Character counts in homeschooling, and counts more than most other subjects you will teach your children. Character brings results in vital areas of life that remain untouched by the usual courses of study.
Reading is often rated the most important part of the curriculum. It is true that reading skills will help your son or daughter study every other subject, but character will help them choose positive rather than negative reading material. Character will help young children choose and enjoy books like Christopher Cat’s Character Club rather than one of the unwholesome books that flood today’s market. It will make them want the benefits – the happiness – of always doing what’s right.
Mathematics is another example. Mathematics will help your children add and subtract accurately when shopping at the mall, but character can save you money when they go shopping! As you help them build strong responsibility into their lives, you will help them learn financial responsibility. You will help them understand and embrace thriftiness, contentment, and resourcefulness. These qualities and more are life-changing, and will help save money regularly and consistently.
Character counts in homeschooling your sons and daughters in history courses. While knowledge of history can help your children understand how and why people in society do as they do, character can help them actually do as they should do. Character changes history from a spectator sport to one of full participation. Build into your children love for others. Build compassion for others, appreciation, gentleness, and kindness. These traits supersede history’s ability to make their lives better.
Then there’s science. A grasp of science will help your children understand the world, but character can give them greater safety and health in that world. Attentiveness, determination, and diligence in caring for their bodies will improve health. Patience, peacefulness, and self-control can increase safety. Character counts among its benefits health and safety for your children and you.
Language Arts will help your children communicate more clearly with others, but character will enable them to communicate and receive what we want so badly for them – love. As you teach them to exercise honesty, compassion, and kindness in every communication, you are giving them the key to true love. As you help them develop strong convictions, and exercise the courage of those convictions, standing up for what is right, you make them a person who is more worthy of love.
Character counts in homeschooling your young people in sex education, too. Anyone can teach them about the birds and the bees – including people in the park or on the Internet! But character helps them understand that sex must be linked to the character trait of love. When you build character in your teenager, you take sex education and dress it in the health and safety of discernment, prudence, temperance, and contentment. You can give your daughter a deep desire for sexual responsibility by giving her the best-selling teen novel, Date with Responsibility. Take the homeschooling a step further with the books’ professionally-written lesson plans.
Character counts in homeschooling, and the parent who gives it priority will reap great benefits.
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