Did you send your kid to school last week?
How'd that go?
I think about school all the time. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what sort of education I want my vibrant toddler to have. I think about my own school years with mixture of dread and wistfulness.
I’m a 40 year old woman and my most vivid nightmares ALWAYS take place in a high school class room, where I am to take a math test (on my period). I plead, I say, “I’m a grown up! I don’t have to do this anymore!” My protests are ignored and the scantron looms!
I had an eclectic and loving tribe of drama kids I rolled with. I ran the student newspaper. I starred in plays. I DOMINATED IN DISTRICT WIDE SHAKESPEARE COMPETITIONS. I had magnificent teachers and still, I would say, that school was a (low-level)trauma I endured.
I resented every morning having to go sit in a giant institution to study things I wasn’t interested in (GEOMETRY, WTF?!) , jockeying for position in a rigid social order among cliques, constantly feeling like shit about my body, enduring the indignities of stupid and petty teachers, eating shitty food, being sleep deprived. I felt restricted, pissed off, and cheated out my own time. The only reason why I kept decent grades or showed up at all was so I could do my drama thing. Without it, lord knows what kind of serious trouble I would have gotten into.
So I think about what school will be like for my kid and I think… I don’t wanna do it! A parenting idol and friend of mine, started an homeschooling co-op, and 10 years in she’s raised two magnificent children within a community of like minded families. Her kids are cool and weird in all the right ways.
This essay about unschooling also fundamentally changed the way I think about schooling (read it!) All that being said, I could change my mind!! I also said I’d never buy plastic toys for my kid or watch a Disney movie and boy, did I have BAD NEWS for my past self.
Anyways, BACK to you!
Did your kiddo get on the bus?
Did you take the picture on the front step with them holding the sign that says all the things?
What did you pack for lunch?
How did you get them prepared for the transition out of summer?
We’re you sobbing? Relieved? Did you nap? Clean? Binge eat tearfully in your car while listening to that brat summer lady?
HOW’D YOUR KID DO?
Tell us!
We are hosting a RADICAL MEETING / webinar about how lactation professionals have been breaking their professional code of ethics to market baby formula. It will shock you. And our plan to stop it will THRILL YOU! 🔥 Sign up here.
Why not give your favorite mom the gift of indoctrination and searing insight! You can gift a subscription. Or you can treat yourself if you haven’t already. 🤱🏻👸🏻👩🏽🔧
Alex looks so big in his backpack, it's hard to reconcile that he's my baby who still asks for milkies 😳
Heyyyyy! I did NOT send my kids to school/daycare! I cannot justify taking my kids away from their mother for the majoirty of the day, the majority of the week, majority of the year! I am the primary attachment figure and do not find enough value in what a school provides(group activities, learning things albeit at a frenzied pace, getting a break from being 'mom') in order to participate in it. The cons far outweigh the benefits in my mind and the longer I'm alive, the deeper I dig my heels in. School serves one primary purpose: functioning as a state-funded daycare for working parents. I get wanting to go along with it, cuz us parents--specifically mothers--need space from our kids on a regular basis...totally normal. BUT the quality of whomever is replacing you as the guide/authority figure is an overlooked and critical issue. Kids are stuffed into a room all together, outnumbering the teacher 3 times over and the actual influence the kid is being affected by is his or her PEERS. The teachers do not have time to be giving quality attention to each kid and thus, kids becoming peer-oriented, concerned with impressing and being approved of by their peers instead of impressing and seeking approval from their parents, whom were the designated influencers of their kids...and this is just ONE flaw of our American education/childrearing machine.
I took the unschooling route and my 7 year old goes to a cooperative 2 days per week. We participate in other co-ops and activities on days she doesn't go.
It all depends on the parents' understanding of child development (they're affected by every single thing that happens to them, thus the need for conscious parenting revolution) AND the parents' priorities.
If you wanna see the difference between schooled children and unschooled children, go to a playground with homeschool kids then go to one with public school kids and you'll see the difference in how they treat one another.
OFC there are always exceptions but the difference between having a parent consistently available and NOT having a parent consistently available makes a remarkable and undeniable difference.