Not all families have had servants all throughout history.
**Right. But likewise, they weren’t attempting to teach a modern K-12 curriculum at home.
Historically, poorer families would either a) teach a much more modest home curriculum (the three rs) and/or b) use their local schools.
It was only very well-off people with servants that could attempt their equivalent of a modern K-12 equivalent at home. Also, middle class and better families often used boarding schools, especially for boys.
**
There is a great deal of people that have not had outside help at all, not even from family and friends. It is not new at all for that to happen whether people plan it as such or whether life dictates that for them.
**Yes, and it’s a very sad thing and also a relatively new thing. Women are, by nature, usually communal critters, and it often makes us sad not to have each other’s company. We need each other.
Contemporary American SAHMs have absolutely terrible stats for depression compared to women working outside the home. It’s a very sad thing that for a lot of women today, the only way to get normal adult female companionship is to put the kids in daycare and go to work. (There is the internet (love you guys!) but that has its limitations.)
**
I see nothing wrong with having help or hiring things out, but in the long run for a family where that isn’t possible–either by choice or circumstance–continuously pointing out how much easier it makes things is pointless. Throughout history, the middle class and above have had their share of hired help or servants or slaves. Most people below that economic class did not have that possibility.
**But they did often have grandmas, mother-in-laws, mothers, aunties, nieces, cousins and sisters, not to mention neighbors, school friends, etc. When you have it, you don’t really notice it. Like, when my oldest kids were around 4 and 1, an old student of mine from Russia came to stay with us for half a year while getting medical treatment in the US. Now, of course she was medically somewhat frail, but at the time, it was very helpful. **
Not everyone lives (or in the past lived) near family so yes, many did do “everything” on their own. They managed and they survived.
**But it was a hardship for them. And nowadays we’re somehow not allowed to point out that it is a hardship. **
I can tell you truthfully no one in my family on either side had any outside help for at least the last 4 generations–and that stretches back to the mid-1800’s in my family. On my dad’s side they did have family nearby. My mom’s had no one. It gets old hearing about how virtually everyone always had servants/etc. when in reality a good deal of people never had help–they were the help.
I don’t think anybody said that. I do say that in the past, the average mother who effectively homeschooled the equivalent of today’s K-12 education for a large family did have help of some kind, and lots of it. That’s not "everybody."
Then they also had their own families to care for. In my husband’s family there has never been the help described here–no one would even dream it possible. And homeschooling has been done since the beginning of time, usually by the same people who couldn’t afford help because the cost of sending children to school was impossible to come up with, or they lived where there were no schools yet, or because the kids had to work along with their parents, or even because they were of a race/color/creed that was not allowed to attend the schools with the families that could afford the help.
I’m getting ready to start planning a longer getaway with some other homeschooling mom friends of mine for hopefully in the next year (we’re think a cruise so that we cannot be reached by phone!)
My husband constantly reminds me that kids thrive with structure (this is an area of weakness for me).