Schools shouldn’t be treated as these magical places where you’re put in at some age and over a decade later you emerge a complete human being. You have parents and you spend more time at home than at school for a reason: you’re supposed to learn from your parents.
A school can potentially give you a degree of financial literacy instruction. Your parents should be the ones paying your allowance money and driving you to the bank to get your first checking account. A school can teach you how to cook something. Your parents should be the ones eating your food and helping you cook it better. A school can show you some level of DIY. Your parents should directly benefit from teaching you how to fix the sink when it gets clogged. A school can tell you what kinds of careers exist. Your parents should love you enough to tell you that either your career ambitions or your financial expectations need to change. A school can tell you how to build a resume. Your parents should be the ones driving you to your job interview and to your job until you buy your first car. A school can give you a failing grade when you do poorly on a test. Your parents should be able to make you face the real, in-the-moment consequences of doing something wrong.
Expecting a school, public or private, to teach you everything you need to know is a grave mistake. You need people in your corner who are taking an active part in raising you all the way to adulthood and beyond. If you have kids yourself, that goes for them as well. If you aren’t there for your children, to teach them the things that schools don’t teach because they can’t mass produce the lessons to nearly the same quality that you can give them, they’ll blame you and the school for having failed them. And they’d be right to lay the blame at your feet.
My kids definitely spend more waking hours at school. If they’re doing extracurricular activities it isn’t unusual for them to be gone from 7a to 9p. The earliest they get home is 6p. Oh and then they still have homework.
Fair point, but those activities are optional and they still need support from the parents to carry on. When I got out of high school in the US about a decade ago, we were getting let out of school at 2-3PM. The latest I ever stayed was probably 5PM for a club. Even so, you’re providing food and shelter for them, you raised them from birth to when they could start going to school, and you probably want to be there for them in some way after they graduate from school, while they’re in college, and beyond. Schools are too limited in scope to do all that.
Yeahy my oldest is 19 and she did a semester in the college dorms but she’s back home now. And actually she’ll listen to us now. When she was 17 she didn’t hear anything we said. We tried to teach her some of these things but she knew it already. Until she realized she didn’t. She’s knocking out some debt really quickly now, she’s doing really well.
That’s good to hear. Teens can be tough, but I’m glad you’re there for them.