Thoughts on a Thursday. Home educating children and life.

I've not logged into Hive Blog for ages but it's good to see that many of the people I follow are still regularly posting. I should have got into the habit of blogging on here regularly but I really struggle with keeping things going.

I started keeping a written diary/journal about a year ago after I had completed a cursive handwriting course but I didn't keep that up either. I occasionally add something new but not most days as originally planned.

If I'd consistently blogged on here from the start as others I follow have, I would like to think I could be earning a couple of dollars a day by now and maybe more if my writing had improved as it should have with consistent practice but there's no time like the present.

I just looked at my draft posts and there are quite a few in there so I have made some effort but unless they are published it doesn't really matter. Part of the problem might be that I follow such good bloggers who consistently put out great content compared to mine but again this comes down to consistency and practice on their part and lack of such things on mine.

I actually enjoy writing and recording my thoughts and feelings and it makes it seem more worth while knowing they are being recorded on the Hive Blockchain where they cannot be deleted or my access blocked as is the case on other blogging platforms.

With all that in mind, here are my thoughts for the day on Thursday 16th November 2023

I'm writing this at 11am and my kids only just got up (Daisy 14 and Ollie 12). We (it was a joint decision with my wife) took them out of school about a year ago and have been home educating them and I must say that I an pleased with the way they are growing/developing as people. Before I took them out of school I noticed that they were developing a bit of an attitude and it was challenging at times to communicate with them and I felt my relationship with them was deteriorating but now things are much better.

When people find out we're home educating our children the first thing most of them ask is, "Don't you worry about them missing out on friends and socialising?" and I will admit that I was concerned about this at first but then I read a book called "Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers" by Gabor Mate and it opened my eyes.

Here's a bit of info about the book taken from the authors website.

In the book Hold On To Your Kids, International authority on child development Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., joins forces with bestselling author Gabor Maté, M.D., to tackle one of the most disturbing trends of our time: children today increasingly look to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated; being “cool” matters more to them than anything else.

I could see my children were starting to get peer oriented and now thngs are the way they should be. When I hear parents with kids of a similar age who are still in school talking about how difficult thier children are and how they don't listen to them or respect them, I feel good about the decision we made.

As for the socialisation/friendship side of things, I spend a sizeable amount of my time in my car driving the kids to various clubs and activities so they do get to socialise and have friends but the difference is that we have some control over who they mix with and they don't spend the majority of their time with other children in the school environment which is toxic.

Most parents just sent their kids to school (indoctrination camps) and accept that they will be rude, lazy, ignorant teenagers because that's how things are but the truth is that things can be so much better.

That's it for today.

Hopefully I'll blog again in the next day or two.

Thanks for reading.