Wake up in the morning, hound children through breakfast, teeth cleaning, getting dressed, brushing hair. Then miss out on breakfast yourself because of making school lunches. Then interrupt children who are playing, who have not made their beds or tidied their rooms or found their library books or anything that you would like for them to do, to hound them into the car to take them to school. School drop off, relatively straight forward unless your child chucks a wobbly, has forgotten something, or is just upset because it is Tuesday.
Comparatively peaceful couple of hours in which nobody is home (unless you have preschool children) and then off to spend 30 minutes minimum picking up children from school. They stagger the let out times to help with parking problems.
Then the afternoon dance begins, hounding kids to and from after school activities, insisting that they need to do homework and violin practice each day, cooking dinner, hounding them into then out of the bath. Hounding them through dinner, insisting that they eat rather then play. Then, because everything is running late, chasing them into bed straight after dinner, then getting down to some serious clean up of kitchen.
Yes having all children at school gives you a couple of hours peace through the day, however it does make the few hours spent with children anxiously pushing them through activities and responsibilities. You have less time to train them up how you would like them to be as adults. You hand over a significant amount of their learning and character building time to a person who must also teach 20 other children. You have less time to just be with them in a non hurried way. You have less time to teach them how to care for themselves, their belongings and other people.
School has it's place and some children thrive on school, however I would like to home educate my children if I have any, if only to keep me sane.
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