Woman Calls Out Her Sister For Failing At Homeschooling Her Kids, Family Drama Ensues

While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with homeschooling, it still has to be done right. After all, your children’s futures are at stake here. Unfortunately, not every parent is an education expert. And being a good mom doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a good teacher. That’s what we learned from redditor Willing_Occasion501.

The redditor shared how her sister ‘homeschools’ (or rather unschools) her kids which basically means that they’re left to do pretty much whatever they want, at their own pace. Actual learning? Not so much. And it’s a scary thing because the aunt is worried that two of her sister’s three children might not even be literate at 10 and 7 years old.

When the redditor’s sister suggested that she homeschool her own son in a similar way, she finally snapped and let her know what she really thinks of the way her two nieces and nephew are being raised. Like you could have expected, it caused a whole of drama and now the entire family seems set against the redditor who was only being honest. Have a read through her full story below and let us know who you personally think is in the right here, dear Pandas.

The redditor pointed out that her sister had undiagnosed ADHD until college, so going to school was a thoroughly miserable experience for her. She didn’t want her own kids to have the same negative experiences, so she decided to homeschool them.

However, her homeschooling amounts to her kids going to dance class, playing soccer, watching TV, playing computer games, and doing pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want.

Even though I’m a big fan of freedom and flexibility myself, I also know that you can’t get anything worthwhile done without at least some order and discipline. These kids might be happy, but they’re lagging behind in important areas which are bound to compound as the years go by.

At the end of the day, you’ll have three individuals who are completely unprepared for life in the real world. Unless they spend the rest of their lives living with their parents, they’re likely to have an incredibly hard time finding jobs, adapting to strict work conditions and deadlines, and working with other people who were schooled more traditionally.

As far as the redditor knows, her sister’s kids don’t actually do any of the chores at home, either. What’s more, her sister put a stop to her quizzing her kids when she wanted to test how well they know math.

To be completely fair, school as we know it is a fairly new concept. Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow which promoted childhood independence, explained to me in a previous interview that learning used to be done in a very different way for much of history.

“In the United States, for instance, school only became compulsory a little over 100 years ago. Previously—for hundreds of thousands of years of human history—kids learned simply by watching, copying, helping, and playing. In other words, they’d hang around the adults, see how they made things like baskets and arrowheads, they’d ask questions, noodle around, and try to copy what their elders were doing,” Lenore told Bored Panda.

“They’d also help out as soon as they could—fetching things, tracking animals, whatever—and in between they’d be playing with a group of mixed-age kids. All these activities were fueled by curiosity,” she said.

“You were motivated to learn what the bigger kids in your group knew, too, because they were so cool. Your entire day consisted of observing and practicing the stuff you needed to know— skills and games. If you weren’t curious, you weren’t going to enjoy life, or succeed at it.”