Homeschool News & Views

Issue 28, June 29, 2007

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.

Probably the greatest weakness of homeschooling is the reduced role of the father compared to the mother.

At the first United States census in 1790, 90% of America’s citizens lived on farms. Mostly they weren’t big farms, because people couldn’t farm big farms. The south had its huge plantations, made possible only by the labor of the slaves. But that thievery by the plantation owners cost a great price, which eventually had to be paid.

Thomas Jefferson thought that the ideal nation would be a country of small, independent farmers. In the original US, he had something close to that, where 9 out of 10 people lived on farms. Many of those men worked at another vocation besides farming, but part of almost everyone’s living came from his own little farm.

In a society where everyone had less, everyone had to do more. Going to school was not as important for children as eating. Therefore the school year had to fit in with the farm work. School basically began after harvest and ended at planting time.

As a family worked on their small farm, they were together so much more than today. Their eating depended on their farming. So together they plowed and planted, sowed and hoed, picked and pickled. The work was not at all easy. Each person had to push himself, and the whole family had to push together. They had to grow enough food to make it through the winter.

My dad was born in 1910 and grew up in the rough mountains of West Virginia. His dad had a sawmill, but like most families, even a century after that original US census in 1790, they got much of their living out of the ground. My dad remembers first working in the garden when he was five years old, helping to plant the corn. A few years later, and after another couple of kids had been added, he moved up to the job of hoeing the corn. The rows were long and the ground was very rocky. It was hard to get a good lick in at the weeds with the hoe because it kept clanging off a rock. His mom and dad and all of the kids who were old enough had a row to hoe. My dad tried as hard as he could to keep up with the older kids, but he couldn’t. They finished their rows way ahead of him. He was bone tired, and still had a lot of row to go. Years later he often told me the story of how his mother, his wonderful mother, came back and helped him finish his rows.

Every year this was repeated in almost every home in America: the family working together on the little family farm place. Those families grew a lot more than vegetables. They grew close.

There was a natural specialization of labor back then. Although my grandma helped hoe and even helped plough behind the mule, that rough physical work was naturally the man’s job. The father was the strongest one in the family, and he did the strong work. Mother did those things which she was best at, keeping the soldiers in the daily battle supplied with food and ammunition.

All that was very natural. Father being the strong man, Mother being the supporter, the kids fitting in their place in the family from older to younger – and the family spending a lot of time together.

When the work day was over, the family was still together. There was no TV, or video games, or even radio. In my dad’s family of eight kids, four played musical instruments. That’s what they did in the evenings. Some played, some would sing, together in the log house on Conner Mountain.

Not long after the first census in 1790, the Industrial Revolution began rolling, where man began to use powered machines to help him do his work. First it was steam engines, then petroleum and electrical machines. It took over a century for that to really begin to affect most people’s lives. As I said, in the early 1900’s, my dad still worked on the family farm with his family. But my dad did not do that with us. He went to work for the big coal company in West Virginia, and our living came almost totally from them. We did put out gardens, but they were usually little ones, just for the fun of it.

That transition from the agriculture based economy to a corporate machine based economy took the father out of the home for most of his useful life. This was especially true during the years when the children were home.

The typical father worked somewhere away from the home. The typical family no longer had a little family farm, but a little house in a big subdivision. The kids did not have to help with the planting or the harvest, so they were taken mostly out of the home, too, going to school for most of the year. Most mothers still stayed at home, being a homemaker, making a home for the father and children, who were now away from home for most of their useful time.

Finally, in the last half of the 1900’s, Mother was taken out of the home, too. This began in World War II, when women began to replace men and work with the machines which actually did the work. Because of machines there were now many jobs which females could do which did not require great physical strength or endurance. A family could get some extra income if the mother went to work away from home, so now most women do that.

The picture is complete. Everybody is away from home, and the family is hardly together at all. Even when the family could be together, there are multitudinous distractions to separate them and get them to ignore one another. Some households leave their televisions on continuously, as if they are afraid they will wear out the switch. Most car trips have a blaring radio or cd player, serving to separate people who are only two feet apart.

Now we have come to the point where many people don’t even want to have kids. That is the ultimate in family separation – just don’t have a family. In most of human history, children were assets, to help do the work. Now kids are often considered a burden, and we hear news stories about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to raise one. Families now want extremely big houses for extremely little families, a third of which are already broken up.

This separation of the families which has occurred is not an accident. It’s not just the way things happened to work out. God wants families to be together, to be close, and for the parents to teach their children about Him, not just in sit down lessons, but in discipled daily life together.

Satan wants the reverse of that. That’s what we have today.

Homeschool families try to put the family back together. Usually this takes the form of having the father work away from the home to earn a living, and the mother takes care of the home and teaches the children their homeschooling. This is a practical approach, but it is not the ideal. The father is missing too much.

It seems that many homeschool families have accepted the premise that the father earns the money, and the mother spends it and raises the family, while Dad looks on approvingly, kind of an uninvolved overseer. Exhaustive research has shown how much single parent families are damaged when only a mother raises the children. If a homeschool dad is not actively involved in what his children are doing and doing things with them, then his children will be bypassed with that blessing.

The ideal may be for the family to have a family business, just as the family farms used to be a family business. A few homeschool families are able to do that, to have some type of family business where father and mother and the kids work together, just as families have done for thousands of years. But the whole huge economic system is lined up against that boot strap type enterprise. If you try to start a family business, you will be competing against everybody from Wall-Mart to Microsoft. It is very hard to establish a small family enterprise which can support the family. I have seen a number of homeschool families have the dream, but most of them did not have the steam. The Amish are the ones who are most successful in this approach, but even they now are being forced out of that pattern.

So usually the father winds up working away from the home, and spends most of his useful time away from the family. I think the worst part is that the father gets accustomed to that, accepts that as being good, and does not make a gigantic effort to use the little time that he does have t0 do things with his family.

Dads, the less time you have with your family, the more you have to do with the time you do have.

I am basically bald. Now anybody else looking at me would say that I am bald, but I make a distinction and say that I am basically bald, meaning that there is some residual aftereffect left from the luscious head of hair that I used to have, kind of like the corona around the sun. There are still some hairs on the top of my head, but it doesn’t take God to be able to count them. So I carefully take what hair I do have and lovingly position it for optimum coverage. The less hair you have, the more you have to do with what you do have.

Fathers, the less time you have with your family, the more you have to do with the time that you do have.

When you get home from work at the end of the day, you are tired. There is no changing that. When my dad got home from working at the coal mine, he was tired. He ate supper, read the paper, relaxed and watched TV for a couple of hours, and then went to bed at nine o’clock to go back to work very early the next morning.

That’s all very understandable. At the end of a work day, dads are done in. You got a done in dad. However, kids need dads every day. Doing something together on the weekend, between weekend chores, is not enough. Fathers need to be dads every day. They need to rack up their frequent fathering miles.

People tend to become focused on what they spend most of their time doing. I know someone who knows someone who has been extremely successful in amassing properties. His wealth is enormous, and he is known far and wide for that. He is now in his ninth decade and quickly running out of days. This man has spent his whole adult life amassing properties, he will soon leave this life and leave all his properties to some other amasser, he will only inhabit a two by six plot of property, yet when this old man talks with people, he always talks properties. His mind has become so focused on that one thing that he can’t think of much else. He doesn’t talk eternity. He talks property.

This can be a problem for homeschool fathers. If you are very involved in your job, and you probably are or you won’t be any good at it, then when you get off work, go home and sit down to do something else, your mind will still be focusing on that job. You may be so obsessed with the battle you are fighting at work that – although you hate to admit it – you may not be all that interested in your wife and kids.

God forbid! You’ve been at work all day, you have an hour or two of useful time to spend with your family, and you’re still thinking about work. But that’s sometimes the way it is.

Your children are not focused on your job. They are focused on you, to the degree that you accept and return their attention. If you ignore them, they will learn to ignore you. Homeschool kids in particular, without all the hustle and bustle of the public schools, need an interested, involved father. When you hit the door in the evening, they need to know that Dad is home, and stuff is going to start happening. Yippee!

The less time a father has to spend with his family, the more he must use the time that he does have. Taking the father out of the home is part of Satan’s process to destroy the family. Reverse that as much as you can.