Dear Abigail,
My husband and I are having a hard time agreeing on how to educate our three children. I want to start homeschooling, but he’s not sure.
I’m a stay-at-home mom, and while some days are exhausting, I feel incredibly lucky to have had this time with our children. We’ve generally started them in very part-time preschool around age 3, followed by part-time pre-K. But our oldest just started kindergarten, and the transition to full-day elementary school has been much harder for me than I expected. With the rush to get everyone out the door in the morning—then the scramble to fit in dinner, sports, activities, and family time in the two or three hours left in the afternoon—I find myself mourning the slower days we had before. My kindergartner comes home overstimulated and full of pent-up energy, which often gets released by fighting with his siblings.
Over the past two years, I have also become increasingly concerned about what is happening with technology in public schools. We live in one of the best public school districts in our state. But at our neighborhood elementary school, children are using Chromebooks beginning in kindergarten. My son has come home singing commercial jingles from ads that appeared before YouTube videos played by his teacher.
For the past seven months, I have been petitioning our school district, meeting with leadership, and building a local parent community, to address concerns about EdTech and AI in the classroom. To the district’s credit, they have listened and made some meaningful changes. But the experience has also consumed an enormous amount of my mental and emotional energy. I’m realizing that I don’t want to spend the next several years trying to reform the public school system. I want to homeschool.
My husband can see the appeal of homeschooling. He also thinks childhood should be slower and dislikes the amount of technology entering education. We both wish the school day included substantially more time outdoors. But he worries about what our children would lose by leaving school: the casual, unpredictable social exposure that happens throughout a normal day; friendships that develop organically; interactions with kids they might never otherwise meet.
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I understand his concerns. At the same time, I don’t think homeschooling has to mean isolating our children. I just want to be much more intentional about the people and environments that shape them. There are enrichment programs in our community that offer one or two days a week of group classes. I also want my children to have meaningful relationships with teachers. My oldest already works with a neighbor who is a former teacher, and he absolutely loves learning with her.
My husband and I don’t have big fights, but this has become the biggest disagreement in our marriage. He thinks I may have developed a vendetta against our school, and worries that I have lost perspective and am making a drastic decision based on something that is not actually a major problem. He wants to spend the rest of this school year observing what is happening in the classroom—and whether the growing backlash against excessive technology leads to a reduction in EdTech—and exploring our alternatives, before making a decision.
In my view, every year we spend waiting is a year we can’t get back. But I really do not want to bully my husband into homeschooling. I want this to be a joint decision that we are both genuinely excited about. I know that, faced with a problem, I am much more emotionally reactive and tend to go immediately into problem-solving mode. My husband is thoughtful and methodical about change. The frustrating thing is, we do agree on a lot. The difference is that I want to act, and he wants to wait.
How do I balance my husband’s reasonable desire for more evidence with my feeling that we already have enough information to make a change? How do I advocate for the kind of childhood I believe our kids need without steamrolling the person whose judgment I trust most?
And, if we do choose to wait, how do I accept it?
I recently popped in to surprise my son at lunch. While I was waiting for his class to come out of the classroom, I saw the children sitting on a rug watching a video on the projector. My son later told me they were watching bubbles float across the screen and were supposed to count them, presumably as a pre-lunch calming activity. I wasn’t looking for something to be upset about—I was just there to surprise my kid—and yet I felt my blood boil.
That is the part that scares me. I am trying to determine whether my reaction is telling me something important or whether I just see every example of classroom technology as evidence for the case I already believe in.
Warmly,
A Torn Mom in Colorado
Dear Torn Mom,
The first time I toured elementary schools, it was 2014, and Smart Boards were all the rage. At each school my husband and I visited, administrators were bursting to announce that the whiteboards would soon be replaced by large screens. The Smart Boards were sleek and elegant. They were smart—it was right there in the name! The administrators waited for awe to sweep my face.
I didn’t like the thought of putting large computer screens in every classroom, and as a pedagogical tool, I didn’t trust them. “But why do the kids need them?” I kept asking.
I couldn’t yet guess what exactly teachers would do with these Smart Boards or what would go wrong. That epistemic asymmetry is the naysayer’s structural disadvantage: The promised benefits of novel interventions are always neatly specified. Meanwhile, we skeptics struggle to predict their unintended consequences.