A stay-at-home parent can be the best investment in your child's education
Parents can go to great lengths to give their young children a head start in school. No question it will pay off.
Our formula for success was much simpler:
A stay-at-home mom.
Parents are their children's first teachers. We decided one of those parents should make it a full-time teaching job for several years.
What an incredibly important decision that was -- despite the major financial sacrifice required.
I firmly believe if you want to make your kids smart, you should give them the full attention of a parent, who teaches, reads to, plays with and takes the child on outings.
The other parent can take over the teaching duties after work.
Talk with your children. Read to them. Interact with them.
Because of the income lost during the many years our kids had a stay-at-home mom, we were never able to catch up enough financially to save much for college.
It turned out we didn't need to. Scholarships covered most of their costs.
The best investment we ever made was giving our kids a full-time teacher at home.
Comments (1)
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Some of us did not have it as fortunate as your family Doug. As a single parent raising a daughter I was often away days and even weeks at a time. When I was "at home" my days were longer than most peoples weeks. I did not have the quantity of time that your family enjoyed but I made sure that my time was quality.
I agree on the reading and playing for I did those things, the things that Mom's usually do with daughters. I ironed the little dresses with the thousand ruffles and curled the long golden tresses into banana curls for church on Sunday morning when I was lucky enough to be at home long enough to go with her. I played the tea parties and built the oversized Barbie houses and made the elevator go up with a battery powered motor instead of a string like the kid's down the street had.
I worried about college too but scholorships paid the way for her also. Elon was her choice and for a soon to retire government employee it was an expensive one. Guess I did as good as some two parent families. At least my daughter thinks so. And that is good enough for me. Glad you were fortunate enough to have someone to stay at home with your children. They too seem to have turned out well.
Posted on February 5, 2006 8:37 PM