This afternoon, my husband and I took our kids to see Kung Fu Panda 2. I won’t give anything away, in case you haven’t seen it yet, but I did want to share a very important truth that was brought out during the course of the story—parents make sacrifices for their children. We sacrifice our health when we bring them into the world, we sacrifice time and money to raise them properly, and we sacrifice huge amounts of our sanity every step of the way. In the end, we are rewarded for those sacrifices beyond anything we might have given up.
All parents make these sacrifices, but as this is the homeschooling section of Families.com, I’d like to talk specifically about homeschooling parents. We sacrifice huge chunks of our day to teach our children the things they’ll need to know to get by in life, and sometimes we sacrifice sleep if we need to prepare lessons or projects for the next day. On occasion, we have to defend our choices to friends or family, and we make sacrifices of our reputations. There are definitely things we give up because of this choice we’ve made.
There are days when it’s hard to make these sacrifices. I’m the type of person who needs a certain amount of alone time, and when I don’t get it, I’m cranky. When the kids are working on projects that take a lot of supervision and I’m not able to sneak into my bedroom for Mommy time-outs, it’s hard on me. When it seems that I’m bouncing from kid to kid and don’t have a minute to eat my lunch or go to the bathroom, it’s very hard on me. Yet when I come to the end of the day and I see what we accomplished, how the kids have met their goals or completed their projects or understood concepts they never grasped before, all the sacrifices pale in comparison.
Yes, parents make sacrifices. We love our kids, we want what’s best for them, and in the end, we as parents are the ones who are the most richly blessed.
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