friends of a home
schooling family to share with them. (Deborah Markus' book, Don't
Worry, is a very good one.)

If your parents are extremely resistant:

When your parents concerns make them anxious, it can make them
difficult to be around. Their approach could be anything from the mild
"Are you sure you've really considered all sides of this?" to sharp
disagreement and constant nagging. Whatever their style, your parents
likely know how to get under your skin when they disagree with your
decisions or question your motives or your wisdom. If you've been
homeschooling, and your parents have been objecting, for a while, you
may be feeling pretty exasperated, especially if they've resisted actually
learning anything about homeschooling and simply fall back on their
assumptions and their prejudices.

Unless there is some really pressing reason that you need your parents
buy-in (like you're living in their home), it would probably be best to have
information available to share with them should they voice an interest,
but don't open the subject, and try instead to find things on which you
can agree. Other than offering them information to read, it's best to drop
the subject yourself. Refuse to be drawn into the same old arguments
again and again. The arguments have never gotten through before, so
it is better to agree to disagree.

"Mom, I know how you feel, and you know what I think, so maybe it's best
if we just agree to disagree on this one. Let's drop the subject. I don't
want us to end up dreading our time together"

"Dad, as much as I love you and respect your opinion, it's clear that we
just aren't going to agree on this one, so my children's education is no
longer open to discussion."

In the end, all you can do is to do your very best for your children (which
is why we homeschool) and leave it to your parents to find out for
themselves that you're doing a wonderful job. If you give them room not
to have to defend their opinions and the choices they made, they might
be able to react (eventually) to what they see rather than to what they
think is happening. If not, well, at least your life will be more peaceful.

It might reassure your family if you can let them know about all the
wonderful experiences your children are having -- maybe even
experiences that they couldn't have had if they were at school all day
five days a week! Shared with the attitude of "we had so much fun today"
rather than defensively, these educational adventures are legitimate
topics of conversation. You might share your these adventures face to
face, or in telephone conversation -- or perhaps a family blog that you
can make available to all the relatives. The blog has the advantage that
it eliminates the need to respond that is inherent in conversation and so
can help reduce the conflict. Maybe over time the rest of the family can
help reassure your parents about the job you're doing, even if they don't
keep up with your news themselves.

If your sharing starts the cycle again, simply thank them again for their
deep concern for the children you both love and remind them that this is
a subject best dropped in the interest of family harmony. Then drop it.

Oh, and when they point out how beautifully someone else's children are
doing in school? School really is the best choice for a few children.
That's neither here nor there; your children are *your* children. They
are not their cousins or their neighbors and they can't be expected to
thrive in exactly the same circumstances as those children do, anymore
than they can be expected to have exactly the same tastes in food or
books or be exactly the same size. But your parents don't need to be
convinced of that -- they had their chance and they raised their kids as
they saw fit. Now it's your turn and your responsibility to do the same.

I hope that helps ... as grandparents ourselves, we have a certain
amount of sympathy for both sides in this one. There are choices our
older kids make for their kids that make us cringe. And, as the parents
of a four year old, we still manage to raise our own mothers' eyebrows
from time to time with our own decisions. And so life goes on.
Rod and Misti Smith (2008)