The Imperfect Homeschooler
(An interview with Barbara Frank)
by Christine Field
Barbara Frank has been around the homeschooling block. This homeschooling mom of
four has a passion for encouraging the imperfect parent (and that’s all of
us) and equipping our young people for the adult world. She is the author of Life
Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers and The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide
to Homeschooling. She also has a few other ideas up her sleeve!
TOS: Welcome, Barbara! It’s so cool that we live close enough
to each other to actually meet up once in a while. It’s been a joy to get
to know you! You’ve been at this homeschooling thing since the early 1980s.
Have the challenges we face as parents changed much during this time?
Barbara: Yes! I think parents are under much more pressure to put
their young children in school now, even if their children are still toddlers. Add
to that the pressure parents are under to get their kids ready for college, starting
in kindergarten, and I think today’s parents are nearly overwhelmed with pressure.
TOS: Tell us a bit about your family.
Barbara: Tim and I have been married for twenty-nine years and
have four children who were homeschooled from birth through high school. Sarah (25)
is an artist who works as a retail manager by day. Peter (23) graduated from college
last year, got married, and now works for Concordia Publishing House. Mary (17)
is a writer (working on her second novel), who also loves to sew and play the violin.
Josh (15) is a video game player extraordinaire who happens to have Down syndrome.
TOS: Is there a story behind the idea of “imperfect homeschooling”?
Barbara: As a firstborn perfectionist, I’ve always put a
lot of pressure on myself, and that got worse once I began homeschooling. I’d
read stories in magazines about large homeschooling families (ten kids, all perfectly
groomed and dressed alike!) and felt inadequate in comparison. But over time, as
I watched my children grow, I learned that the success of our homeschooling venture
didn’t depend solely on my efforts. God led us to homeschooling, and then
He guided us through it.
TOS: The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling
is a wealth of information. I especially appreciated the chapter about overcoming
obstacles to homeschooling. What obstacles have you personally faced?
Barbara: Like most parents, I’ve had to overcome the habits
and prejudices I had from my childhood schooling experience; those can be significant
for some people. Also, while I was fortunate that I didn’t have overt resistance
to homeschooling from relatives, I do come from a volatile and pretty dysfunctional
family, and its dramas were often disruptive as I tried to maintain a peaceful home
life where my children could learn and grow.
Our biggest obstacle was probably Josh’s birth. He arrived with several medical
problems that kept him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for his first month of
life and on a heart and apnea monitor for two years. He required many medical and
therapy appointments, especially that first year, which made our home life pretty
hectic for a time. I really feel for those parents who are homeschooling special
needs children, because now I understand that we’re under even more pressure
than other homeschooling parents.
TOS: Do you have a newsletter? Tell us about it.
Barbara: The Imperfect Homeschooler is a free monthly
E-Newsletter intended to encourage parents wherever they are on their homeschooling
journeys. They can subscribe at my new website,
www.barbarafrankonline.com or at
www.cardamompublishers.com.
TOS: I have a passion for teaching our kids life skills (even wrote
my own book on the subject, Life Skills for Kids). What prompted you to
write Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers?
Barbara: Two words: Sarah Frank. My daughter is a very
independent person. Starting when she was 18 months old, I’d find her in her
room, struggling to remove the clothes I’d put on her so she could choose
her own. By her early teens, she had rearranged her bedroom to look like an apartment.
When she told me she would be moving out on her own as soon as she was done homeschooling,
I believed her!
Since she didn’t want to go to college, we decided it was useless for her
to study college prep courses as she finished high school. So I designed projects
for her that would teach her what I felt she needed to know for living on her own,
and they prepared her. She moved to Chicago shortly before she turned 20. After
a year of living with two roommates, she moved to her own apartment. She has lived
on her own ever since.
TOS: What projects do you cover in that book?
Barbara: How to research and rent an apartment; how to understand
taxes, insurance, and mortgages; how to research, find, and pay for a car and car
insurance; … all the useful subjects we should have been taught in high school
but weren’t. I wanted to make sure Sarah would be prepared for life on her
own.
Not long ago, we published a second, expanded edition of Life Prep for Homeschooled
Teenagers with two new sections for parents (about part-time work and credit
cards). There’s also a new project for teens called “The Financial Freedom
Project,” which illustrates how the decisions young adults make affect their
financial freedom while they’re young as well as later on in their lives.
TOS: What are you working on these days?
Barbara: I’m nearly finished writing my new book, Thriving
in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality.
The world our children will live in as adults will differ tremendously from the
one we were prepared for when we were their age. We were told that if we earned
a college degree, we’d always find good jobs with benefits and a pension for
our old age. But that world is gone. Some people without degrees are making millions.
Some people with degrees are making lattes at Starbucks. As for employer-paid
benefits and pensions, they’re quickly evaporating.
Our children are likely to have several different careers over their lifetimes.
They’ll occasionally find themselves between jobs and will sometimes need
to obtain retraining or other forms of education. With pensions disappearing and
social security’s future in jeopardy, it’s likely our children will
have to finance their own retirements.
I’m fascinated by the question of how to prepare our children for this new
economic reality. I’ve spent the last several years researching this issue
while writing the book, and I’ve got a lot of specific recommendations for
today’s parents, along with some very good news: the things we need to be
doing with our children lend themselves to homeschooling so completely that choosing
to homeschool is becoming almost a necessity, if you want your child to be prepared
for what’s coming.
TOS: Tell our readers how they can learn more about your writing
and get in touch with you.
Barbara: They can find me at
www.cardamompublishers.com,
www.barbarafrankonline.com, and at my blog,
www.barbaramfrank.blogspot.com
TOS: Barb, thanks so much for your wisdom and work. You have helped
many homeschoolers look to the future with confidence.
Biographical Information
Copyright, 2009. All rights reserved by author below. Content provided by The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC.
Christine Field and her husband, Mark, have graduated two homeschoolers from high
school and have two more to go! They live and work in Wheaton, IL where Mark is
chief of police and Christine maintains a limited law practice. She is the author
of several books, including Homeschooling 101, Homeschooling the Challenging
Child, Life Skills for Kids, and Help for the Harried Homeschooler. Christine
is a frequent conference speaker, often along with her husband, and is available
to speak on a wide variety of topics related to homeschooling and family life. Visit
her website at
www.HomeFieldAdvantage.org.
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