We have been programmed to think that it is normal for children to

be in a room all day with 20 to 30 other kids of their exact same age.

Hi friends, and welcome.

I'm your host AmyElizSmith.

I'm a homeschool mom of three and have homeschooled each from the start.

While I have a Master's in Elementary Ed, I want to teach other mamas that you

don't need a fancy degree to have the passion and knowledge to successfully

educate your children from home.

I hope to bring you encouragement to jump in and start your homeschool journey and

provide my absolute best recommendations to help you begin your homeschool journey.

Thanks for joining us along for this crazy, messy, grace

filled homeschool ride.

Hello, and welcome back friends.

I'm so excited to be back with you here today and talk about the Top

10 Reasons Why You Can Homeschool.

And this episode is gonna focus on "You are the Influence in Your

Child's Life", and you want to be the influence in your child's life--

morally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically, and cognitively.

I've heard it said that children need to be "Socialized, and

what about socialization?"

That's a big buzzword that people like to denigrate homeschool for .But

just think, who do we actually want our children to be socializing with?

Do we only want them to be with their same aged peers or only spend their days in

all their hours of their waking time with one or a very small handful of teachers?

And those teachers may or may not have the same moral and

spiritual convictions as us?

It's really amazing that people use this as an excuse that

homeschooling or homeschoolers are weird or it's even wrong.

We have been programmed to think that it is normal for children to be in a

room all day with 20 to 30 other kids of their exact same age, and that

is actually a very new concept for centuries children have learned at home.

Or in multi-age schoolhouses where siblings are present and learning

together and supporting each other.

So as for me and as for my house, we will serve the Lord.

We will raise our children up, teaching them together the fruits of the spirit.

Galatians 5:22-23 says, "But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, patience,

kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."

Again, such things there is no law, and these are the fruits that I

want to give to my children, and also give them the gift of spending

their days together as siblings.

Government schools do not, and they should not have the

authority to teach these things.

And I would even go as far to say that they don't want to.

Indeed, they teach the opposite of these things.

And next episode, we will do a mini deep dive on the history of education.

Its brief history in the United States as well as its every 25 years or so reforms.

But, suffice it to say, raising moral citizens that live upright lives is

not the essential goal of the public school system, or those elite educators

who form boards to put together the curriculums that our children are

learning from today, if you could even call them curriculum, because

they are not based off of any liberal arts, education or wisdom of the ages.

That indeed, I would argue children need to actually learn.

But let's look at their moral, spiritual, religious upbringing and those emotional,

physical and cognitive elements that we as parents want to nurture our children in.

Teachable moments happen every day.

We can have a plan for what you teach, and it is wonderful.

We always go through a devotional.

We do various habit trainings, but you can't really put a timestamp on what

will be effective for every child.

Truly, it's quantity that matters-- being with them day

in and day out, hour after hour.

And it's also quality that matters.

Morally as children grow, they will shift from learning about being

good because you as the parent, have told them to be good to becoming

civilized and virtuous on their own.

This is the way of the will.

Developing and cultivating that will is one of the core responsibilities and

privileges that we have as parents .They must know that there is such a thing

as moral absolutes and absolute truth.

That everything is inherently right or wrong and no context

or outcome can change this.

These truths are grounded in the sources like law, rationality,

human nature, and religion.

Let's look at spiritually, whatever your faith is, and you're welcome here, even

if you're not a believer in Christ, but whatever it is, it is important to you.

This is why you believe it.

No matter what your belief system is, you place deep conviction in it,

and probably you have spared time and effort to make conscious decisions to

honor whatever your religion is for.

For us in our home, we have deeply held Christian beliefs.

We seek to raise our children up in the love of Christ and

in the discipline of His law.

Loving God and His precepts above all else, and loving others.

We have many ways we can do this as parents.

We go to church with our children.

We work on scripture memory.

We sing songs.

We talk about things daily.

But if our children are not with us the majority of the time, then

that influence will come from where they are and not from you.

Going to Sunday school just once a week or maybe including a Wednesday

night Bible study cannot neutralize or pacify the amount of time that your

child had also spent in government school where the belief system there

does not align with the beliefs of your own convictions in your own household.

The beliefs in schools today, as was the case to a lesser degree throughout the

entire 20th century, is secular humanism.

And secular humanism is a belief in that there is no God.

And if that doesn't align with your thoughts and beliefs then why are

you or are we allowing our children to be influenced by principles

that don't align with our own?

Let's look at emotional regulation.

We all know that growing up can be hard, puberty is hard.

Being a teen is hard.

And with today's world of bullying on the rise and social media,

bullying has been higher than ever before to unprecedented levels.

Children and teens no longer have to say words out loud.

They can type them and those words can sting harder than

if they had been in person.

You could take a current poll of our entire nation's youth's mental health

to know that things are not going well and the repercussions of screen usage,

social media use, exposure to explicit content, dopamine addiction in general,

the cyber and in-person bullying can be more than a young person can bear.

Now, I haven't even brought up the academic pressures that children can have.

And yes, 16, 17 year olds, they are still children.

Their brains are not yet fully developed.

This is another reason we want to parent our own children and teach

our own children in the home.

I have seen young girls in classrooms or on buses who act much older than they

are because of exposure to social media or television that's inappropriate.

Posing as models or dancing inappropriately, attitudes

can emerge, bullying ensues.

This is not sensical and it's not needed.

I've also seen the light in a child's eyes become extinguished because they

have a strong desire to learn and a wonder, but then they're placed in the

cog of the public school system day in and day out, and that light in their eyes,

that excitement becomes extinguished.

The process of growth and change in intellectual mental

abilities, such as thinking and reasoning, is not one size fits all.

We need to allow our children the time they need to learn and to grow, rather

than taking into account a classroom of 20 or 30, moving at the pace of every

child rather than the individual child.

Children need nourishment, they deserve nourishment.

Early wake ups too, late homework, too many afterschool

extracurricular activities.

When and where does it end?

There's a constant cycle where the child, it doesn't even have time to

take a breath and take in who they are and what their interests actually are.

My children are not perfect . I don't have every single answer.

My children struggle with a variety of things as do any adolescent, but I am

here with them, and I am so proud of that fact that we are working through their

development and their growth together.

I'm proud of our daily wins, but also of our daily struggles because we are

taking them step by step together.

We do not take home education or the atmosphere of learning and family lightly.

We know that children belong with their parents.

Parents deserve to be the most strongly influencers in their children's lives.

We are the ones who love our children the most.

It's not a teacher who does their best, but it's not someone who's simply

following orders with the current curriculum that may include gender

unicorns or an introduction to critical theory or other educational theories

where their brains are way too undeveloped to understand what any of it means.

This purposeful confusion is intentional and it's detrimental to our young people.

We know this, so what do we do?

Take a breath.

Know that God is for you, and sometimes hard decisions have

to be made, and that is good.

Last episode, we talked about bravery, and it is brave to acknowledge these

things and acknowledge that Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will

your homeschool, but you've got this.

You can take them out of the cog of public school and just spend time

together, going to the park, going to the zoo, reading stories, reading aloud,

and that can be enough for right now.

You don't have to have it all or know it all to make that choice.

John Greenleaf Whittier, from the 19th Century, wrote a beautiful

poem that I'd like to read to you.

We searched the world for truth.

We call the good, the pure, the beautiful.

From graven stone and written scroll from all old flower fields of the

soul and weary seekers of the best.

We come back laden from the quest to find that all the sages.

Is in the book our mothers read.

So my prayer for you is that we read to our children, we spend that time with

them, and we acknowledge that we are the fierce lovers of them, and they deserve