-
Oldest Vs Youngest in Homeschooled Families
There are some things in the homeschool world that seem to be the opposite in the rest of the world.
I think I may have mentioned before, but the naive oldest homeschool child cluelessness phenomenon. I feel like it’s usually the oldest public schooled kid telling the younger sibling about stuff. Not with us. Pretty sure my younger siblings learned lots of stuff at a much younger age, possibly even before me (okay, maybe that is a stretch, the youngest is 12 years younger). Granted a few of them went to public highschool, but even the ones who didn’t. I think my parents started out stricter and then loosened up over the years, but I feel like its more than that.
And then there is what we oldest children of many have called youngest child privilege. I know people at large mention the favored oldest child status (ha!). I think also that when there aren’t many kids in the family maybe the youngest don’t get as spoiled, but when there are, wow! And it’s not just our family we’ve noticed it in, we’ve seen it in other larger families as well. Any other homeschoolers notice this?
I’m sure middle children everywhere bemoan their “forgotten” status and the oldest and youngest roll their eyes. Especially if as is the case, the strictness either decreased or increased, so the bookends perspectives would be, “oh, how sad you didn’t get in trouble as much and got away with more.”
-
Oh So Sheltered . . . and Clueless
I was watching Blimey Cow (first clue of being home-schooled which is the first clue of being sheltered). I watched their two sheltered videos and took the quiz in this video.
I gave myself a 22.5. But I think the quiz is a sheltered person’s sheltered quiz, meaning that it really should be higher, lol. Other things to add might be the news (we were never allowed to watch, didn’t watch into adulthood, tried, couldn’t sustain it) or electronic devices as a category (my first of my own was a flip-phone at 19, and we had no gaming devices besides the computer until the Wii a while back). Because there were six of us split into two categories, the older ones tended to be more sheltered (one of my sisters took the text, and she was a category down, not unexpectedly) and stay sheltered/ignorant?/naive? for longer.
Also, mixed together for me (when I was younger, I’m not so clueless now). Some people are sheltered, but they can start to put the information together pretty quickly (all of my younger siblings). Other people aren’t sheltered, but they don’t connect all the dots on certain subjects. And there is obviously a variety of mixes of “sheltered” and “clueless.”
Of course in the Internet age, all that “innocence” is VERY fleeting; trust me, I wish I could have some of it back, I don’t want to understand dirty and words and innuendos jokes so quickly.
Let me give you a rather (in my opinion) hilarious example. The Bible doesn’t fit most of a sheltered person’s parental advisory standards (violence, sexual themes, etc.). I did understand the concept of rape and sex (mainly from the Bible) as a preteen, and those stories that spelled things out, I obviously understood after the age of knowledge, but it wasn’t until near adulthood that I understood some of the stories (although I might have if more obviously different and specific words, like say, “harem” or “concubine” had been used in this particular story).
I thought Esther and co. were being interviewed by the King (Veggie Tales and other childhood versions gave a me a solid background understanding that I didn’t think to question after the age of knowledge); I didn’t understand “women’s quarters” meant “harem” which might, although possibly not, have led me to understand what the “interview” actually was! Let’s be real, that story is pretty horrid; that also, probably assisted in keeping the veil over my eyes, I wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing being possible.
