Day 2

Today seemingly started out o.k. The kids knew what was expected of them so I was good to go, right? Wrong! How could I expect that there would be no struggle or fight after only one day. I realized that I was in dreamland when my son proceeded to tell me at one point that "I don't want to waste my time looking it up!!". Well, I thought, neither do I! He loves to ask me how to spell words all the time. Not really realizing that I was doing so, I had proceeded to train him to keep asking me by always just giving him the answer instead of allowing him to find his own answer. He knows how to use the dictionary, but, if you had someone just giving you the answer all the time, would you want to do the work?? So, in the midst of his fit, I had to make a choice.............either go ahead and tell him how to spell it (fixing things for the short term) or not giving in and having him discover the answer himself (teaching him for the long haul).

In the midst of teaching our children all about reading, writing and arithmetic, somehow we can tend to miss what is really the most important issue we are striving for here..............Who our children are becoming. We can build up our children on solid rock for the future or we can solve their problems for them today. If we focus our schooling on the short term.......this day, this week or even this year, we can tend to be tellers or advise givers. If we focus on the end of this homeschooling journey, we see something else emerge, helping our children grow to maturity and become a responsible person who is ready and able to find their own way in life.

It is o.k. as a parent to let our kids fail sometimes (at "safe" things). Failure is one of the best catalyst to growth!

The question is......do we want to empower our kids for tomorrow or train them into dependence for today?