Why
Latter-Day Saints Should Homeschool . . . and how to do it!
#4:
You
Will Find Comfort in Your Old Age
The
Mailbox is a short movie made by the Church some years ago about an
elderly woman who walks down her lane to the mailbox every day in hopes of
finding a letter there. There never is a letter; she
has been forgotten by her family.
It’s
easy for busy people to neglect the elderly and we’ve probably all been
guilty of not doing all we should; at the same time, though, we might also
wonder just a little what kind of a mother this woman had been to her
children. Did she take time for them, or did she turn
them over to others to be raised? Are they treating her
now as she treated them before?
Our
children come into this world helpless and completely dependent upon us to
take care of them. Decades later the roles reverse as
we become old and helpless and dependent. Will our
children want us around when we need extra care? Or
will they live for the “September” of our lives so they can turn the
responsibility over to someone else?
I
learned a valuable lesson years ago visiting my grandmother in a rest
home. I heard visitors talk to their elderly mothers in
what was obviously the same manner, for better or worse, in which those
mothers had once talked to them. The experience caused
me to be introspective about my own parenting.
One
of the parenting rules I established for myself was to be sensitive to my
children’s need to go places when they weren’t yet old enough to drive
(14-year-old boys require many trips to the hardware store!) and to cheerfully
accommodate them as much as possible. Cheerfully!
One day my son and his friend called to ask for a ride.
I cheerfully dropped whatever Less Important Thing I
was doing in favor of an opportunity to spend a few precious minutes with
a darling boy, an opportunity that was available in that one moment of
time, to me alone. Afterwards, both boys thanked me for
the ride, and I said, cheerfully, “You’re very welcome.
Just remember this when I’m old and I can’t drive.”
Several
days later we were at the grocery store and my son was putting things in
my cart that I didn’t want. I was returning those things to the
shelves. “Aw, come on.” he teased. “When you’re old
and I’m taking care of you I’ll buy you whatever you whatever you want
to eat.”
It
is only wise to establish good relationships with your children when they
are young so they will be successful teens and adults and will want to
take care of you later. Homeschooling helps.
It gives you more family time, and thus more opportunity to
strengthen your family bonds, to teach correct principles, and to build
faith. It gives
Babylon
less opportunity to draw your children away.
Sometimes
parents who look forward to September as a time of relief from their
parental responsibilities also look forward to age 18 as a time of relief
from the troubled relationship they have with a child.
They anticipate that the child will move out and take his problems
with him. It doesn’t work
that way. Your child may leave
home, but chances are good that he will be back in a few years and you
will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of a shattered life.
Then you will hear words like meth, porn, suicide, felonies, prison
. . . and children.
Other
words, spoken prophetically, will have new meaning:
.
. . . we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon
individuals, communities, and nations
the
calamities
foretold by ancient and modern prophets.
One
of the great calamities of our day is the number of children born to
unwed, misbehaving parents. Statistically
speaking, these children are automatically assigned to a higher
probability of poverty, poor health, poor school achievement, criminal
activity, and a less successful adulthood in both their career and their
relationships.
Another
Calamity, and one society is only beginning to notice, is that of
grandparents who are raising their grandchildren because of the
misbehaviors of their adult children.
This is not the heartwarming Andy Griffith situation where
grandparents or Aunt Bee step in to help raise grandchildren when a parent
has died. This is a very
different, heart wrenching situation in which grandparents find themselves
raising a meth baby, a neglected or abused child, or a child whose parents
are in jail or rehab. The
children of misbehaving adult children come with severe problems.
They will have been poorly nurtured, and their hearts will have
been broken by the anger, embarrassment, and insecurity of having
misbehaving parents. The
teaching of moral and religious values will have been neglected. There
may be health issues that would tax the energy of a younger person, and
behavior problems at school. If
the children are already teens, heaven help the grandparents!
As
a volunteer family advocate for families whose children are in the custody
of the state, I’ve seen many young parents get their lives back in order
so their children can be returned, but I’ve also seen grandparents
mortgage their homes, cash in their retirement, or run up credit cards to
cover legal fees and other costs to help their children overcome
situations caused by past poor choices.
To
the young, it may not seem like much for grandparents to raise their
grandchildren; but in truth, grandparents usually do not have the energy
needed for the job. In some
cases they won’t even be around to finish the job.
In a 2006 CES broadcast Elder Merrill J. Bateman of the Presidency
of the Seventy used charts to show how the physical strength of the human
body peaks about age 30 and then slowly begins to taper off.
Grandparents in their 40’s may still have good energy levels, but
those in their 60’s will probably struggle.
Older
grandparents, however, have something else to offer -- wisdom.
With another chart Elder Bateman showed the trend for a gradual
increase in wisdom over the years. This
was especially so for those who choose to live celestial law, as all the
hours of study and service bring a rich harvest.
A
friend who is parenting his grandchildren says the experience has robbed
him and his wife of the opportunity to be grandparents.
The proper role of a grandfather is to be the patriarch, with his
matriarch, of an eternal family. Grandparents
should be living examples of gospel application.
They should be another witness of the gospel, supporting the
righteous teachings of the parents. They
should share wisdom and perspective with their grandchildren.
They should add a bit of sparkle to their lives.
When
adults misbehave, they not only force their own parents to become parents
when they should be grandparents, but they deprive their children of the
joys of grandparents. Then
they further damage their children, first by reducing their likelihood of
success in life and then second by not being there as parental supports to
those children in those very life struggles.
Then they damage the next generation by leaving their grandchildren
without worthy grandparents.
We
need to think in big pictures. The
family is eternal. Problems
don’t go away when the children move out; they get worse.
The sooner we take care of things that are out of order the better.
The war against the family is absolutely real.
Just because we can’t see the army of evil doesn’t lessen its
reality.
If
you want your retirement years to be peaceful and happy, if you want to
enjoy your grandchildren rather than raise them, then invest in your
children while they are young, while the twig can be bent. Help
them become good adults. Make
every sacrifice of time and focus that you can reasonably make.
Do your very best to build a peaceful, harmonious, gospel centered
home and to teach your children true knowledge, and you will be blessed.
If,
in spite of your best efforts, you have a child who does not stay faithful
-- and some won’t no matter what you do – homeschooling might not make
a drop of difference. But then
again it might. My experience
and my testimony is that it will. Your
loving efforts and the bond you forged, together with your own growth and
learning through homeschooling, will make even a bad situation better to
live with and easier to solve than it would otherwise have been.
As
I look back over our clumsy attempts to homeschool, I see many failures
and so many things we could have done better; but I also see many things
we did do well. We did spend time with our children. We did
teach them. We did learn from them. We did give at least most
of our best efforts to our family. There is great comfort in knowing
that we did some things well. There is great comfort in our
beautiful, refined, spiritual posterity. Our children treat us well
-- I think they really will buy us whatever we want to eat when those
last days come.
Nurture
your family garden well when your tiny seedlings are still in the
greenhouse. Use great care
when you put your little plants out to soak up the sun during the day.
Your best efforts in the spring and summer, even if they are imperfect,
will bring a great harvest in the fall.
And
in your wisdom years you will find mail in your mailbox, even
love letters from your posterity.
.
. . and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion,
and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.
D&C 121:46
Home
Reason #3 Reason
#5
©
2007 Joyce Kinmont
|