Perhaps I am slow to notice a trend, but lately it seems that everyone is offering some sort of specialized class. This weekend, a flyer for "Baby and Me Yoga" crossed my desk. The flyer mentioned relaxation, meditation and babies in the same sentence, As if . . .  Anyway, I digress. Apart from this example, most of the classes I see advertised seem to be geared towards kids, and most particularly homeschooled ones. Don't get me wrong, the more opportunities for homeschoolers, the better. It just seems to me that businesses have figured out that there's a profitable new market sector out there during what used to the dead-time of normal school hours.

I can't go to my local pool during school hours without being accosted by the homeschool aquatics instructor wanting my kids to sign up for classes. Never mind that my 5 year-old is swimming circles around the kids in the class, and never mind that the only thing relatively interesting that the class does is paddle up and down a lane in a kayak, the instructor really thinks my kids should join the class. I can't blame her for trying; after all, it would help pay her salary, but the pool is our family time, and my husband joins us from work, just so that we can all be together. Our kids snorkel around the pool, dive for objects, play tag, and swim laps like the grownups do--and they have fun doing it. Let's not spoil their fun (and ours) by organizing it and calling it a class. They're learning new skills and having a blast all the while!

I'll let you in on another secret: To teach our children these new skills at this early age requires not much more effort than getting wet and playing with them. Aha! There's the rub. In order to teach your children a new skill, you must immerse yourself with them and come alongside of them. This is pretty much universal no matter what type of skill you are trying to teach to a youngster. You can't simply hand a kindergartner a book and tell him to read it, or throw him into the pool and tell him to swim; however, you can send him to the reading specialist at the local co-op, or the aquatics instructor at the pool. The choice is yours. Do you want fond memories of your child cuddled up with you and a book, and splashing happily beside you, or do you want to hand him over to a professional when that type of intervention is not needed? Not that professionals can't be very helpful at times. I just think that we, as homeschoolers, need to be discerning of the cases in which we turn to the experts. Any loving adult who can paddle around in the water can teach his own children beginning swimming skills. Why hand over a preschooler to a stranger, no matter how well-trained, who is responsible for a class full of squirming, splashing kids, in addition to yours? Nothing surpasses one-on-one tutoring by a loving teacher who is heavily invested in the student's learning. Moms and Dads, you qualify!

Several of the YMCAs around here have started offering P.E. classes for the poor-deprived-homeschoolers that never get the opportunity to exercise or socialize. Never mind that the homeschoolers I know are some of the most actively involved, overscheduled kids on the planet. Between AWANAS, music lessons, dance lessons, tennis lessons, co-op classes, soccer practice, and scouts, when does a homeschooled kid get to relax and just be a kid? I see this as no small issue. If we are constantly programming our children to death, when will they get to explore the world, without a distracting guide, and encounter something that really sparks their interest? Perhaps, given adequate space and wise cultivation by their parents, with a little less over-crowding by the weeds of organized activities, our children will have room to blossom and grow into the persons that God made them to be, and they will bear fruit accordingly.