Do you ever wonder if this well-thought out, well-researched, and carefully-planned life of homeschooling turns out to be the wrong decision?
Doc asks a similar question when her 18 year old starts wondering what he missed in high school, and regrets, perhaps, a certain sense of being carefree and lost that his age-mates are experiencing.
Are there drawbacks to being a responsible and capable 18 year old in our modern society? Are there drawbacks to not having spent 4-10 years of one’s life trying to mark off all the checkboxes instead of being in the real world?
I sometimes wonder if my kids will regret the opportunities that they didn’t have. In a way, there’s no way to avoid that. Whenever we choose a path, there are many paths that we can’t choose. If I think about it, I can come up with a very long list of things that I could regret not doing (or doing). So, the question is not whether we’ll have something we can regret, rather is one kind of regret worse than another kind of regret?
Perhaps, having regrets as a 18-22 year old is part of the process of learning how to let go of childhood, and moving forward. Maybe there’s no way around it.
But I know what I’ll never regret; the time we spent together with the kids, the fact that we lived every day as if it was our last and our first, and creating a lot of good family memories. So, even if we do miss something good, we had so many other good things, I’m OK with my kids having regrets. The past 10 years really couldn’t have been any better. I’m looking forward to the next 10 years, no matter which direction we take.
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Just Enough, and Nothing More 
June 10, 2008 at 8:00 pm
We just can’t win, can we? The grass is always greener. I think my teen daughter thinks it would be sort of cool if her father and I were divorced, and sometimes she got to live at Dad’s house and sometimes at Mom’s house. We are waaay too boring for her, married.
June 11, 2008 at 5:15 am
But you can regret going to public school rather than private school or public school A vs public school B. There are always things where you will wonder what might have happened had you taken a different path. Regret is a fact of life – don’t dwell on it or it will become your life because it will snowball since you are missing experiences while you sit around and bemoan what you didn’t do.
June 11, 2008 at 7:42 am
I was wondering about Doc’s post too. Gave me food for thought. Right NOW my dd10 is thrilled with hs’ing. Me too. But I regret *I* wasn’t homeschooled…
I think Tana is right…regrets and the path NOT chosen are a part of life. And really, a good part of life, because they make us take stock and evaluate. Perhaps age 18 or so is the beginning of all that….
June 11, 2008 at 8:40 am
“But I know what I’ll never regret; the time we spent together with the kids, the fact that we lived every day as if it was our last and our first, and creating a lot of good family memories.”
My mother exasperatedly questioning me on our decision to homeschool (and the fact I stopped my own resumed college education in order to do so) asked, “But what’s going to happen ‘if something happens to you’ and he has to go back to school?” My response, “I don’t know, mom. I suspect he’ll have to adjust. But think about that the other way. If he spends so much time away from me and his mom (being at school most of his waking hours) and something happens to me, what has he missed in that scenario? He will have missed the last two years (so far) of priceless time spent together doing things he can remember and hold onto the rest of his life.”
June 12, 2008 at 5:49 am
A few months ago we watched a tv show- something about a jr. highish boy that was keeping a journal of rules for getting through school. It made school look like alot of fun- hanging with friends, joking around, doing crazy things without getting into any real trouble- and I wondered if it would make my kids feel a bit envious. But when my dh suggested taking to them to a local school to sit in and experience school for a day, you’d’ve thunk we offered to boil them in oil and feed them to a pool of piranhas.
They know just how good they have it right now, and my firstborn, who graduated 2 years ago and is now in the Army, is very grateful that he was home educated, having been out in the world long enough to see the difference.
June 12, 2008 at 10:48 am
From one who has done it all – homeschool, public school, and private school – there is no perfect anything! I know a mom who homeschooled all 6 of her kids and the oldest one has major regrets. A friend of hers said to her “you are lucky your mom cared about you as much as she did. You are a fence jumper, but if you were in public school, you would have jumped a fence that would have led down a really bad road. Atleast your mom was there.” In my opinion, she is the perfect example of a homeschooling mother and yet her daughter still was unhappy. I did all 3 types of school and I hated homeschooling because my mom didn’t invest into us like she should have. I taught myself. I swore I’d never homeschool. Yet here I am with my own children, and I choose to homeschool! Hopefully one day my kids will appreciate it atleast a little bit, but if they don’t…I guess i can live with that. I can live without my own regrets because i know I did what God asked of me.
It irritates me when I see these teenagers saying they are dumb because they were homeschooled too. I saw a myspace page one time that said “I’m slow. I was homeschooled”. That really makes me mad! Public school kids are stupid too. You will get what you put into it. And if you invest time into your children, they will be better off because of it.
God bless!
July 25, 2008 at 9:55 am
I’m on the fence – about to bring my now second grader “home” for school. I know I won’t regret the time and energy I will put into schooling my own girls, but there is a part of me which fears I will regret missing out on things personally and financially if I keep staying home with my kids through these next elementary school years. Part of me is starting to think, “Hey, now it’s my turn to have a paid job and start a 401K”. I don’t want to get to be 40 something and regret the time I could have had to build up my own skills in the workforce. Is this something I’m really willing to give up, and trust God, and continue to give this time to my kids? I want to do this!