Our kids participate in a teen group for homeschoolers. They meet on a Friday night, monthly, just to hang out. And other stuff gets planned as well. Our family hosted a couple of Capture The Flag games. Other families host other stuff. And yesterday one family organized an afternoon of ice skating. I can't say why exactly. But it was very satisfying to see this group of teenagers meet at the rink. It was fresh, athletic, good natured, and fun. Not their usual sitting around grousing each other in various parks. They had to move and most of them were awkward, but all of them were generous with each other. They wobbled and laughed and sometimes fell and helped each other along.

Teenagers often drift out of homeschooling. Not because they are poorly socialized. But because their social opportunity is too constricted. Teens need more freedom, more than meeting through various classes and time-controlled clubs. They need to move, roam, congregate, and spend more time without supervision. A couple of mothers started our teen group up. I am so grateful to them! They have addressed a need I rarely hear mentioned in wider homeschooling forums.

Yes, teenagers need more freedom. And by that age they should be worthy of freedom and ready. I don't want to know the private details of my teenager's lives---unless they need help or just feel like sharing. All I need is to know they are steady reasonable trustworthy folks armed with appropriate information about sex, drugs, and economy. Which is so opposite the national standard of behavior we expect from teenagers.

In society today, we send our tiny babies off to day care and school. The babies and young children cry. Until later, when they don't cry anymore. Few notice this as ominous, children hardened to their natural fear of abandonment by the adults who actually love them. Left, instead, with other adults most often of dubious authority and nominal character---as compared to, say, an actual mother.

In homeschooling society the children aren't left. The children grow up and leave. They leave happy, ready to go, looking forward to going, (if somewhat wistfully.) They leave not crying, waving good bye with a big smile. Its the parents who cry to see the children, now grown, leave. This is the natural order of human development. Or at least, it was from the beginning of time up until the industrial revolution. Homeschoolers leave for high school, or college, or simply to seek their fortunes. They don't leave before potty training, unable to articulate actual sentences, dependent and helpless, still needing to learn how to read. And really, how must that feel? Most of us, if we are honest, can remember.

In the wake of yet another mentally ill teenager armed to the teeth laying waste to yet another industrial school, can everyone see a few things we may be getting wrong? This current generation is the first generation to be raised by parents who were raised by the school system. Which is to say, parents who were parented by bureaucrats. Parenting skill has been in a free falling nose dive for a couple of generations. Which doesn't seem to be working out very well. Not by any measure. Might children who are raised in an industrial bureaucracy grow up to become the sort of adults who believe children should be educated reading instruction manuals?

I don't mean to say mental illness, medical care, and gun control are not important issues in their own right, not to mention the affect of non-nutrition on our society at large. But basic parenting would help a lot, for starters. Actually raising babies who turn into children who turn into young adults who, rather than having grown up steeped in a culture of abandonment and institutional absurdity, knew mostly mundane common love, trust, hot meals, and wonder, who leave home curious and ready. Rather than exhausted, secretly fearful, and furious.