“She’s so polite, I bet her parents are super strict”
– my daughters boss when he discovered she was home-educated.
And he wasn’t the first to think so.
On at least one other occasion and maybe more, people have assumed our daughter must have been brought up in a home with strict discipline and ‘over-protective’ parents. Partly they hadn’t met any home educating families before and had decided that was the type of people who would surely choose this way of life.
But it was their experience of our daughter as a hard worker, as enthusiastic, reliable, kind and sensitive to others*, that had mostly led them to conclude we must have been very strict with her. We didn’t delve into exactly what they meant by strict, but I’m guessing they were imagining lots of rules, routines and rewards backed up with large dollops of threats and punishment if she dared step out of line.
Yet our daughter…
has never had a bedtime
doesn’t have to go to school, do lessons, or tests
lives in a home without rules
has no limits on ‘screen time’…
or ‘door time’ (she can come and go as she likes)
isn’t punished, or even told off, when she messes up
has parents with some pretty funny ideas about praise and rewards too 🙂
and can eat what she wants when she wants. Even ice cream for breakfast, yep it’s a shocker. Though when I think about it, I’m not sure she ever has. But I did, just last week. We were on holiday. And of course, I had a very different childhood to my children.
And she can still get up early, hold down a job, pass exams, hold her own in some pretty cool conversations and she’s a dab hand at queuing 🙂
Who’d have thought it?
If you’re at all interested in why we parent the way we do, then please take a wander round the blog. Try the links in the text above for starters or just browse the categories at the top of the page.
Happy, fun week all x
*of course our daughter doesn’t always demonstrate such wonderful traits, she’s not a robot and has her moments, like us all. She’s just as imperfectly perfect as the rest of us 🙂