It takes a village to raise a child...

When I first told a friend a long while back that we were home educating his response was to remind me of the famous African saying "It takes a village to raise a child". For some reason that popped back into my conscious brain again over the last few days. I remember when we first considered home ed a few years back now we initially dismissed the idea; afraid of an unhealthy, claustrophobic, inward-looking family where we all spent too much time together, too much time exclusively in one another's company and grew both bored and heartily sick of each other as a consequence. It was only after fruitlessly searching for a school that we felt confident our kids would be happy in that we returned to the idea. Having decided to give it a go, we have never looked back. It does take a village to raise a child and for us that village is composed of : family, neighbours, friends from the local community, friends from the home ed. network, friends from further afield who we see less often but stay over with, the staff in the shops we frequent, and so on and so forth. It is rare that we spend a day without some sort of social activity going on and to be honest it is nice to have those odd days on our own too. As parents our support network is bolstered by the online home ed. community. Quite a thing for a Luddite like me to realise! These are people I will probably never meet face to face but they are a wonderful source of support in so many ways: practical and emotional. Looking more deeply we are also supported by the authors and suppliers of the curricula we study. Many of them offer online support through Yahoo groups or online forums where they will personally respond to queries and comments from users. Often these people are home educators themselves so included in our support network are all the people who supported them in their experience home educating. This could get ludicrous so I'll stop but...there we go. I truly feel that my kids have a massive and constantly evolving support network behind them. It's a pretty good village!