by Mary James

My oldest son is a freshman in high school this year. It seems like just yesterday that we had our very first day of school. Now I find myself mapping out a four-year plan that will satisfy my need to cover "everything." There is such a sense of finality to it! I know many home schoolers who are facing the very same situation with the same degree of fear. Will I make it? Will I finish the topics I have begun? Will my son leave our home school with that well-rounded education I wanted him to have? Or will I be leaving huge gaps of ignorance that can never be filled?

It is true that in May, 2004, my son will graduate from high school and my daily chore of home schooling him will end. Certainly our relationship will change. But is it true that my influence over my son will end the day he graduates? Will I have no other opportunities to educate him after he turns 18 years old? As I begin to look at my son's future, I am realizing something very important - there is nothing magical about the number 18 and he will not wake up the day after high school graduation a "finished product."

Looking back over the history of our country, I can't pinpoint the exact time it began, but somewhere along the way we began to view the age of 18 as the end of youth. The freedoms our young people gain at that age are certainly noteworthy, but do they signal an end to the need for parental supervision? Decades of freedom-seeking that bordered on freedom-desecration brought forth what amounts to a battle cry... "I can't wait until I'm 18!!" No longer to live under the rule of the parents, free to experience the world in all its glory!

I certainly recognize that this battle cry is not heard in the average home schooling household, but I think we still lean toward society's view that our children are ready to be out on their own when they graduate from high school. It has become such an accepted part of our culture that even home schoolers begin to prepare to throw our little birdies out of the nest when they reach that magical age of 18. And what faces those little birdies? Well, I would challenge each home schooling parent to look back over their own life from the age of 18 to 25. It is certainly possible that you graduated from high school and left your warm, loving home to go to a warm, loving educational institution where you studied diligently and enjoyed a most wholesome social life. But if this describes your experience, I estimate you to be in a rather small minority. Most of us look back on this period of our life with varying degrees of regret and embarrassment. Oh, if we only knew then what we know now... Hindsight is 20/20... I made a few bad choices....

Is this what we want for our young people? Did we spend these many years building a nurturing home and charting a specialized education plan just to kick our children out of their warm nest, hoping their wings are strong enough to carry them in flight? I look at my 15-year-old son and I can't possibly imagine him living successfully on his own in four years. Granted, he is a 15-year-old boy who cares more about computer games than academics and who hasn't remembered to do his household chores without being told in three years! I realize the next four years will bring a good deal of growth and maturity (at least that is my most fervent prayer!). But his graduation from high school will not be the end of one phase and the beginning of another as much as it will be a small turn in the long road to adulthood. It will be a time when he takes a stronger hold over his life and makes more of his own decisions and is even more responsible for his own actions. But for this time of transition to be successful, I feel it would be best accomplished under the still-close supervision of his parents. Rather than society's example, I choose to follow the Biblical example. I see nothing in Scripture to indicate that young people left the home of their parents until they were, in fact, establishing their own home. Not their own dorm room or apartment with roommates... but their own home. In the ancient Hebrew engagement ritual, a young man who had chosen a wife (with the approval of all parents) returned to his father's home to build a room for his bride. It is to this ritual that Jesus referred when He said, "In My Father's house are many mansions [or rooms]... I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). Likewise, the young bride-to-be lived at home and prepared herself for marriage. She was, in fact, to be in a state of readiness because she never knew when her bridegroom would call for her, as we see in the story of the wise and foolish virgins.