Kids + Social Life

Our family just finished our second year of homeschooling and our first semester of opening a community homeschool Co-Op. Our school has seven kids and we hired a math teacher to keep us on track. The kids just delivered a fantastic end-of-year play and after the last day of the semester I breathed a big sigh of, “I made it and I loved it”. Like most teachers, rest and reset is a needed ritual.

After moving from the city to the country last year, we set out to build a life in our new hometown of Collinsville, Texas. Having a love for the vibrance of the city but a desire for the simplicity of the country we were curious how the cards would all fall. When you have a family of five it can be a challenge to engineer a life that works perfectly for everyone.

I had to wonder… Is that the goal? Bending as a parent to give our kids the perfect life? And what resources best serve each of our children?

Like any anthropologist would, I went to the source. I asked my kids for their feedback about school, friends, and community. I asked them how they felt about life and it opened up a beautiful connection. Feel free to use these questions as a loving check-in with your own children. Use varying words to describe emotions and normalize their experience of discomfort by reminding them that they are safe in your love. We don’t have to jump to fix their lives, teaching them how to ground and reframe - to create hope, can go a long way.

Right now the deep question in our home is- are our children getting enough socialization? Even inside a public school with a lot of children, many can feel alone. It is important to remember that it’s less about the quantity of friends we have but the quality of friendships and that metric is highly personal that children may not be able to rank in words. Stay tuned for a write-up on social life, the impacts of isolation, and authentic community bonding.