I freaked out tonight. Oh, it wasn’t anything overt.  It snuck up on me, really.  I held it together like a pro today — teaching myself a second-grade math concept so I could help my daughter understand it for her test tomorrow (can someone PLEASE give me a pat on back, or fist bump….or dab…or whatEVER for that one because today’s math is not what it used to be. Am I right?) , then taking her to gymnastics while listening to my son read me a fantastic book he’s writing.  I got home after gymnastics, fed my family, got the kids showered and somehow in bed with time to spare for bedtime snuggles and giggles…annnnnnd farts. Because, well. Boys.  I’m convinced that fart humor might actually be a lesser known love language for the male species. But, that’s a topic for another day.

On the surface, everything today looked — well — storybookish, really.

But, suddenly and without warning, it wasn’t.  After the kids went to bed, I went to look in my son’s folder — a nightly ritual during the week — to sift through graded papers, sign a discipline log, and read the weekly newsletter along any other communications that are sent home.  As I browsed through the informative sheet that outlined the upcoming lessons for the week, my eyes began to blur as I skimmed over dates, trying to file them somewhere inside my overcrowded (and apparently overwhelmed) mental At-a-Glance planner.  I pulled out an art assignment to be turned in Friday, and read through the instructions.  I read the usual weekly reminder that our kids are to read for 20 minutes per night. I pulled out the note that told us about Open House scheduled for next week. I remembered that school pictures are coming up and that I need to remember to buy my kids’ yearbooks.  I tried to make sensible stacks of the papers I was sifting through: Trash. Bulletin Board. Jonah’s desk (but don’t forget to remind him about it)…

In the newsletter, I read “Tomorrow our GT liaison is coming, so please remember to have your child send his completed [blah blah blah]signment.”  And, then, it happened.  Out of the blue. My heart started racing.  Pounding out of my chest.  My legs turned to jello.  I wondered if I was going to throw up or just pass smooth out, altogether.  I had to sit down.  It was too much.  I couldn’t keep it all straight.

My mind finally said, “ENOUGH!”  And the way my mind said it was through a certifiable panic attack.

I like to think that I am a relatively stable person (outside of a very small and predictable window about every 28-days or so), but, friends, I just had a panic attack over third-grade homework.

Third. Grade. Homework.

It’s just too much, my friends.  Hear me out.

I want to preface this by saying that we have been blessed with absolutely incredible teachers.  I cannot imagine trying to do the job you do, and I value you immensely.  This is not directed at a specific teacher, but instead at a widely accepted systemic flaw in our education system that I believe comes with considerable consequences.

I value education.  So much so that I actually work for a foundation whose sole mission is to support and enhance education within our local school district.  To me, education is a BIG deal.

I’m an involved parent (as much as I can be, given that I work full-time on a school campus, myself).

I want my kids to learn.  But learning doesn’t just happen through academic assignments.  Learning happens when kids play,  when they’re involved in sports or music, when they build personal responsibility by completing household chores. I, of course, want to know if they’re struggling, so I can reinforce concepts at home.  But somewhere, somehow a myth has permeated our school system that says a child needs to be in school for 7(+) hours per day, and then practice what they learned in the evening to stay on target.  It is unnecessary and it is causing epic amounts of anxiety – not only in children but in their parents, as well.

I get that there is a huge issue with lack of family involvement in their children’s education these days, and that parent involvement is a key factor in student success. But, please hear me when I say:

For the LOVE of all things sane, peaceful, and well-rounded on the home-front, please stop sending my kids home with homework at an age when they’re too young to have the responsibility to manage it.  There has GOT to be a better way.

I understand that there is a breakdown of family occurring in our culture, but may I be bold enough to say that the absurdly copious amounts of communication going home, dates to remember, projects to plan, daily assignments to accomplish, nightly reading assignments to log, discipline logs to initial, fundraisers to finish are – dare I say – contributing to the problem.

That’s RIGHT.  I said it.  They are contributing to a breakdown of the family, and let me tell you why.

By the way, I have absolutely ZERO research to support anything I’m about to say.  I don’t ACTUALLY have time to conduct research because by the the time I finish managing all my kids’ responsibilities (which are placed on them in excessive amounts at an age in which they lack the developmental maturity to actually MANAGE said responsibilities — so their responsibilities are really mine), then managing my own responsibilities (because I’m a grown adult who has to tend to my own responsibilities or our house is filthy, we go hungry, and we eventually get our electricity turned off – or worse), I literally have nothing left to give.  Research doesn’t land on my list of priorities.

You know what does land on my priority list these days?  Survival.  That’s right.  During the school year, my priority is to survive each day without freaking out or blowing a gasket, and without inciting anxiety in my kids because I’m spread so thin trying to manage all their crap that I eventually go cuckoo for cocoa puffs on them instead of just letting them be actual KIDS.  So, my priority is to survive while, in the meantime, causing as little emotional damage to my kids as possible.  And, I’ve only got two of them. So, God bless all of you SuperMoms and Dads out there with three or more kids in school.

I want to give you a peek into a day in the life of a full-time working family with only two kids.  (I can’t even imagine stepping into the shoes of a single parent home, or one where the stress of having food on the table or a roof over the head is literally the priority of every single day.)  My kids are ages 7 & 9.  They are one grade apart in school. We only allow them to participate in one extracurricular activity at a time, which still puts our family on-the-go three nights a week.  And, maybe your kids are different, but mine require sleep at this age.  If sleep deprivation enters the equation, you can forget our daily survival goal.  There will be bedwetting epidemics (which translates into no sleep for Mommy) and meltdowns galore, with mounds and mounds of molehills being transformed by the minute into mountains of Pike’s Peak proportion if my children do not get good sleep. My kids. need. sleep.  In my opinion, all kids need sleep, and we, as their parents, owe it to them to prioritize healthy sleep habits they lack the maturity to prioritize themselves.

Any given day of our week looks something like this:
6:30am     – kids wake up to catch the bus at 7
5pm           – pick up from after-school care
5:30-7pm – gymnastics (Lexi) or soccer (Jonah)
7:15pm     – eat dinner, take showers, complete chores, do homework, read for 20 minutes
8pm           – bedtime

Now, I’m no mathematician but I’m 97% certain that even with Common Core math, the time needed in our evening vs. time we have does not add up. The only way it will add up is if we pull our kids out of their extracurricular activity (their ONE bless-ed extracurricular activity apiece) or I quit my job.

Are you tracking with me, here?  My kids are awake 13-½ hours per day, on average.  They spend 1 hour per day en route to school on a bus, 7 hours per day of instructional time inside the walls of school, 1-2 hours in after-school care (because God BLESS it, I work!), 1-½ hours doing ONE extracurricular activity a couple of days/week, which leaves them with 1-½ hours per night to spare — which you want to fill up with reading and homework, leaving virtually ZERO time for talking to their parents, having dinner with their family, bathing, connecting on the homefront, doing chores, using their imagination, or playing with their friends.  How presumptuous of an education system to proclaim, “We need strong families. So, this is what we’re gonna do.  We’re gonna cut into the 90-blessed-minutes you have to hang out on the homefront as a family unit on any given night and fill that time with more academics. Because seven hours is not enough.  And by doing this we’ll be sure to instill a lifetime love of learning in your child.”

Newsflash.  It’s NOT working.

• Kids are stressed because their expectations for responsibility are beyond their developmental capability.

• Parents are stressed because they are absorbing their children’s unrealistic responsibilities as their own, while still having to manage their own responsibilities, after putting in a full day of work.

• Parents are emotionally unavailable to their kids (or worse yet emotionally abusive to them) because the stress is too much to bear.

• Consequently, kids are developing emotional disturbances and discipline problems in epic proportions at much younger ages than ever before.  And these disturbances are showing up in more affluent families and those of higher socioeconomic groups than ever before, which lends to the case that the pressures placed on families by our current educational standards – meant to increase parental involvement in students’ education –  is actually contributing to an across-the-board familial breakdown.

 

So, please. For the love of FAMILY.

Just stop it.