Millions of Moms Choose to Teach Their Own

If you are a mother with a cause celebre or axe to grind, you will garner much attention in the post-feminist age.

From Jane Swift’s multiple pregnancy to the adoption craze among Hollywood’s single moms to the drowning of five little children by the post-partum depressed Andrea Yates, motherhood seems to have become one long sideshow of misfits and curiosities. Normal mamas need not apply.

As commentator Wendy McElroy notes, “Today, politically correct feminism creates a stereotype that denigrates a housewife or, more accurately, portrays her as a paradigm of how men politically oppress women.”

Confound the stereotypes and the politically correct.

Melanie Krumrey does her homework to teach her three young children in Amherst.

Karla Moore homeschools her two girls and a boy. She is a psychologist.

Carolyn Abbott teacher her 15-year-old son, Nicholas, at their home in Westminster.

By Izzy Lyman
August 2001

Millions of American Mrs. still choose to stay home with their children and make a very good life of it, thank you very much. A number of these women, driven largely by the collapse of public education, have reinvented themselves as home schoolers. Since the number of home schooled children is estimated by researchers to be between one to two million, well, that sounds like a significant group of moms are teaching their own.

Far from the limelight, and sans an angry, men-are-jerks agenda, women who decide to school their offspring quickly realize there is more at stake than helping a child write cursive, learn multiplication tables, and recite the capitals of the fifty states. They have to be able to answer the following questions affirmatively:

“Am I willing to cheerfully bypass a promising career to remain at home with school-aged children? Am I willing to be the art teacher, physical education instructor, dean of students, cafeteria worker, and custodian? Am I willing to track down the people or the resources necessary if I can’t be ‘Jill of all subjects’? Am I willing to seek out friends for my children? Am I willing to answer queries about how my children are faring socially?”

For some families, especially those with a large brood of youngsters, the home schooling lifestyle could challenge the organizational skills of a domestic guru like Martha Stewart. In reality, these moms are down-to-earth types, not divas.

They are likely to be your neighbor, attend your house of worship, volunteer in your community, and frequent your favorite supermarket. They may be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, liberal, conservative, black, white, Asian, or Hispanic. They may live in the Arizona suburbs, on a farm in Kansas, in a condominium in Florida or in a beach house in Massachusetts. But their pleasant, middle-class veneer masks a crowning achievement: These mothers are conceivably the country’s most effective education reformers.

Moms who become parent-educators, on occasion, turn out wunderkinds – young people who graduate from Harvard or the U.S. Naval Academy, become Eagle Scouts, appear on national television, get drafted into the National Football League, win a Grammy or a National Spelling Bee, build churches in Mexican villages or outscore their public school counterparts on college entrance exams like the ACT. But while most of these self-taught schoolmarms have learned to purchase curriculum as expertly as any professional administrator and still make time to bake cookies, this is what they love about managing a home school: the opportunity to spend an ample quantity of quality time with their children.

Who Are These Mothers?

Melanie Krumrey, who taught special education and first grade in Austin, Texas, now home schools her three children, ages six and under, in Amherst, MA. Married to Robert Krumrey, a Southern Baptist minister, Melanie enjoys having a role in her husband’s ministry and caring for her two sons and baby daughter. “I thrive as I see a warm (home) atmosphere being created for my family,” she says.

Debbie Shumway also leads a busy existence in Amherst. She lends a hand in her husband Alan’s roofing business, is in her twenty-sixth year of teaching dance and recently began home schooling her teenagers – two sons and a daughter. “I feel that I am contributing to my kids’ well-being, as well as to their education,” notes Debbie. “The kids are nicer, calmer, and closer to one another than when they were in the school environment.” She adds, “They have always needed individualized attention with their curriculum; home schooling was the perfect answer to their academic needs.”

Karla Moore, who has a masters degree in psychology, instructs her two daughters and son in Guthrie, Oklahoma. She is a longtime home schooler who says, “I have gained the joy of seeing my children grow and mature, as well as shared the joy of learning with them.”

Carolyn Abbott is a high-tech training consultant and the editor of americasvoices.org. She lives in Westminster, MA, and is married to Bruce Seibert, an aerial photographer and pilot. Her son, Nicholas Seibert, 15, was home schooled during the seventh and ninth grades (he skipped eighth grade). “As a home schooling parent, you know you love your child more than any teacher could and are more concerned about their meeting the educational goals you have set, and that they are learning the truth, not government-controlled propaganda,” explains Carolyn.

Pam Kelly of Concord, California is another happy camper. Along with Ward Connerly, Pam crusaded to pass California’s Proposition 209, the anti-quota ballot measure. Yet her activism is hardly a day job. She is married to financial controller, Paul Kelly, and in 1994, she began to teach the couple’s three children, two girls and a boy. She worked as an independent computer/systems analyst for eighteen years and notes, “No job has challenged me as much as being at home and home schooling my children. I am a fulfilled woman – challenged as much to my ‘gender’ max as any triathlon competitor.”

She also appreciates the attitude her children have developed toward their studies. “They don’t see schooling as a task to be accomplished but rather as an ongoing process. They are set on the path of finding something new each day to learn.”

Are They Different?

So, one wonders: Is a woman who commits herself so wholeheartedly to her family a throwback to a less enlightened era? Or, are these trailblazers who defy categorization? Engage them in a debate about radical feminism – a movement whose leaders famously champion Take Our Daughters To Work Day – and the opinions that emerge are spirited.

Pam, for example, believes she is “the epitome of what feminists say they are for and what they believe in.” Yet sisterhood in the National Organization of Women isn’t for her. “I think ‘dictator,’ ‘hostile,’ ‘anti-male,’ and ‘anti-female,’ when I hear the word feminist,” allows Pam.

Carolyn considered herself a feminist until she got married and had a child. “If you’ve raised a boy, you know he’s different from a girl from the get-go,” she says. “Most women who identify themselves as feminists seem to me to be whiners and complainers looking to the Nanny State or Big Brother to take care of them, and to give them what they haven’t earned on their own.”

While her husband, Dr. Lloyd Moore, works grueling hours as an emergency room physician, Karla spends equally long hours schooling her children and driving them to church, a home school learning cooperative, and other activities. She thinks the stigma attached to being a stay-at-home mom is harmful. “The attitude gives women the feeling that if they are not working outside of the home, they are not doing something fulfilling. It also puts extra stress on the family unit and leads to the breakdown of the family,” says Karla.

Debbie pragmatically observes, “I think if women are capable of doing a man’s job, they should. I worked with my husband doing roofing because I could. Not every woman is cut out to be a wife and mother.” She sounds more traditional, however, when she acknowledges that she enjoys being at home and not “totally career-oriented.”

No doubt, starry-eyed women’s studies majors, like those found at Wellesley or Smith College – who want their gender-mates to wield power in the boardrooms, not nurse babies or chauffer teenagers – will be dismissive of these ladies’ opinions. But so be it. “The gender feminists claim that women are somehow morally superior to men. They are guilty of perpetrating feminist studies in a totalitarian manner on college campuses,” notes Carolyn.

Paradoxically, it is these women’s other-centered lifestyle that is facilitating opportunities for their daughters to acquire social graces, scholastic know-how, and confidence - that elusive quality which many contemporary young ladies lack. Jennifer Moore, 15, competes on award-winning academic teams and studies ballet. Fiona Kelly, 17, has served as a Mandarin Chinese tutor and has recently joined the U.S. Army, and her sister, Caitlin, 14, takes pre-calculus classes at a local college. Stephanie Shumway, 13, plays softball, skis on snow and water, and belongs to a local dance company.

It Takes Adjustments

The ladies who form the vanguard of a new women’s movement, however, aren’t cruising through their tasks without adjustments. Consider the financial issue. Dr. Lawrence Rudner’s study of nearly 21,000 home schooled students entitled Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, revealed that the median income of the families surveyed was $52,000 in 1997, while a 1990 survey of Maine home schoolers by the David C. Cook Publishing Company reported that 70 per cent of respondents had an annual pre-tax income of $35,000.

Making ends meet on a budget is a reality for most home schooling parents who also have to pay confiscatory taxes and who live out their choice without the public stroking that high-profile, working mothers often receive. As Melanie notes, “Home schooling and being at home requires self-denial and self-discipline. Society pressures us to have a desire for prestige and says staying at home is a lesser role.”

“When my girlfriends go for a treat, like getting a pedicure, I often need to use that money instead for books,” says Pam. “And the furnishings in my home are not new, modern, or impressive.” Pam also confesses to feeling frustrated when her working friends discuss the money they have saved in their 401(k) retirement fund.

Adds Carolyn, “What is hard about home schooling is wondering if what you’re doing is adequate, along with sustaining the discipline required by both parent and child to accomplish everything that needs to be done.”

Their sacrifices, fortunately, have resulted in close-knit families whose homes aren’t treated as a Motel 6 pitstop. Christine Field, a former criminal prosecutor turned home schooling and adoptive mom, writes in Home School Digest, “My house unapologetically reflects the fact that children are in residence. From the toys on the lawn to the projects scattered around the house, a visitor can readily see that this is a place of creativity and learning.”

Such is the attitude of women who have chosen to not contract out the child rearing and have made their sons and daughters a top priority. “We can always have a career, but we only have our children for a short time,” as Karla sums up the prevailing sentiment.

Thankfully, a generation of children are not growing up as latch-key kids, largely raising themselves by clicking on a remote control, or being shuttled off to a day-care center, at the mercy of kind strangers. It is likely that the population of home schoolers will increase if the current public school system continues to be viewed by a growing number of Americans as an irrelevant, unsafe, and immoral institution that hurts children.

As Martin Luther King III observed at a home education conference in Danvers: “The kind of things home schoolers are doing may be the saving grace of our nation.”

A native of Costa Rica, Isabel Lyman, Ph.D., lives in Amherst where she home schooled her two sons and ran a private school. She has long been a home school advocate and has written a book, The Homeschooling Revolution, and columns on home schooling in the Boston Herald, Investors Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal and National Review.