Home Schooling

Spiritual Growthe

Our home is the core place our children will see the power and mercy of the Gospel on display and experience how that can affect our lives. If your faith and values matter to you and these inform your daily attitudes, choices and actions, then your home is the best context for the spiritual development of your children. Sometimes this is a matter of faith for parents – all kids, prior to adulthood, will evaluate and either adopt or discard the values and beliefs their parents hold. Some kids will go through this internally without much indication of the process; others will experience a lot of questioning and struggle. But, no matter how your teen responds to the process, you can be confident this development is taking place and he is moving towards a place of personally held beliefs and convictions.

Homeschooling allows the daily context for that fragile time to be in your home and with your family. Research has repeatedly found that parents are the biggest influence in their children’s moral development – if they do not abdicate that role. Peers will become the chief socializing influence, if parents are not around. It’s not quality time that trumps quantity of time; kids need both from us.

Homeschooling allows a natural context to exist for spiritual growth, the only one that can truly integrate a child’s emotional, intellectual and moral development. And that’s important if we want our kids to learn how to live with integrity. Compartmentalizing our faith – being forced to leave it out of the equation, especially during adolescence– is risky business. Our children will learn to disconnect their academic achievement and their knowledge base from the moorings of God as creator and center of all we know and do. It also fosters moral development for utilitarian purposes: I will play by the rules because I want the reward that is offered for doing so. Emotionally, the Psalmist understood God was his source for peace and hope when his soul was wracked with disquiet and worry. He knew to look up, not within, for enduring solutions. Our kids do not figure out on their own how to bring their faith to bear upon all of life: this internal integrity needs to be made visible as we walk transparently with our God before them and talk with them about how this process works.

The culture-at-large is fragmented and idiosyncratic. Modern education is as well: forty minutes for science, the bell rings, hurry off to forty minutes of English. All the components of the school day are divorced from each other. What is the unifying whole? How does all this fit together and for what purpose? At home, you can seamlessly move back and forth between your child’s emotional upheavals, academic tasks, and spiritual questions.