You’re doing it backwards!

Dear stay-at-home parents who send their kids to school,

You’re doing it backwards!

If you think about it, by the time your kid is ready for school, you’ve done a lot of the hardest, most tiring work of parenting. Your four or five year old is walking, talking, and has pretty good hand-eye coordination. They’re pooping in the toilet, sleeping through the night, and maybe getting their own snacks. Just when your work as a parent is starting to pay off, your kid goes away to school where some other adult gets to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Nuh-uh!

Kids start kindergarten just as they’re beginning to be more fun to hang out with. If anything, we should outsource our parental duties when they’re little babies, and start keeping them home when they’re school aged. That would be way easier! 😉

Jk, babies are so cute and everything……..

If you’re like me, and you have multiple kids, fairly close in age (4 kids in 6 years for me), it seems like it could be easier to send the older ones to school so you can concentrate on the little ones who need more intense looking-after. But to me, that felt like it would just be adding more demands on my time with the hectic morning routine, homework after school, classroom volunteering, and all that. I felt better letting my days play out naturally, not trying to meet too many commitments while I was caring for a bunch of littles.

Now that my youngest kid is five, I feel like I’ve hit a whole new zone with my family life. My days are often so nice now that the difficulties of baby and toddlerhood are a thing of the past. This life-stage is what I’ve been looking forward to, and it’s truly wonderful. Me and the kids can decide every day what we want to do based on how we’re feeling, how the weather is, and what needs to be done to keep the household running. It’s great! I highly recommend it.

I foresee the future being even more fun and interesting as the older ones enter their teens and become young adults with a lot of independence and the freedom to pursue anything that strikes their fancy. Sounds good to me!