Rethinking “Schlepping Children Around”
One of the issues for parents considering homeschooling—and sometimes it can be a big negative—is determining the amount of time they will spend finding and transporting their children to activities and friends. But rather than think of themselves as chauffeurs for their children and being filled with resentment for all the other things they could be doing instead, some parents are able to rethink how their time with their children also provides pleasure and insight while they ride in a car together.
This article, from GWS 69, is a good example of how mundane activities also provide us with deeper connections to our children.
From Susan Shilcock (PA):
I’ve been thinking recently about chauffeuring children. So often I hear people say, “Oh, I have to schlep my child all over,” complaining about being the suburban mother who taxis her children all over. And then people who enjoy living out in the country may complain that to do anything they have to get in the car and drive forty-five minutes. All of those complaints are valid, and I’m certainly someone who, with four children, does a lot of driving to activities in the course of a week. We’re all really happy with those activities that the children are involved in, but it certainly does involve a lot of car time. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about that car time, and about the positive side of it.
Last week I realized, all of a sudden, that our times in the car are sometimes our very best times together. Often what happens is that something inspires a conversation—maybe there’s some construction in the road and somebody asks, ‘Why are we stopping here?”—and that may lead to a whole discussion of the use of township taxes to repave the highways, why things get held up in the government of the township, why some people want something built and others don’t, and all sorts of things that I wouldn’t otherwise have thought of bringing up. I find that the four children have their own questions, all at different levels that they seem almost compelled to ask about this sort of thing. They ask, “Why would somebody not want to build a road once they started building it? Why would the township spend that much money and then stop?’ and so on —the conversation can go on and on. I think the fact that we’re all a captive audience in the car, all necessarily together for that finite period of time, contributes to this. So I’ve found the time in the car to be a wonderful time for family discussion, and I’ve come to value it.
I’ve also been thinking about carpooling. We’ve always tended to do a lot of the driving to activities; our children haven’t been involved in many car pools, although there are a few families that we do trade driving with. But one of the advantages of being the parent who drives, when you’re driving your own children and their friends, is that you get to hear, and almost eavesdrop, in a positive way, on the children naturally relating to each other as they’re involved in their own conversation in the back seat. You have a chance to see how your children see themselves in relation to their peers—are they quick to jump in with a joke in conversation, are they the ones coming up with ideas, and so on. Our children are sometimes quite different with other children, outside the family, from the way they are inside the family, so I’ve appreciated those glimpses into that—which I’m not as likely to get when they have friends over and are off playing in another room. I wouldn’t want to sit nearby and listen to their conversation in that-kind of situation, because I certainly value their privacy, but I feel like in the car they know I’m there even if they’re not paying much attention to me.
Another advantage to being the driver is that because I get to see the children just as they come out of the activity—ballet or violin lessons, for example —I get a good sense of how it went that day, just by seeing how they are when they’re fresh from the activity. It can give me a more immediate sense of how they’re responding to the lesson; what kind of mood it leaves them in, than I might get if I waited to ask about it later. So for that reason, too, I really don’t mind being the one to pick the children up at these outside activities, and I’ve even come to appreciate being able to do it.
