What's More Important?

For the past couple of weeks, I've noticed that my children seem to think that fighting for a toy, a book, or a certain place to sit is more important than...anything. It's been constant work, every day, to drill into them that they love each other and don't need to act that way. Just today, I told them that relationships are much more important that anything you are fussing about at the moment. The books will be ruined, you will out-grow the toys, the snacks will all be gone, but your relationship as a family will last a lifetime...make that work. The same for friendship. You can choose to hurt your friends with words you can't take back, or to take care of their hearts by how you lift them up. What is more important...how you feel right now in the moment, or how you are going to feel when it's over?

We now start our homeschool mornings talking about our self goals for the day, our guidelines to go by when interacting with someone, and how we want others to feel. Homeschooling with multiple children can be very difficult but can work well when dealing with issues like this. I can purposely make lessons for us all to do together where we can practice manners, taking turns, complimenting each other after answers, helping with the concepts, not bragging, and being patient. Those days, these skills are more important to me than the curricular lessons we may be learning.

I love homeschooling for this reason. I am able to teach my children more than just academics, throughout each thing we do during the day. It is a lot of work...but worth it! I'm learning to slow down to teach these things and not just think that they will learn it along the way. There will be other days for graphing and reading comprehension. One day, they will learn these valuable lessons. One day, they will understand how it feels to make choices in everything that betters someone else. One day, they will know what's more important.

*Mar 2019