Our Kids Are (Surprisingly) Normal

Here, I am supposed to establish that we homeschooled our kids until high school, starting in kindergarten. But really, we didn’t “start” doing anything. We just kept raising them and instructing them as we had since they were toddlers. It was a completely natural continuation of our life when they reached school-age, and as we observed with many friends and family, it was sending young children off to school for eight hours a day that was the really big change in life. 

This was all brought to mind for me in June when Ivana Greco wrote a marvelous piece here at The Dispatch about dropping out of the academic rat race and homeschooling her four young children. It was an essay I cheerfully nodded along to, smiling along the way; after all, like recognizes like. I thought of kids sleeping until they naturally wake. My children begging to read just one more chapter of Watership Down before bed. Trips to the zoo, aquarium, parks, historical sites, homeschool gatherings, grandma and grandpa’s house, and…Shakespeare. Much of it really was a kind of family idyll.

I am a bit further ahead of Ivana, though, with our four children aged 15 to 21, and I can report to both Ivana and other younger homeschooler parents what their near futures might look like as their kids hit their teens and 20s. I can also offer observations of how our homeschooled kids fared in a not atypical suburban public high school. It’s a story that has, as all good stories do, its ups and downs.

Let me first say, with no slight to my children or their forebears’ genetic bequests to them, that my kids are bright—but they’re no geniuses. Their merely above-average (but in no way elite) standardized test scores, along with their collective horror at the very remote prospect of A.P. Calculus, instructs me that these may not be the kids who get us to Mars.  

Nevertheless, their parents have long grown used to being told by others how smart they are, how articulate, how friendly, and how polite. (Many homeschooling parents across the nation are nodding their heads in recognition here.) Although I hope they would have turned out this way anyway, I am more and more convinced that the fact that we were all together for the first 14 years of life is a big reason they impress.

One of our most memorable interactions was with the local elementary school principal.  When our eldest was 9 years old, we decided to register her for the state proficiency exam, just to see how she would do. It happened to be the year they were administering the first Common Core test, but before they had actually started teaching the curriculum. In their infinite wisdom, the state had decided they wanted to use the new test that year as a baseline to measure future test scores against. (It was also the beginning of the revolt against Common Core, as children predictably did miserably on the test.) Our daughter was thrilled to go to school, pack a lunch, put on a backpack, and see her friends—and she scored in the 85^th percentile on a test that was largely a statewide catastrophe. The principal pulled us aside and said how great our daughter was to have at school—and could we, he wanted to know, bring her back for all standardized tests in the future? She boosted the student-achievement numbers for his district. A homeschoolers’ story for the ages.

We did also have to deal with the cohort of doubters who know very little about homeschooling. One of our favorites was an otherwise friendly and intelligent woman who, when she found out the delightful gaggle of children she had just complimented us on were homeschooled, asked, utterly bewildered, “Well, how are they going to learn to stand in line?” She could not have encouraged us more if she had awarded us Parents of the Year.

Usually the standard question was, “Don’t you want them to be socialized?” To which the answer was, “Yes! That’s why we homeschool them!” It always puzzled us that people asked us this at athletic events, parks, or parties where our kids were tearing around laughing and playing with their friends. They played sports all year, had neighborhood friends, and were part of theater productions at church. They had cousins, and they had each other. The idea that homeschool kids are isolated is largely ludicrous.

By 2012 I had four kids under the age of 8. That year Kevin Williamson wrote a National Review essay on homeschoolers that was titled “The Last Radicals,” and stated: “There is exactly one authentically radical social movement of any real significance in the United States … It is homeschoolers, who, by the simple act of instructing their children at home, pose an intellectual, moral, and political challenge to the government-monopoly schools.” You tell a married, churchgoing, middle-class couple from suburbia where mom is home with the kids that they are the true rebels, and they’re going to yell “Hell, yeah!” and blast “Rage Against The Machine” at full volume and … turn it back down and read the Chronicles of Narnia to their kids again.

But honestly, we were never homeschooling evangelists. We believe in it deeply. But we chose it for our family. We loved that we could teach at each kid’s optimal pace—faster for some kids, slower for others. Faster in some subjects, slower in others. We loved that they learned together, and that they learned from each other. They are a little tribe, even now. And our kids probably did a lot to mainstream homeschooling acceptance with the thousands of people they met just by being normal. And by that I mean nice, courteous, and likable; they are interesting, and interested in other people and the world.

We reluctantly decided, as our oldest hit her preteens, that we were probably going to send them to high school. Part of the reason was that we wanted them to get a thorough science and math education, and we were not sure we could give them that. Another reason was that our kids were very eager to go to school, mostly for the social aspects. It was not the determining factor for us, but it was a strong tide that we would otherwise have to hold back. But still: We no longer homeschooled, but we were still homeschoolers.

Again, never were there more enthusiastic high school students than the Salvato kids.  It was an adventure. It was a social club. It was an entry into the wide world. It was Friday night football, the homecoming dance, and all the bright spots of high school years. They loved it and rarely complained. They thrived. I am sure their friends sometimes wondered, “Why are you so into this?”

My kids did have to learn peculiar things that most adults have probably forgotten as part of daily school life, like needing permission every time you have to use the bathroom. And a more serious drawback of this new school experience was their sudden exposure to the many vulgar, profane, and cruel things we largely shielded them from for 14 years—particularly related to the phones they didn’t have until high school.

Some might expect our children, free at last in high school, to have become critics of their parents and their upbringing. But our kids have instead become, to our surprise, social critics. They are taken aback at how some of their peers behave.  They are amazed at what other parents allow their kids to do. They are incredulous that co-workers at their jobs are rude, slack off, come in late, or just don’t show up to work at all. This strong response, I think, is definitely a result of homeschooling: You hope all kids carry their parents’ good advice with them in life, but 14 years of being mostly with family means they have an especially strong moral base camp to return to when they go out and explore the world.

We know people who have homeschooled their children all the way through high school—and people who homeschooled for just the first few years. We know people who pulled their kids out of school to homeschool them. We know people who homeschooled some of their kids, and not others. It’s very much a judgement call, and as with all parenting choices, there is no perfection. There is great love, imperfectly lived out. 

I wish Ivana joy on her own family’s homeschool journey. If her experience is anything like ours, she—and others who homeschool—will have the deepest delights and contentment to look back on. Likely, her children will cherish their parents’ particular care and education of them. And even though homeschooling is becoming more and more popular, I hope she clings fiercely to that sense of rebellion—of being a special kind of American radical. Homeschooling parents should take their thrills where they can get them.