The kind of freedom homeschooled children enjoy – no early bedtimes, sleeping in and no homework, to name just a few – must be perceived as a threat to mainstream parenting. I assume that the parents whose kids are in school tolerate us. Sometimes I’m convinced they avoid us. Probably they judge us. Alternatively, they might just feel sorry for us. They can’t imagine spending the entire day with their children. So when their own kids inform them that not all children go to school, they likely have ample ammunition to justify the importance and necessity of doing curriculum and regular schooling. Every now and then, however, their real thoughts about homeschooling slip out. But that’s okay because, as homeschoolers, many of us are engaged in the same comparison and judging of their children’s schooled lives. At times we mingle warily, at times freely. Most importantly, to preserve relationships, we routinely keep our opinions to ourselves. After all, every one of us believes we are doing what’s best for our children. No one way is perfect, and it does little good to create an “us against them” standoff, for even though the abundance of homeschoolers in my immediate vicinity suggests we’re not a minority, I know that’s not the case. The peers my children will have as adults will likely have been schooled. Some of them will have fared better than others. Regardless of who went to school and who didn’t, they will be of the same generation and they will find common denominators in order to get along.

To my mind, parenting today is more challenging than ever before. Perhaps at no other time in history has so much focus and attention been spent on analyzing how children develop, how they don’t develop and what we need to do to get them to develop. Sadly, today’s children are diagnosed with all kinds of deficiencies and behavioral problems. Professional pathologists analyze the speech of kindergarten children. Reading tests are done at an increasingly younger level. Schools practice lock-downs as commonly as fire drills. One can almost feel the collective held breath of an entire community of schooled parents who desperately hope their child will not be the bullied one or the one singled out as a remedial student. Articles in magazines discuss the realities and pitfalls of competitive parenting. Somewhere along the line we have lost our bearings. Rampant individualism is replacing cooperative communities as more and more folks operate not collectively but as individual family units (and even within these units, there is often a shocking lack of interaction).

The homeschooling community, because we routinely seek each other out for social activities, may be more cooperative out of necessity. However, even though I’m not drawn into discussions about what school is better, what teacher I wish my kids had or who is getting better marks, I am not immune to the anxieties and pitfalls that stem from contemporary parenting. Perhaps this says more about . . .

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 Theresa Shea is the mother of three unschooled children. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in several magazines and anthologies in Canada. She has just begun to seek a publisher for her first novel, The Quickening, which deals with the complex moral issues surrounding contemporary conception and birth technologies. An amateur violinist, Theresa spends much of her time trying to get her children to do their music practice. Any free time she has generally involves drinking americanos in cafés, reading the latest in contemporary fiction and non-fiction or homeschooling her new golden retriever puppy. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.