There’s nothing to start an argument among Christians like how to raise your kids!
When our family first started praying about school options for our kids, we got comments from people who were horrified that we were thinking of sending our kids to public school, and people who were shocked to hear we were considering homeschooling. But for 16 years, we’ve followed the advice we got from a wise older couple:
Pray and then decide what’s right for each kid, for each year.
Following this advice, we’ve put some of our kids in public school and other kids in private school at different times (with homeschooling held as a valid option each year and still a possibility for the future).
Most of our kids have been in public schools most years. We see our kids’ involvement in a public school as a great opportunity to develop relationships with people in our community. We’ve always tried to leap at every chance we get to involve ourselves in the life of the school, from field trip chaperoning to school event volunteering to sports team boostering.
Then there’s the opportunities our kids themselves have to display and proclaim the gospel. We’re continually amazed to hear about the questions our kids’ friends have asked, and how our kids have responded by speaking the truth in love. Fiery topics like abortion and the transgender movement have given our kids opportunities to talk about Jesus.
Yes, there are concerning things being taught and modeled in public schools. But the same things are being taught in the world (at least implicitly), so we would much rather have our kids deal with these things while they’re still under our roof.
The secret to helping kids navigate these things is asking lots of questions. When our kids come home from school every day, we ask what they learned. We ask if there was anything that seemed “off.” We ask what they did at lunch and recess. We ask what they talked about with their friends.
Another secret is to take our discipleship responsibilities as parents very seriously. This has taken different forms in different seasons: from Saturday morning devotionals over our family-secret-recipe waffles, to Sunday night family dinners with dad’s latest taco creation, to Bible stories before bedtime, to verse-of-the-day discussions on the car ride to school.
In a sense, we’ve always homeschooled our kids. At least on the subjects that really matter.