Growing Pains: Childhood Phases

Every time I enter a new phase of motherhood I find a new heart-wrenching choice to make. And, no matter how important and possibly life-altering the decision seems to be, I always look back and think, “What in the world was I sweating over THAT for?” First it’s medicated or natural delivery. Then it’s sleeping-in at the hospital or sending the baby to the nursery. Then it’s breastfeeding or bottle feeding or some of each. Pacifier or no pacifier. Cloth diapers or disposables. Beech-Nut baby food or make your own. And at what age should I start potty training my little angel???

Before you know it, it’s time for little Johnny to go to preschool. Suddenly, trying to decide if you should decorate the nursery with airplanes or soccer balls seems so trivial. I mean, what school will be the starting point for my baby’s no-doubt-bound-for-Harvard future? Exactly which institution will have the right teaching philosophy, teacher-to-student ratio, ethnically diverse population, and discipline style to fit our family? And, when it comes to a quality educational experience, can you put a dollar value on that?

I began this mental flip-flop right along with the best of them. I sent my first-born off to a preschool that my husband and I had researched, toured, and put our name on a waiting list. We were willing to keep our daughter out of preschool altogether if her name did not make it to the top of that list, but such a fate was not to be. She went off to preschool on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 2 hours a day to begin her educational journey. And do you want to know what happened? Well, nothing too remarkable, really. She made a macaroni necklace. She brought a flower for show-and-tell. She learned how to sing “Little Bunny Foo Foo”. I learned that maybe, just possibly, I had some expectations for the school and for my daughter that may have been a wee bit too high.

Kindergarten came and we agonized over where to send her for the next phase of her academic development. We decided on a parochial day school with small class size. And she… did fine. She didn’t jump ahead a grade level and she didn’t fall behind her peers. She did just fine, and continued to do fine for the next 3 years. Then, we moved. When we chose our new house, we looked at schools and actually bought a house because of where we expected our kids to be attending school the following year. We toured the school and considered ourselves experts at navigating the school waters, now that we had two in school and a third was to start kindergarten that fall. We listened to the principal and read reviews online. Our decision was made.

And now, one year later, we’ve pulled out our kids and put them in the public school. There wasn’t anything horribly awful about that school, and our kids certainly didn’t suffer, but we got to the point that we realized we had pretty high expectations for the school and those expectations just weren’t being met. Plus we were spending quite a bit of money for tuition. And, while a good education should be worth every penny, exactly what price do you put on a mediocre education?

We considered all our options: I could go back to work and earn enough to send our kids to another, more expensive private school. We could pull all the kids out of school altogether and I could homeschool them. We could leave them in the school they were at and continue to pay tuition, but lower our standards and expectations. Or we could try the public school. We don’t have anything against public school, but we had no experience with public school so we had no idea what to expect. And, being a very religious family, we were cautious about releasing our children from the protective parochial bubble they’d been inside until now, carefully protected and sheltered. None of the options seemed good. Some seemed more plausible than others. But, which ever solution we chose didn’t really seem to solve anything. Our kids were going to be at a disadvantage one way or another. But, the end result of our most recent mental wrestling match has been a lot of growing pains, both for us and for our kids. We’ve learned how to deal with disappointment. We’ve made a conscious choice to lean on each other and support one another. And we’ve looked back on things like, “Remember when we fretted about weaning the baby from the bottle? That seems so silly now.” My mom always said, “When they’re little, they have little problems. When they get big, they have big problems.” Which scares me to think about the growing pains I have to look forward to.

Gretchen, a.k.a. Texan Mama, tends to her 4 Peanuts and her husband, while juggling the growing pains of daily life.