Our Dark Hour

Unfortunately, the relational side of our home school, now called Joy Academy, did not flourish nearly as well. Joe's hyperactivity continued and, despite a trial of medication and counseling, he began to exhibit increasingly violent behavior. My eight-year-old showed exceptional ability at designing machines, including a Radio Shack motor, but he threw punches and threatened to beat me up so often that I repeatedly called the emergency pastor at church. In September 2006 we moved to a new house, which doubled our floor space and gave each child his own room, but the pressure of leaving our old neighborhood and friends proved too much for Joe. In the winter of third grade he repeatedly tried to throw himself over the staircase, and he flew into rage fits which forced Jim to restrain him for hours at a time. We eventually had to hospitalize him for a week.

Joe's hospitalization was definitely the darkest time our family has seen, and the fact that we continued home schooling through all this was nothing short of a miracle. Every professional we encountered told us he had to be placed in public school; the hospital informed our district that we were home schooling an emotionally disturbed child; and even our church told us that his problems were caused by lack of classroom experience. I escaped social work intervention by the skin of my teeth. By every right, we should have lost our freedom to home school, but we managed to slip past professional scrutiny and continue. I considered seeking help through the system for some of his more difficult issues, but changed my mind after some difficult encounters with the professionals who were working with our autistic son, David.



We continued, now card-carrying members of Home School Legal Defense and a Christian homeschool support group. Still, I knew that the kind of problems we had had were unacceptable in the home school world, and I kept a low profile--even offering to leave the support group, because we were an embarrassment and a discredit to the miraculous benefits of homeschooling. We were told not to, that others have had trouble with their children; but the stigma lingered, especially when others talked about the "selective socialization" that would inevitably leave us out.