Separation Anxiety
Jan. 7, 2006 at 8:51 AM
family
This post was prompted by what I posted yesterday "Poster children for the state" (links to blogger) and the discussion I had in the comments. If you haven't read that I'd encourage you to read that first.
Children are perceptive. They learn not just by what we say to them but by what we do around them. They begin to identify with those they spend the most time with. Those that they spend less time with become less important. That is what is happening to that young fifth grade boy in Tennessee. He is beginning to identify with the school to the point that it represents family to him. The idea that this young man would identify with the state as "family" in a positive way is not a value I hope to culitvate in my children.
My sister told me a story from her days as a teacher in a private Christian school. Shortly after she began teaching.
She was assigned to a fourth grade classroom. As a typical recent graduate she was eager and enthusiastic to impress her little scholars. By the middle of the year things were going along quite well. The staff liked her, the parents seemed impressed, and the students loved her. So much so that one day a little girl said to her as she was walking into class, "Mrs. H. you're so pretty, you're so smart, you're nothing like my mother!"
Instead of feeling complimented my sister was saddened. Because she was doing such a good job the little girl's impression of her own mother was diminished. My sister knew this mother. She was a typical mother trying to do her best to raise her daughter. She was working hard to send her to the best schools and hand picked the teachers to ensure her daughter's success. But the unintended consequence was that her daughter's heart was slowly being wooed away to see others more important than her parents and family. Left unchecked, the little girl will grow into her teen years ignoring her parents and their impact in her life becomes minimal. The eventual outcome is that the relationship is weakened and the little girl will constantly be looking for the next Mrs. H. to fill the need for information and advice.
But I guess most parents accept this a just a part of life in the "real world" their children are going to one day be a part of. I want to create a better reality for my chiilren.
But people often say, "The real world is not so rosy. Not all have a mother. What about those children?" In general I would agree that if there is a parental void that it be filled. Just not by the state. The schools are not the place to build lasting relationships. While this teacher or school may fill it for him this year. What about next year? Or the year after? It wil be a revolving door of "caring people". That's not a family. And that has a long term affect on children. But many cannot see this because they themselves have been affected. They believe that not only can the state fill this need. But that they must fill it. After all, who else will do it? Never stopping to consider the long term ramifications to our society when the state is so powerful.
God did not design things that way. He made a man. Then a woman. From them came a family, and then the nations. He didn't create a nation of individuals to be intimate with who ever they chose or whoever the state assigned them. God, the marriage, the family, and then the nation is the order in which I believe a proper society will function.
A society that doesn't seek the face of God is bound to seek the hand of the state.
I have much more to say on this topic. (Don't I always.) But this same dear sister has just delivered her seventh child today. So I'll be busy but I'll be back.
Children are perceptive. They learn not just by what we say to them but by what we do around them. They begin to identify with those they spend the most time with. Those that they spend less time with become less important. That is what is happening to that young fifth grade boy in Tennessee. He is beginning to identify with the school to the point that it represents family to him. The idea that this young man would identify with the state as "family" in a positive way is not a value I hope to culitvate in my children.
My sister told me a story from her days as a teacher in a private Christian school. Shortly after she began teaching.
She was assigned to a fourth grade classroom. As a typical recent graduate she was eager and enthusiastic to impress her little scholars. By the middle of the year things were going along quite well. The staff liked her, the parents seemed impressed, and the students loved her. So much so that one day a little girl said to her as she was walking into class, "Mrs. H. you're so pretty, you're so smart, you're nothing like my mother!"
Instead of feeling complimented my sister was saddened. Because she was doing such a good job the little girl's impression of her own mother was diminished. My sister knew this mother. She was a typical mother trying to do her best to raise her daughter. She was working hard to send her to the best schools and hand picked the teachers to ensure her daughter's success. But the unintended consequence was that her daughter's heart was slowly being wooed away to see others more important than her parents and family. Left unchecked, the little girl will grow into her teen years ignoring her parents and their impact in her life becomes minimal. The eventual outcome is that the relationship is weakened and the little girl will constantly be looking for the next Mrs. H. to fill the need for information and advice.
But I guess most parents accept this a just a part of life in the "real world" their children are going to one day be a part of. I want to create a better reality for my chiilren.
But people often say, "The real world is not so rosy. Not all have a mother. What about those children?" In general I would agree that if there is a parental void that it be filled. Just not by the state. The schools are not the place to build lasting relationships. While this teacher or school may fill it for him this year. What about next year? Or the year after? It wil be a revolving door of "caring people". That's not a family. And that has a long term affect on children. But many cannot see this because they themselves have been affected. They believe that not only can the state fill this need. But that they must fill it. After all, who else will do it? Never stopping to consider the long term ramifications to our society when the state is so powerful.
God did not design things that way. He made a man. Then a woman. From them came a family, and then the nations. He didn't create a nation of individuals to be intimate with who ever they chose or whoever the state assigned them. God, the marriage, the family, and then the nation is the order in which I believe a proper society will function.
A society that doesn't seek the face of God is bound to seek the hand of the state.
I have much more to say on this topic. (Don't I always.) But this same dear sister has just delivered her seventh child today. So I'll be busy but I'll be back.
5 Comments and Trackbacks
posted by SteveWalden on Jan. 7, 2006 at 9:32 AM
Great thoughts, Spunky. You're definitely making good points why homeschooling makes so much of a difference. People accept that institutionalizing your children is cutting your ties with them and that it's a normal part of growing up. If they think anything about homeschooling, they think it's people who have trouble "cutting the apron strings." They don't realize that the apron was meant to remain intact until the children learn to stand on their own as adults.
But still, as a society, we ship our kids off in yellow busses to a state-run day care that gives them facts (some of which aren't factual at all) and, if we're lucky, a benign morality. You can't NOT teach morals and values when you are educating. Something will fill the gap left by parents who don't fill their children with morals and character. Someone else proposed, "Walk down the hallways of a high school and tell me which student's behavior you would like your child to emulate." Parents who turn their children over to the institutions gradually lose their children's hearts and minds and then complain about how "sullen" or "angry" their child is, as if it were a mystery.
I sometimes wonder if God had Moses spend all that time in Midian undoing the damage his royal Egyptian education had done. Parents who love their children must learn that the state makes a lousy teacher and an even worse parent. The children who do okay in these institutions do so in spite of the system, not because of it.
posted by PatriciaWHunter on Jan. 7, 2006 at 11:01 AM
Without making excuses for anyone - I think it is fair to say that MOST parents make the best decisions they know how to make. So why aren't parents making better decisions? I believe that one of the reasons, besides our bent toward sin, is the failure of the Church (both corporately and individually) to teach parents their responsibilities and biblical mandates, the examples the Church has displayed in their willingness to accept state and institutional support (I can, and WILL, eventually get into this in much more detail), resulting in the Church's lack of impact on society.
Why isn't the Church not only better preparing believers, but also failing to offer parenting classes and support for those parents (probably like many of the parents mentioned in that article) that don't have the skills and resources to know how to make better choices? There will always be children with parents who cannot/will not nurture their children. That is where the Church should be filling the gap...not the state. But the Church has failed to fill the gap and the state was more than willing to oblige.
Congratulations on your new neice! God is good!
~ Patricia
posted by bwktbarr on Jan. 7, 2006 at 11:39 AM
As I grew up in public schools in California, I gradually grew to accept that my parents' ideas were archaic at best, foolish and bigoted at worse, and by my third year of college had completely rejected my parents' God in favor of secular humanism. This sent me into a tailspin of severe depression, which the Lord saw fit to deliver me from a year later. I remember walking through San Francisco, my home at the time, looking at all the physical beauty around me (the gardens, the buildings, the ocean), and realizing I could not enjoy any of it because my life was so empty. That was when I decided that even if my parents' ideas didn't fit into the world's concept of acceptable, I needed to give them another chance. I began attending church again.
It has taken me years to get back to the place where I accept my parents' teachings and values. Even now, after fifteen years of making my way back, I am surprised by continually discovering ways I rejected their wisdom. I will unearth another feminist or humanist idea that I unknowingly embraced, and discover the fallcies and ungodliness of it, learn the way of God in whatever matter it is I'm dealing with, and when I figure out what my approach should be in order to honor God, it is often what I would have been doing all along if I had retained my parents' teachings. That's so frustrating. It's like peeling an onion, layer after layer of bad instruction coming off, but more underneath to deal with. I'm just glad the Lord saw fit to reveal my error to me, and continues to do so.
God bless,
Katie Barr
posted by SusannahCox on Jan. 7, 2006 at 12:05 PM
Congratulations, Spunky!!! And Spunky's sis, of course!
Second, our church educates parents. They periodically hold parenting classes, and I'd say 90% of our church homeschools. However, they don't set it up as normative. In other words, "Homeschool, or you are out of God's will." I don't believe that would be right for the church to do. I still believe homeschooling is a matter of opinion among Christians (Rom. 14). Obviously, I have very strong opinions about why homeschooling is preferable, but I don't go around foisting them on people. I know I don't like it when the reverse happens to me.
I believe that it's best to love people first, rather than critique them, and lead by example. I know of at least two families who have been influenced to homeschool by our church. I personally am so impressed with our pastor's and former homegroup pastors' families that if I were not homeschooling, I would be drawn to it merely by their example. In fact, that IS how I was drawn to homeschooling in the beginning, long before my first child was born. Just seeing the closeness and happiness and cohesion of homeschooling families was enough to make me sit up and take notice.
I totally agree with Spunky, and the way I have always put it to myself (because the "rite of passage" of sending children off to school is so ingrained these days that we all feel that pressure) is that it is NOT normal to institutionalize children at the tender ages of 4, 5, 6.... It is NOT normal for a child not to be close to his or her siblings. It is perfectly normal for a baby to cry for his or her mother and it is perfectly normal for a mother to grieve over having to leave a baby in someone else's care for hours out of the day. No matter what all the "working mom" or "scholastic" magazines say, institutionalizing children, especially at such young ages, interferes with their normal development. I was reading a magazine in the doctor's office just two days ago that, in article after article, discussed in detail, with many suggestions, how many children have to be "eased" into the school environment because it's scary for them to be separated from home around so many strangers. In at least two articles, they were discussing 4-year-olds! I'm sorry, but it's perfectly normal for a 4-year-old to be afraid when he is separated from home for hours out of the day. That he gets habituated to it after a while is not necessarily a good thing for the family! "A body can get used to anything" (as Pa Ingalls used to quote the Irishman) "even being hanged."
I used to be plagued by doubt that my eldest child didn't have a "best friend" outside the home. We did have little friends with whom we regularly joined in playgroup, and she had acquaintances at church and in the community, but (at the tender age of 4) she didn't have a "bosom buddy"! O Horrors! Then amazingly (who could have foreseen it?) her little sister grew up from toddlerhood, and now they are best friends! I wouldn't have it any other way. School chums disappear after a year or so, or at best after a few years. Sisters are there for as long as you live! When DH and I are gone, they will still have each other.
The same thing is now happening between my boys, ages 5 and 4. And my 7yo daughter has really taken to playing with my 2yo daughter, and dotes on her incessantly ("she's so cute!"). They love to dance and spin around the living room together.
I probably should have made a blog entry of this rather than going on in Spunky's comment section, but I just wanted to reinforce what she was saying.
posted by spunkyhomeschool on Jan. 9, 2006 at 9:52 AM
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This is indeed an interesting topic and one that isn't going away anytime soon. I think that as our society continues to mature we are going to see more and more fall out from this. And unfortunately more and more cries for the state to help fix it.