By Grace Jorgensen

THINK BACK to your childhood for a moment, to reflect on what really mattered most to you.

Perhaps you came from a home, like so many today, where you could only hope to experience what mattered – a hope that was never realized.

Or maybe you are able to remember warm thoughts of home, of feeling safe and loved.

We know that human lives are shaped emotionally, spiritually and psychologically by the experiences and influences of early childhood.

Childhood scars left unhealed can affect future generations through continued negative behaviour patterns – unless God heals the broken and wounded.

Children are born with a drive to bond to mother, to have attachments that will give them a sense of protection and nurturing. They need to feel safe, and to be allowed to flourish in an environment of peace.

A house does not make a home. To a child, the physical structure of the place they call home matters little. In my travels around the world, I have met happy, contented children who called home a hut with a leaky grass roof and a mud floor, with no toys and only one meal of rice each day.

Home is where children are free to be themselves, where they know they are loved, understood and cared for.

Home is a place they want to share with their friends, because it is a place where they are receiving what matters most to them.

Children are born to learn, to discover, to explore. It is as unnecessary to tell children to learn as it is to tell them to grow. The wonder of life draws searching, penetrating and baffling questions out of every child.

Their questions push parents in the 21st century to google for instant answers. Parents today have so many more tools than past generations to provide their children with what really matters. Information has never been so readily available in so many diverse forms.

Parents are, in fact, their children’s primary educator.

The primary responsibility for their children’s learning does not belong to strangers in institutionalized schooling. It is imperative that young parents today educate themselves on the options for their children’s education, and that they seek what is best for their children.

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Adult peer pressure has many parents pushing children out of the nest when they are not ready to fly.

Too many children are trapped in a room with strangers, feeling detached, abandoned, misunderstood and unfulfilled.

Many  children and teens are begging to learn at home where they feel safe from bullying, feel understood and are allowed to learn and be creative.

Thousands of parents in Canada are listening to their God-given intuition and asking themselves, “Would learning at home be the best option for my child, right now?”

Many are accepting the challenge and sacrifices involved in bringing their children back home to learn.

Families are learning together the joys of doing kitchen math and backyard science.

Institutionalized schooling is not the only education option, nor is it necessarily the best option. Parents need to know that home is their child’s first and most important school.

With the decline of the nuclear family, role models for children are not what they once were. The extended family was a child’s village, modeling relationships, tolerance and generosity. In this community, children learned how to respond to trauma and adversity.

As contemporary culture and economic stresses threaten what remains of community and family life, schools have taken a guardianship role that is not theirs to assume.

Are we overlooking the obvious? What matters most to a child?

What matters most is for responsible parents to create, with God’s help, a loving, peaceful, nurturing environment where their children will flourish. With the stresses on today’s family, a house will be a home that will stand . . . only if the foundation is Christ.

Grace Jorgensen is executive director of the British Columbia Home School Association.

For more info: bchomeschool.net.

August 2010