Just Because You Can . . .

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A new homeschooling family has moved into our area. Though I haven’t seen her face to face since she and her family moved here, the mom (I’ll call her Sara) and I have spoken on the phone a few times. I called Sara on Friday night, while she was at the Kroger grocery store in Cookeville, about 40 minutes from her house.

We have two grocery stores in our little town. One is locally owned and the other is a discount chain store. I shop at each of these sometimes, but for most of my traditional grocery store shopping, I depend mainly on Kroger in Cookeville. There I have many more choices.

Sara mentioned Friday night that there were four Krogers in the town where she and her family lived before moving here.

A few years ago I became acquainted with a homeschooling mother (I’ll call her Frydryka) who had been born in a formerly Communist country in Eastern Europe. Her daughter was in the cast of The Cross Behind the Curtain, Mary Evelyn’s Homeschool Dramatic Society play about Christians who stayed faithful to God and who even homeschooled in the former Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

Frydryka and her mother helped the children know what it was really like to live under the circumstances they were portraying in the play. I remember her telling about their immigration to America and their shock the first time they went into an American store. A store filled with merchandise was an amazing sight to people who had lived under Communism.

We in America have seemingly endless choices. We can choose what stuff we want to buy and we can choose how we want to live and how we want our children to live.

Having choices can be a great blessing, but sometimes choices can get all tangled up with temptation.

Many people fought long and hard for us to have the choice to homeschool. I am thankful. Today parents don’t have to wonder so much whether they can homeschool, but they do have to choose how to homeschool.

I sometimes talk to mothers who seem to be in a hurry. Often these mothers have children who are academically gifted. Sometimes they tell me about their junior high age child who is doing high school work or their high school child who is doing college work.

Options that give our children the opportunity to do things that are usually reserved for children older than they are now can be good in certain circumstances. In others they can be devastating. This year a word of caution and advice came to me as I heard again and again about these kinds of choices.

Just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

If you have read Daily Encouragement very long, you know that I am of the “why rush it” school of parenting. I believe in childhood. I guess I’m on a sort of vendetta to help children get to be kids for their whole childhood. I figure the time for childhood is when kids are, well, children, so just because they can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that they should.

Here’s an extreme example. Just because a four year old can spend her whole day reading a book about the Holocaust, should she do that instead of playing with her dolls and toy kitchen?

When we make choices about our children’s days, it’s something to think about.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child,
think like a child, reason like a child;
when I became a man, I did away with childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11

 I can imagine the apostle Paul as a precocious youngster, but even he had a childhood, a precious childhood, and when that was done then he became a man.

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