Pulling Teeth - Homeschool Dads Meetings

Barbara’s comment on this post led me to write a new post rather than reply in a long comment there.

Yes, the dads in our homeschool group get together for meetings. Yes, this is incredibly rare, from what I hear about homeschool groups and dads. Yes, it has been a very long road to get to this point, and it’s still in the development stages.

Our local homeschool support group has been together for a number of years and is about 12 families, give or take. Activity has ebbed and flowed over the years based on who felt the need to organize what. There has been a monthly “Moms Meeting” for almost seven years, but it varies between a defined conversation topic, a Q&A session and a chat-and-dessert night.

I think the issue for dads is that the moms see each other far more regularly than the dads do, because they get together for field trips, swimming lessons, play dates, all that sort of thing. The dads are usually working when all this happens. It used to be that the dads saw each other at the annual picnic, and one summer for weekly soccer lessons and that was it.

At those events, the dads have talked about “Oh, we should get together more often…” for years. Finally, last spring, a few of us decided to just set a date and see what happened. We’ve gone monthly since then, and they’ve been a great time.

Our meetings start late, around 8 or 8:15 because I work on Pacific Coast time so I don’t get off until 7pm. I have time to say “Hi!” to the kids and MrsPages and then head off to the meeting. We begin by just chatting for 10 or 15 minutes, the usual “So, what renovations have you done on your house lately, how’s work going?” kind of guy-talk. After that there is one dad designated to give a 5-or-so minute summary of how homeschooling works in his house. There are so many different methods and styles and curriculums and it’s a great thing to hear how the moms and dads work together in different ways. These short talks and the questions afterwards have been the most valuable part of our meetings.

Next is a short talk by someone (usually the person who did the “How We Homeschool” talk) (”usually” being defined as “It has been this way in the 3 times we’ve met so far”) on some topic that interests the speaker. Topics so far have been “The differences between schooling boys and girls”, “The Five Love Languages of Children” and “Informal Homeschooling”. The talks aren’t major productions, just a brief overview of a topic. They’ve mostly been based on a book that the presenter is reading or has read.

After this, we chat for a while about anything and then we pray together and then go home. It’s been a specific goal of ours to keep meetings short and end exactly when we said we would. Our hard deadline for ending is 10pm. We always set the next meeting date and speaker before we leave.

Because of the ages of the children in our group, most of the open conversations have tended towards dealing with becoming-teens. We as dads are seeing our children reach this stage and are trying to make the required changes to meet their and our needs. Talking it over with other dads is incredibly helpful. Everyone has come with a great idea that no one else has thought of, and everyone goes away with at least one new thing to try.

It has been great to come to the meeting with something on my mind and find out that others are struggling with the same thing, or that someone else was struggling and then resolved the issue and can discuss methods for doing so.

Now, to put all of this in perspective: The homeschool group has been together for seven years. In this time we have had three dads meetings, all in the last four months. We skipped last month because no one could come. We normally have 4 dads show up, out of 12 or so families. I hope you get the picture that this isn’t a model of superhuman dadliness, it’s just a few guys wanting to talk about stuff enough to get over the stigma of “man meetings”.

These three meetings have been powerful enough that I strongly suggest that if you are a man, you should find a few other men and meet together to talk about manly things. Godly manly things. It’s hard, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s totally worth it.