You know, your friends’ experiences in life are not necessarily yours, so their decisions regarding their children’s high school education aren’t necessarily going to be yours. And your pondering questions about how your children will turn out in adult life remind me of something else I went through when my son was much younger. He is autistic, and he was not potty-trained #2 until he was 5….and people would always tell me, “Don’t worry–he won’t be going to college in diapers!”
Of course, they were right, and now that seems a lot less difficult a time than it did back then. Each season of life has its own challenges, and it’s easy to throw in the towel too quickly. I wouldn’t jump into unschooling without doing your homework on it & giving it careful consideration. I know there are many unschoolers who become responsible, productive adults, but just as CM methods are not for every homeschooling family, neither are unschooling methods.
I think perhaps you may be looking more towards either not following CM completely for awhile or just easing up on schoolwork for a period of time. I’ve heard plenty of moms here talk about scaling back to a lighter schedule during a difficult pregnancy, an illness, or while addressing a child’s medical needs. Sometimes this needs to happen during a move to a new town. I’m sure most of them will tell you that, in the end, not much ground was lost (if any) and they were able to get back on track later on.
I don’t know the ages of your younger children, but if you really have the heart’s desire to homeschool them and are in a position to do so, you won’t “ruin them.” On the contrary, putting them in school might do them more harm than good. Sometimes it’s necessary, but I can almost guarantee it would not be a good environment for your child with depression.
As for the messy house and less than gourmet meals, this might be a good time to focus more on habits and life skills for your children. They can help keep the house in order, plan meals and cook them, help when you shop for groceries–and most of those things involve math, science, language arts in one way or another. If they do not already help in those areas, you could certainly use the next weeks or months to train them. Those lessons will be with them for the rest of their lives. A little book that I found helpful to motivate & give some direction with habit training is Smooth and Easy Days, which happens to be a freebie from the SCM Bookstore. If you like that, you might want to then move on to Laying Down the Rails.
If you want to read something about CM methods and high school, the SCM blog has a series of articles from a few years ago on that topic, and you can read them here. I hope you take some time to rest and think about what you’d like to see for your children’s education in the next year and beyond. Just take it a little at a time for now. Your experience is just that–your experience, and not that of other families you know.
Blessings,
Sue
