ForgottenWoman

How Can I Successfully School Them

“Boys will be boys.” “My son has been diagnosed with ADHD!” “They are always moving, always making noise: I’m failing!” “I go to bed in tears almost every night – exhaustion, frustration and feelings of defeat.”

Welcome to the world of mothering rambunctious boys: when we choose to home educate them, we sometimes find ourselves at the end of that imaginary rope. Today, I want to speak to you, give you hope, make you realize that you are in the middle of one of the most wonderful experiences you will ever have. And I mean it!

First of all, in speaking with many of you I have heard about routines and schedules that just aren’t working. Believe me; I know! The best plans for our school days almost never work out as planned – the key to survival is this: Accept It! Mom, be okay with flexing with whatever comes up. Be okay with setting aside the schedule to talk about something that shocks you; that you are determined to find the origin of! Be okay with rushing to the ER because of an accident while learning to cook or riding bikes or just plain childishness. (Don’t let these small emergencies ruin your day!) That ruined day turns into a bad week, a bad month and at the end of another year you find yourself questioning everything.

Be okay with snuggling the young ones who just feel out of sorts or when a sickness is running rampant through your home. While you are talking yourself into being okay in the moment, think about something in the situation to be grateful for! It’s been proven that we cannot be anxious and grateful at the same time. Schedules are good and they help us track where we are – but we can’t let them rule us. We need to control our schedules and not allow our schedules to control us.

Secondly, if you have more than one or two sons who are wrestless, full of energy, giggle at boy jokes and like to stand on their heads when you are trying to teach: embrace it. All of it. Laugh with them at their silly jokes and teach them when it is inappropriate to share their fun; allowing them to enjoy being little boys with one another. Be their safe place to ‘test the waters’ on what is or is not appropriate and lovingly talk them through it without condemnation. When they are obviously struggling to focus, open that door and tell them to run around the yard for 15 minutes. When they come back in they just may be able to sit still to do the math problem. Give them a puzzle to work to keep their minds and hands engaged while you read to them. Let the younger ones build legos on the floor while you teach the older ones about history or science or even language arts. You’ll be surprised what they hear and learn just being in the same room.

Don’t require that they sit still – let them move. Bounce a basketball between you while learning multiplication tables or practicing spelling words. (This works with throwing a baseball back and forth too!) Make human trains and make your way through the house while you memorize poetry or sing history songs. In today’s world of technology it’s fun to find raps or hiphop type songs that teach multiplication tables or other facts. Just be prepared for this to get quite loud – they think they are just having fun and they are learning.

Teach leadership skills to the older by putting them in charge of your little army while they spend 30 minutes in the yard picking up and organizing all of the toys and items scattered about. I used to give all of my children trash bags and send them outside for 15 minutes to pick up items on the property – we have a bit of property. They were required to use adjectives, adverbs, nouns and pronouns to describe what they collected and verbs to detail their action in the process. When they came back in we shared with one another what had been found and reviewed our parts of speech together. In other words, use their energy while educating.

For boys with the need to move, hands on learning is always beneficial. Take several days during the week and teach them to cook various dishes. Not only will they use math skills in the process but they will learn life skills (if you allow them to clean up after themselves) and they will take great pride in their creations when you serve it to the family. Choose a few science ‘experiments’ to do as a family – and let them know what day and time this will be happening; giving them a sense of anticipation. For those simple experiments allow the elder ones to be ‘in charge’ and follow the directions while kindly instructing the youngers on what they are doing. These are things that can be happening in your presence while building confidence, building comradery among them and learning new skills all at the same time.

Most importantly, don’t expect a group of boys (or active girls) to sit in a desk or at a table for hours on end until their school for the day is done. We don’t turn our homes into classrooms – we are educating while at home. In our home, most of our schoolwork is done on the couch, sprawled on the floor, sitting on the porch swing or at the kitchen table where they can do busy work while meals are prepared, kitchen is cleaned and Mom/Grandmommy is basically multi-tasking successfully.

Some of you have mentioned morning devotion time to begin the day. I loved these times as well – where we talked about spiritual things, character development and learned to pray together. This is a great time to involve the children as well. A devotional time doesn’t always have to be led by the parent. I would sometimes give my children topics to study or write about and then they would take turns standing in the front of our fireplace and sharing with the rest of us. Don’t take this time too seriously or you’ll crush their confidence very quickly. Let them laugh at themselves and each other, let them make mistakes and stutter if they are nervous – each time they do it, they’ll be more comfortable and you’ll see improvement and development in their speaking skills. This is just another way to be active while learning.

There are so many specifics we could get into for learning different subjects in a less conventional manner, a more ‘active’ manner; but I’ll save those for later articles. Let’s get back to those who really run a tight ship and are uncomfortable with interruptions. I may be like you in that unschooling is too unstructured for me, but I certainly believe in more life learning and less bookwork. My home was/is one where some structure in schooling is required but lots of flexibility is priority.

So, let me share a few of my personal experiences. Out of my 9 children, most have been or should have been given those well known letters (ADHD) behind their names. (Surely this is because they are my children. I have to set a timer when cleaning and work as fast as I can to accomplish a task before I rush off to something else that has grabbed my attention.) This part of me is not something that I outgrew over the years and it is not something that I was medicated for. It is something that I have learned to manage – and it is something that our children have to learn to manage. *Contrary to popular opinion, it does not have to be a negative thing. It is a part of who we are and if managed well, it is actually a very positive trait. Yes, I said it.

Anyway, life around here is never boring. While raising children with these letters, one of the real challenges is letting them know that they have ADHD or Autism in our case, without allowing it to become an excuse for bad behavior! The victim mentality of our culture has done much to stifle so much of who we were created to be! We all have choices, and I’d venture to say that in today’s world of diagnoses, we all have letters… and we choose whether to be who God created us to be and focus on our strengths or to be the people no one wants in the room and make excuses for our issues.

With ADHD, one of the more challenging traits is the inpulsivity. Yes, the words that are said or the actions that seem to just happen before the brain is actually thinking. For example: one evening after dinner, my two eldest were given the task of cleaning the kitchen. I was still sitting at the table with the younger children while they were ‘working’ on the kitchen, when Josh picked up the broom and threw it like a dagger to his brother who stood at the other end of the room (in front of the stove.) When Joey saw that it was about to spear him, he jumped out of the way and it hit the shatterproof door of my oven and the door did shatter into a million pieces on the floor. There are so many ways this could have gone – but the truth is that my very ADHD son was simply trying to get the broom to his brother in the fastest manner possible and didn’t even stop to think about what might happen if he threw it at that speed. I have a motto for these types of things and it goes like this, “Is this going to matter in eternity?” In other words – does this really matter? NO! But guess what DOES matter? My response to my son’s accident. After a moment of shock we all burst into laughter. Common sense tells me that the lesson was learned without the need of a lecture.

When these two were just babies and we lost their father in a vehicle accident, I was faced with the reality of raising sons alone. Many people were very vocal about their concerns that I would hover as Mom and not allow them to be masculine boys. With very real and concrete determination, I decided that these people were wrong and my guys would certainly be allowed to be boys. The result? Some very shocked adults when they saw them using the top of the swingset like a balance beam, when they heard about the cardboard airplanes that they built and attempted to fly off of the roof, or when they saw the ridiculously dangerous ramps that they built in the yard for bikes and dirtbikes and had numerous wrecks on. But despite the shock and horror of these adults, my philosophy never changed.

When it was all said and done I had 6 boys (all rambunctious and adventurous) and 3 girls who grew up either as ‘victims’ or participants in their antics. Today the bond between these adults is unbreakable and their memories are made up of stories that make us cry with laughter when we talk about them.

Those ramps: They would build them higher and higher and challenge one another until Joey ended up coming into the house with blood dripping from his arms. They passed this love on to their younger brothers. Their BB guns shot a sister (Hannah) from afar and even put holes in windows while aiming at who knows what. One young lad (Zach) even lit the porch on fire when he decided to burn a pile of leaves on the steps. Josh impulsively stomped on a nail to see if it would go through his new tennis shoe. It did – right into his foot. There was that one day when I sent them all out to play and looked out the window to see my elderly neighbor carrying a very scratched up little girl (Susannah) up the driveway to me. Her brother, Micah, had challenged her to ride down the steep drive on her bike without brakes. She did. She went over the embankment that joins our property to the neighbor’s and he heard her crying. On another occasion, these same two were playing together when he put her on the front of his bike and told her to use her feet on the front tire to slow the bike (again, no brakes). She did. The result was that the soles of her feet were destroyed. Our tire swing could be swung as high as 30 feet off the ground at the top – little girls hanging on for dear life as their brothers pushed them on the swing – a real thing. Falling off was too. Oh, and the vines – we had tall vines hanging from trees all over the property and they were great fun, until they were well worn, or had three kids hanging on at a time and snapped! There were the emergency room runs: when Josh climbed up on my mother’s roof for who knows what reason and fell off, when one ‘accidentally’ pushed another off of the top bunk of the bunk beds and we had to check for a concussion, when one ‘accidentally’ pushed another at the top of the stairwell and another concussion check was required, when a bike wreck on the gravel drive resulted in Cameron receiving numerous stitches on his face by a plastic surgeon, when Catherine spilled boiling water on her arm while making tea, when Joey’s bike wreck resulted in a chunk of flesh removed from the calf muscle and yes, when eye drops caused our baby’s heart to stop. I’ll mention here that it is a great idea to have children educated in CPR and choking prevention when you have a house full! There were a couple of occasions when I went into panic mode and a much calmer couple of boys came to the rescue.

My furniture is all worn and even torn in some places, glasses and utensils disappeared on a regular basis when used for all sorts of things outside, carpets were always stained (because I do allow snacking all over the house), fingerprints covered the ceilings because of jumping competitions, paint is peeled from stair railings because one just cannot resist peeling it off, gallon size pickle jars were found in corners of dark rooms filled with coffee grounds and pickle juice when someone decided to experiment, an entire bedroom was painted pink when a couple of toddlers (Cameron and Catherine) were ‘napping’ and decided to be artists instead, one pinky was broken on Mom when the impulsive grasp of a teen son was a little too strong, brothers and sisters were handcuffed to trees (yes, by Cameron) … These are just a few of the every day occurrances.

Then there were the other challenges – one severely autistic little boy (Chris) who had violent episodes that left holes in doors and walls, required that we hide the steak knives in the house and even put an alarm on his wrist. I cannot count the number of times that an older boy warned me that I was going to be really hurt or killed by our smallest if we didn’t make progress with him. These violent episodes often resulted in my hair being pulled, being kicked and scratched from head to toe and almost always ended with me lying on the floor holding him as tightly as I could until his body went limp and the episode was over. He often hid on the top shelf of the linen closet to sleep, walked on countertops and climbed on the top of the refrigerator in the middle of the night exploring the higher cabinets. He hardly ever slept but would rearrange the furniture all night instead when his OCD just wouldn’t let him rest. During his violent episodes he would sometimes run – out the front door and into the woods. On one such occasion we had to call the police when we couldn’t find him – we have friends now who were on that call! I finally found him under the seat of my van (I had looked their repeatedly but he kept moving to not be seen) Now that he talks about those days he shares with me what he can remember going through his head at those times. On this particular day, he had heard me talking about leaving to go to the library and he didn’t want me to leave without him so in his rage he had run into the yard/woods and then decided to take refuge under the seat of the van. Just a few months ago, as we stood in our kitchen and were sharing with his wife many of these stories I asked him if I had done anything right to help him. His response was, “Mom! You did! You went through every minute of it with me and never made me feel like I was a bad person. You taught me to control myself – and never stopped loving me – even when I hurt you.” Yes, I cried.

As you can imagine, this son’s education looked very different from the others. We were told he was legally blind and would never read or learn. We were told he could never speak and that the worst thing we could do was to force him to look at us. We were told he would never walk. His entire skull is titanium and we had no idea what his future would look like as his brain grew. Mom, be stubborn! Be the advocate for your children. Figure things out for YOUR children and don’t just accept the status quo. I canceled our daily treks to the specialist and I researched for myself and studied him relentlessly. We all worked together on his needed therapy to have the strength to hold his own head up, then to use his arms and then his legs to walk. I would sit with him in my arms every single night and hold his face close to mine and force eye contact. His brothers and sisters were a big part of working with him daily, helping me with his violent episodes and as he grew; helping him conquer many challenges. He is 20. He is married. He holds a job. He reads. He walks, he runs, he takes care of my property. He is amazing. His education at home was not conventional – but it worked!

I’m pretty sure that my more severely ADHD children would have fallen through the cracks in a traditional school setting – and I don’t doubt for a minute that home education was the best thing for them. I’ll repeat that the need for you to know your children as individuals is so important! The need for you to be an advocate for them is so important! Go against the flow if you need to. I’ve had to more times than I want to talk about; but that’s part of parenting.

When you were reading about some of the antics around here, some of you were ‘grasping your pearls’ and thinking that I was negligent in allowing so much. You may think that I was a horrible mother for letting the kids do things that weren’t necessarily the most safe activities and wondering how they all survived to adulthood. I would argue with you though, because there is absolutely no way to prevent most of these things unless I were to require that they all sit in a circle in the middle of the room all day and never leave my sight. At some point we have to figure out what is part of childhood and may have painful consequences but won’t be too consequential. We always want to be close enough for true emergencies and then let them experience things that will become a part of their best memories. I was talking to one of my daughters yesterday about all of this and she said, “Mom, you would send us out for our breaks and say, ‘Don’t come back in unless someone is bleeding!” She then laughed and said, “We learned to not make mountains out of molehills, we learned how to spend hours outdoors and create fun (remember when we would take the water hose and slide down the mud hill for hours?) It was great!”

Some are asking if there was absolutely no discipline and if you know my kids today; you know that this is not the case either. Since the statute of limitations is passed (you can’t have me arrested) I’ll tell you that I believe in discipline, in spanking when appropriate. I do not believe in this kind of discipline for impulsivity or childish behavior – after all, how in the world can we expect children to act like adults? Aren’t we supposed to be walking with them through the process of maturing? We can’t spank that into them, yell that into them, shame them into acting more mature than they are. To try to require that of them is ludicrous! And to scold or punish a child for embarrassing you when they act like children? Don’t get me started!

The truth is, there are a few non-negotiables for me. I don’t tolerate a bad attitude. In fact, if you’ve ever coached or taught one of my children outside of our home, then you probably know this! I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher or coach come to me because of an attitude problem. My kids knew that if I spotted an attitude on the court or the field, the coach wouldn’t have to deal with it – I’d sit them on the bench myself!

And, I don’t tolerate lying – because without trust we cannot have a relationship. I spanked for lying. (Six swats for each lie) Period. I wanted them to know that this was just not okay. I also don’t tolerate deliberate disobedience and I spanked for that as well. (3 swats) For other things I tried to remember my motto: Is this going to matter in eternity? Of course, different children require different levels of discipline. I have one daughter who would burst into tears if I looked at her sideways – and a few others who were more stubborn. We had “meetings with Mom in the den” where we discussed things that needed attention or changing and once the meeting was over, the whole deal was over. These were pretty regular. Ask my Grands – they now have meetings with Grandmommy. Once the point is made, the offenses are forgotten and we hug and return to our day.

Those of you who are moms of rambunctious boys and struggling – to be honest; much of your struggle may be about you, about your expectations, about your desire for peace and quiet, about your need for order, about your need for a house that could grace the front of a magazine. To you I say with all of the love I can muster, let it go. Embrace the chaos of people loving, living, laughing, messing up and learning and growing up together. For me, one day I’ll replace the couches that cause a wee bit of embarrasement. One day I’ll replace the chipped stair rails that remind me of a certain son every time I climb them. The fingerprints have been removed from the ceilings and now a few new ones can be seen – until they are painted again. One day I’ll invite friends over and not feel the need to apologize for damaged places around my home. But for now, I know that every imperfect part is a reminder of a houseful of active people who loved and still love one another. This home is a welcome place for all of my grown boys and girls and my grandboys and grandgirls gather here for all of the adventures that they can possibly come up with! I’m here for that chaos.

And know this. Even if they are standing on their head while you are reading to them, running through the room while memorizing facts, doodling while completing a math assignment or giggling at silly jokes when they supposed to be doing language arts; they are learning. You are not failing.