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>> 133 6 Looking Back The Homeschooling Journey Before I present mothers’ follow-up stories, it is important to explain how the local homeschooling culture changed in the interim between the two interviews . As I mentioned in the introduction, most public schools in our county had established Parent-School Partnership (PSP) programs by 2008, in which the district provided a certified teacher to act as an academic adviser/ facilitator for families, serve as a liaison between them and the school district , and organize an offering of classes for homeschooled students. Several of my interviewees had utilized these programs, and they invariably reported that it made their experiences more manageable because they no longer had to do all the work themselves. Other homeschoolers expressed staunch objection to them, however; they viewed the programs as an insidious form of government control that threatened their parental rights to educate their children as they saw fit (e.g., the stipulation that funds could not be spent on religious curricula was often seen as a form of censorship and government intrusion into family life). As a result of this controversial issue, the homeschooling community in Cedar County splintered, and PATH lost members, 134 > 135 Name 1st or 2nd choice homeschooler? Enrolled in conventional school between T1 and T2? Reason for enrolling in conventional school? Returned to homeschooling after being in conventional school? Reason for returning to homeschooling? Graduated (or planned) from conventional school? Alice Lange 1st choice No — — — — Annie Agresti 1st choice No — — — — Cassandra Shudek 1st choice No — — — — Gretchen Forrester 1st choice No — — — — Jackie Bell 1st choice No — — — — Leanna Livingston 1st choice No — — — — Liz Trudeau 1st choice No — — — — Pam Rausch 1st choice No — — — — Sabrina Hernandez 1st choice No — — — — Valerie Scott 1st choice No — — — — Whitney McKee 1st choice Yes Financial No — Yes Patricia Tomlinson 2nd choice No — — — — Darlene Rooney-Henkel 2nd choice Yes Mother’s independence Yes Child’s fit Yes Emily Ashton 2nd choice Yes Mother’s independence Yes Child’s fit Hopeful Tracy Chadwick 2nd choice Yes Mothers’ independence Yes Child’s fit Yes Renée Peterson 2nd choice in 2002; 1st choice in 2009 Yes Financial No — Yes Table 6.1 Mothers’ Homeschooling Journey between 2002 (T1) and 2008 /2009 (T2) Interviews 136 > 137 more involved in activities outside the home, which had been eating away at the family’s time together and had kept them running from one scheduled event to another. She explained the impact on the family dynamic a year earlier , which had worried her at the time: The kids would scream, you know, “You’re the worst mom in the world!” or “I wish I was never born!” Just serious melodrama. . . . We just needed to step back and look at what exactly is going on here. And we went and saw a family counselor. . . . [I kept thinking] there’s something wrong with this picture. [We discovered that] we were doing way too much. Chess club, hockey, music lessons—the list goes on. We were just constantly busy. So a lot of that stress, that yelling and screaming, was coming from the kids just needing down time! “I just need to be home! I don’t need to be back [home] to go out the door again in five minutes.” So part of the good thing that came from that . . . is that we looked at everything, and we cut way back on our commitments. Gretchen’s solution was to step back from the “concerted cultivation” model of filling children’s time with extracurricular activities, which research has shown may impinge on family life.2 Another complicating factor was that mothers’ lives did not always get easier as their children aged because the family was a dynamic unit of interrelated parts. When one component improved, others could deteriorate, which affected the family as a whole. Although older children gained independence , other things happened in many families to pull at mothers’ time— time they would have had to themselves if everything else had remained consistent. These changes took several forms. First, adding more children to the family kept the mothers squarely rooted in the time-intensive stage of motherhood , despite having older children as well (I will talk more about increasing family size in the chapter 8). Valerie Scott, who had seven children, one set of four and then, eleven years later, another set of three, noted the stresses of the wide age span: Homeschooling would get interrupted. . . . You know, you’ve got a baby, plus you’re pregnant, then you nurse, and...

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