Thoughts on Education

Thoughts on education: Yesterday my daughter willingly helped me paint all my mum’s garden furniture before my mum’s open studio next week. This is not unusual she often helps me and our family.

Everywhere my 13 year old goes people tell me how polite she is, how pleasant, how respectful, how she never swears, how she’s the first to help another student and always kind to her friends. One helper at a club was nearly crying with emotion describing the care my daughter took off her partially deaf friend. She’s is also pleasant and helpful to me at home. 

I have not applied strict rules to her, quite the opposite, it’s her own respect for others that prompts this behaviour and her cheeky sense of humour shows it’s not because she’s afraid of me!

She’s also intelligent, a good communicator, good at leadership, confident, social, and has lots of good friends. (I realise her own nature as well as her upbringing is in the mix.)

So I have a teen and she’s not a pain. I realise that 13 is still early and I might be for it when she’s 16 or whatever, but I don’t really think so. My mum tells me that my brother and I were never terrible teens really. I went partly to a little private school and was partly homeschooled.

I have several times been told by other homeschool mum’s with teens “Oh, you don’t really get that sort of teen when you homeschool or from little alternative schools.”

I find it an interesting idea that hard to handle teenagers could be not an inevitable side effect of growing up or hormones but instead something we are manufacturing in state secondary schools.

Anyway met daughter now has really vindicated my minimum rules pending style when she was little so I’m planning to keep letting my little son run wild and touch things!