“Were colonists geniuses? [i.e., why did our colonial forefathers have literacy rates close to 90 percent?]. No, truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about 100 hours [italics added] to transmit as long as audience is eager and willing to learn. . . . Millions of people teach themselves these things. It really isn’t very hard. . .”

To be conservative, let’s assume that because you’re not an experienced teacher it takes you three hundred hours to teach your child these skills with help of learn-to-read phonics workbooks and computer software. Three hundred hours, divided by average six-hour public school day, comes out to fifty school days, which is about ten weeks or three months.

Let me emphasize this point — it could take you, or a tutor you pay, as little as three months to teach your child to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Again, to be even more conservative, most children could learn these skills in one year if you (or a tutor) concentrated your instruction on these basics. Public schools take eight to twelve years of children’s lives, yet they turn out millions of high-school graduates who can barely read their own diploma or multiply 12 x15 without a calculator.

David Colfax and his wife Micki were public-school teachers turned ranchers who taught their four sons at home in 1970s and 1980s, and three of their sons eventually went to Harvard. They co-authored a book titled Homeschooling For Excellence, which describes their home-schooling experience. In their book, they compared time a child wastes in public school to time average home-schooling parents need to teach their children basics. Here’s what they wrote:

“The numbers are straightforward and irrefutable. The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these—220—are spent, as educators say, ‘on task.’ Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters.”

As parents, we pray for our children’s safety, health and happiness. We do everything we know to help make these things happen for them.

At some point in our lives, we developed principles and values that guide our life decisions. Our parents and/or caregivers certainly had influence over this but not complete determination. Some of us gladly adopted values of our parents and continue to live by them today. Some of us so completely rejected our parents values that our decisions are determined by doing exact opposite of what we believe our parents would do.

Most of us, however, are somewhere in middle---we have accepted some of our parents values and rejected others. This is a normal process of development. As parents, though, we really fight that period in our children’s lives when they are attempting to differentiate themselves from us.

Maybe it is because we fear for their safety in their decision-making. Maybe we can see that they are engaging in unhealthy behavior or heading down a life path that will ultimately lead to unhappiness. Whatever reason, we get scared if our children’s values differ too much from our own.

What can we, as parents, do? First of all, as we raise our children, we are helping to strengthen their roots. This is first gift a parent gives their child. How does one strengthen roots? We tend, we nurture, we feed, we cultivate---all to develop strong roots.

Sharing our value system with our children is critical to this process. In sharing values, remember that people pay more attention to what they see, as opposed to what they hear. Therefore, if you are a parent who tells your children it is wrong to smoke while you are toking on your cigarette, know that their interpretation of smoking will likely be different from what you are verbally espousing.

A developmental task of adolescence is separation and individuation. This is time when children are attempting to separate themselves from their parents to an extent. It can be a very frightening time for parents. What do we do? This is time for second parental gift---wings.

We want to give our children gradual “flying” lessons. Children are not ready to go from total and complete shelter of their parents’ protection to being absolutely out on their own. This must be a gradual process.

Dr. Nancy Buck, in her book Peaceful Parenting, says it best. “We limit freedom for as long as it takes to teach responsible behavior and then we give back freedom.” We want our children learning precarious process of making decisions while they are still under our semi-protection.

During teen years is perfect time to allow our teens to begin process of deciding what their own set of values will be. If you have done a good job with roots and you handle next part with a minimum of confrontation, then value process will go relatively smoothly.