What We Owe Our Kids
You ease your own burden by easing the burden of others
I am a parent to a special needs child. To say that it is hard is an understatement. Not everyone is cut out to be a parent. This is even more true when it comes to parenting a child on the autism spectrum. The particular form in which it presents itself for my stepdaughter has an oppositional profile. She is high functioning, meaning she does not have some of the accompanying struggles some others carry such as being nonverbal or having daunting physical handicaps. She is one of those kids people would look at and say, “She does not look autistic.”
Due to how her autism presents itself, it poses special challenges to her education, both for those seeking to educate her as well as for her ability to be educated. The pathological drive to avoid demands of any sort makes this nearly impossible. As a result, she does not do well in school and teachers tend not to want to or are unable to put in the extra effort required to make school work for her.
The sad thing is that the child I am a parent to is not an outlier. She is not an oddity. In fact, the more we learn, the more kids we discover who are impacted by some form of autism. The proof is in the numbers. In 2000, 1 in 150 children were diagnosed with some form of ASD. As of 2021, that number is 1 in 44. If the trend continues, we will be looking at 1 in 10 in the not too distant future.
Understandably, one teacher cannot spend an inordinate amount of time with one student, thereby ignoring all of the others. But with teachers leaving the field in unheard-of numbers over the past couple of years, this means further challenges for children such as my stepdaughter when it comes to their education. Fewer teachers mean even less ability for them to give special attention to the kids in their care. This impacts every single child, not just the ones who need a little more help. If a child has a simple question, they may not be able to get the answer they need because, with fewer teachers, this means larger class sizes, putting every kid in a situation where they might not be able to get the help they need at any given time, potentially leaving more and more kids behind.
While this is going on, we have parents treating teachers and school board members like dirt for their concern about the children’s health and safety while they are at school. Laws are being passed intended to restrict what and how teachers can teach kids about matters of extreme cultural and practical significance (think the recent “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida or the myriad bills nationwide intended to ban discussion of Critical Race Theory). People are proposing live stream cameras in classrooms and more armed resource officers to prevent kids from acting up. What is fascinating, though, is that they are not proposing raising teacher pay or hiring more teachers. Instead, they want to entrust the education of their children to someone else and then control the curriculum and environment in which their kids are instructed.
This is exactly why we are in this mess currently. Parents had nearly two full school years to teach their kids and be in full control of their education and yet, the entire time, they just demanded that schools reopen so they would not have to deal with it anymore. I think a lot of parents realized that teaching is hard as hell, and if you are not cut from that cloth, you are simply not capable of doing it, or at the very least unable to do it well.
Sadly, the demand to reopen the schools was never about the kids.
This is not how things should be.
We owe our children a quality education. In a culture that demands twenty-four-hour productivity, this means that homeschooling is not always an option for every parent. With wages remaining largely stagnant, until recently, while the cost of living increases, this means more two-income homes are necessary to function. Therefore, this means more burden for the education of our children is placed on our public and private schools.
If we want our kids to have a good education, we only have two viable options. The first is that we do it ourselves. Homeschool. Sign them up for, if your state offers it, online public school. Regardless, keep the kids at home and be in complete charge of how the information is presented to them. This is going to require a parent to stay home, though, by either leaving the workforce or finding a job that allows them to work from home. For many, this is not plausible. Maybe they are not cut out to be a teacher or the change of career for one of the parents is simply not financially sustainable. Not everyone can survive in a single-income household for long, if at all. Besides that, and more importantly, are the children. Simply changing the environment does not automatically mean they will learn better. Plus, if your child has some kind of disability, you may not be able to split your focus between education and therapy or caregiving. Chances are, without that added help of an aide, which schools are by law supposed to provide, education will take the back seat to working with your child to enable them to tolerate the work or even be physically and cognitively able to do it in the first place.
The second option is to send the kids to school, whether public or private. For starters, this means putting someone else in charge of their education. In doing so, that means you relinquish some of your control over how the education is conducted.
Secondly, it means you make moves to relieve the pressure on these teachers to make it easier for them to teach. We do that in a number of ways. Fund the schools. Not just hire more armed guards and buy metal detectors. You focus on the education of the children. You hire teachers. You pay the teachers well. You supply their classrooms. You keep the curriculum relevant and up to date. You advocate on behalf of children with special needs to convince schools to hire more teachers who specialize in those needs.
Relieve the burden on teachers, and ultimately you relieve the burden on everyone else. If teachers can teach without needing to navigate through an endless maze of restrictions on what and how they can teach, there ends up being less you have to teach at home. It means at home you can focus on helping your children with the life skills they need to function in society. It frees you to be able to, as the Bible says, “Train up your children in the way they should go.”
In the last couple of years, we have seen way too much of the opposite. We have burdened our teachers to the point where they just quit. We have done the same to everyone who has been trying their damndest to help us all along the way. Our selfishness has gotten the better of us.
It is time to drop the facade and put our children first.
