If you are planning on home educating your child, there is a good chance that this is not your first time you’ve exasperated others with your crazy parenting choices.
Perhaps it all started with home birthing or hypnobirthing. Perhaps it was cloth nappies. Or Elimination Communication. Or baby sign language, or baby-lead weaning. Maybe it was your choice of child’s name. Or perhaps you turned up to a family event with the baby in a tie-dyed ring sling.
If any of these previous initiatives had your family, friends, acquaintances rolling their eyes or tutting, then announcing you are home educating is really going to blow their minds. And the questions, criticisms and censure from other people remain a baptism of fire for home educating parents (and by ‘parents’ we often mean ‘mothers’.)
There are many probing questions about this parenting direction you’ve chosen. The questions are so common that there is plenty of online advice to help you craft clever, fact-filled and intricate responses. However, we’ve never been able to remember any of them when faced by the censorious gaze of the supermarket cashier. That hasn’t stopped us fantasizing scenarios in which we enunciate ever more complex cutting retorts for our inquisitors.
It doesn’t really matter what our responses are. Those inquisitors aren’t really wanting to know how we intend to teach maths or socialise our kids. They’re just feeling a little defensive about their own children’s education. So perhaps you can go ahead and feel a little crazy – crazy like a fox.