Preschool Parenting Culture

I stick out a lot here because I have four kids, but I was expecting that. Two is the average here. I get a lot of “are they twins?” about the younger ones as apparently it would be odd for us to intentionally have four children, or comments like v“how do you do it?” (still don’t have a great reply for that one).

But I stick out in another way I hadn’t anticipated: people are always surprised when they hear that I keep the younger two at home. I get asked regularly where they go to preschool, and incredulous looks follow when I say that they don’t.

Apparently it is rare for children to remain at home for their earlier years here, probably due to a few factors—both parents having to work to afford living here, or there being more highly-educated people likely to elect focusing on their careers.

But third, and this is the part I’ve been pondering, I get the sense people here place a higher value on early-child development: they have such a high standard that they feel the only way to do it well is to outsource it to the professional experts. There is a lot of talk about education strategies and things like SEL’s (socio-emotional learning), Carol Dweck growth mindsets, optimizing your child’s brain development and exposures by a certain age. Combine that with a resource-rich environment and parents who either naturally want the best for their kids or are the “Stanford-or-bust” types, and you get competitive preschools teaching based on the latest Stanford experiments, preschools touting specific play-oriented environments, and lessons for little ones ranging from the typical (music, multiple languages, sports, ceramics) to the unusual (Legos to teach political skills, metal-working).

It’s easy to ask, how can I possibly be doing all that by myself at home? Maybe some people are wondering, why would I want to? Why not go do what I trained for twelve years to do, or go get some self-care, and leave that to the experts?

I am in no way judging kids who do go to preschool (we’ll probably find one for the three year-old next year) or lessons, but part of adjusting to being here has been processing this sort of tension. It’s made me realize that I do personally believe in and desire to teach them myself, in large part because the most important things—world view, values, priorities, principles—are taught implicitly, as they are lived out, and I want my kids to see that from me. Maybe I’m just too sanguine and laid-back to worry overmuch about what they are missing, though in that case it’s good to be challenged about what and how I teach them at home.

And that’s the bottom line about living here: there are so many things that are good, but I’m constantly having to decide when there’s too much of a good thing, or whether that good thing in fact aligns with the gospel and our purpose. Without that lens, it’s so easy to get sucked into a certain way of feeling and operating, because the culture here is so strong: its values are like a riptide that can pull you under unawares. We thought a lot of that through before making this move, but it’s interesting to see how it plays out in ways we do or don’t expect.