Last week, I think it was, I was at a dinner, and I sat next to someone who is both a mother and a schoolteacher.  She said several things of great interest to me, one in particular.  She said that many parents, her included, have extreme difficulty teaching their own children.  Not being a parent, I can’t intuit all the nuances of that, but maybe I understand.  Maybe.

If you think that the job of a teacher is to push, to judge, to bestow or withhold approval according to what’s been done or done badly or not done, and in a rather emotionally detached and perhaps even cold and hostile and confrontational manner, then you might very well feel that all of that would conflict with being a parent, especially with being a mother.  Well, if that’s what you think being a teacher should mean, and if that’s what you think your children must have done to them, then it does indeed make sense to outsource it.  “Stretching” children is one thing, and loving and nurturing them is something quite else.

Another big difference between being a teacher and being a parent is that parents cannot simply give up with their children, whereas most teachers, ultimately if not immediately and on a whim, can.  So, a disaster in the teacher/pupil relationship, though disastrous, is not nearly so disastrous as a disaster between a parent and a child.  The kind of teaching I have described in the previous paragraph does have quite a bit of potential disaster built into it.  Or, which may well be sufficient as far as the feelings of the parent are concerned, it might well feel as if it has.  Therefore, it may be something that a parent is reluctant to do.

However, as far as working out what she meant by what she said, the above two paragraphs have been guesswork.  Maybe she had something else in mind.  She only said what she said, that many parents, her included, have extreme difficulty teaching their own children.  Alas, we did not pursue it.

That teaching is something many parents can’t do, or really don’t want to do, is something that someone like me who now aspires to be a “teacher” might have a vested interest in believing.  “Teachers” want to believe that they can supply something essential to the development of children that parents, almost by their nature, cannot.

This may certainly be true of teaching something highly technical or expert, that most parents may not know.  But the barrier there is knowledge, rather than anything deeply or complicatedly emotional.  If your mother knows French or Physics, surely she can teach you that.  Can’t she?

Blog postings do not have to reach any solid conclusions.  I just wanted to record that proposition, and fix it in my mind as something to think about.

Home-educating parents have surely encountered this proposition many times, and responded to it many times.

UPDATE:  Carlotta’s posting today, which I have only just clocked, and which is a response to this, throws light on the above dilemma:

Actually, I only became acutely aware of the constantly high degree of sense of responsibility and need for involvement in the education of one’s children recently when for the first time in six years that I spent a couple of days without either of my kids and I found that the pressure that I assumed was a normal part of life simply lifted. Yep, it was a nice holiday, but the thing is, isn’t this level of responsibility really what parenting is meant to be about?

That pressure might be something that many parents just don’t want.  And, unlike Carlotta, they might feel that such pressure might make them into worse parents, so is best lessened.  Both attitudes make perfect sense to me!