Doc’s Sunrise Rants

You live in rural area that sounds similar to mine. It’s 10 miles to town of 1500 for me. 60 miles to Denver. Not many people homeschool out here and those that do are very religious. How did you deal with friends for your kids? Or did you not and that was okay too?

All of my kids attended the local co-op preschool, where I established relationships with the parents, which I discovered, it way more important than having my kids make their own friends. They also attended kindergarten, which exposed them to yet more kids, and me more parents, and they did end up with some friends. Mostly public schooled. My kids are basically the same age though, so they played with each other. I didn’t think it was that important for them to have a bunch of outside friends when they were say, under 10. Yes, I sort of isolated them. Later they had more opportunities to make friends.

I find the kids in our town are narrow-minded and don’t include my kids because we are not in public school. The closet homeschool group quotes scriptures the whole meeting - yuck. I don’t need or like much socializing-people mostly piss me off.

My kids ran into some of that when they were junior high age. It wasn’t that they were excluded because they were weird, or homeschooled, or geeks, or whatever, it was that at that age, lots of kids are excluded from things because lots of other kids are just assholes. They experienced  some of that mean-girl thing, but the dirty secret is that within their tight knit little groups of friends, they were also sometimes the mean girls. My kids weren’t saints. Even 4H has their little cliques.

All of the really local homeschool groups are conservative. We skipped the co-ops and the meetings and just did the field trips. We were subjected to less prayer that way. It’s hard to beat the deals that groups can come up with that single families can not, like renting an entire railroad car for a trip to Seattle, or doing swimming lessons in the middle of the school day, with a lot of kids who are better behaved, instead of a rowdy crowd of public school kids. Yeah, those religious kids ARE quieter, for sure. Funny thing, after several years, the parents quit trying to convert me and made friends with me. They could see that my kids were well brought up and that I wasn’t married to Satan. I’m sure we were quite the picture, 10 moms in denim skirts, with me and my queer t-shirt in the middle, all of us laughing about something. You just have to keep at them, wear them down. Eventually they put the bible aside and take you as you are. They’re good people. You want them to accept you, you have to accept them.

How did you deal with getting your kids around other kids? Did you drive a long ways? Did you think family was enough? Did your kids whine about whatever choices you made for them or were they happy?

I started a 4H group. Local kids wanted to join, and their conservative parents had to give in and let them be exposed, ha ha. My kids also played on the local public school sports teams starting in 7th grade. Our state allows that. We drive a long way for everything, so I’m not sure that would have been different had we not homeschooled. They’ve always had lots of friends, we found a lot of secular homeschoolers over the years, hidden in pockets around the county. By high school, local kids were coming over here pretty regularly. I would say, in fact, that my kids were at least as popular as any local public school kid. I don’t take credit for that, they’re just fun kids.