I’ve never considered myself a competitive person. I played sports in school and while I always hoped our team would win, I never lost sleep over any games that I can remember. In recent years I even walked out on my father in law during a friendly (or so I thought) game of checkers. He is a highly competitive man and while I am nonchalantly moving my game pieces and chatting away, barely paying attention, he is getting annoyed that I am not figuring out the strategy of the game! I’m like, “it’s just checkers”. He says, “but I can teach you how to win every time.” I mumbled something like “whatever”, and walked away.
To me, the game was about sitting down and sharing time together with another person. To him it was all about winning. I didn’t get it. He didn’t get it. The game was no longer fun.
So imagine my surprise when I felt a bit of competitiveness welling up inside me where my daughter is concerned. I had a conversation with a friend of mine over a week ago in which she told me that her daughter (same age as mine) is doing homework and writing sentences. What the??? I can’t stop thinking about it.
Now my friend was not bragging, mind you. She was expressing how tired she is of trying to write sentences with a 3 (almost 4) year old. I tried to clarify, “you mean, she tells you a complete sentence and you write it FOR her?” Oh no! The little girls homework is that SHE writes the sentence herself.
I am starting to freak out because suddenly I am worried that my child is going to be behind. I chose to stay at home and now my kids will barely pass high school. I know, I know…that’s drastic. But seriously, let’s compare: on the one hand there is a 3 year old doing homework and writing sentences after school and on the other hand is my child, whose evening consists of watching Tom and Jerry. Who do you think has a better chance at going to Harvard?
Deep down I know that she will catch up and that’s silly. But I certainly don’t want her to ever wonder if she could have gone farther with an earlier, structured education. Maybe it’s a little bit of guilt that I’m feeling too. I could probably carve a little more time out of my day to sit down and go over letters and phonics and adding and such.
But I prefer to play. And with play comes opportunities to teach. They are just unstructured and spontaneous. And what does all this say about my desire to homeschool? Who knows. That is a whole other can of unanswered questions, and we don’t even need to go there right now!
For today I am trying to remember that life is short and kids need to be kids. I am remembering that the worldly standards of success, consisting mostly of being a “dog eat dog” world, are not the values I want to instill in my children. I choose to focus on finding their God given strengths and encouraging the abilities they were born to possess.
“Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.” 1 Peter 4:10
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