Last weekend, I attended my first Home Education Network (Hen) Conference, writes Breda O'Brien. Our children are home educated, but I have to confess to merely being a supportive bystander, as my husband takes 99 per cent of the responsibility for it.
I find the whole process fascinating, especially when, for example, I come home and find everyone from the 13-year-old to the six-year-old in the garden, surrounded by various weights and bits of wood resembling very small see-saws.
They assure me it was all about the law of the lever and fulcrums, but it looked mighty craic. Other days, the hot-press door might be festooned with experimental paintings that use only shades of one colour.
There might be the delicious smell of baking, or the six-year-old might be in tears because his Dad was most unreasonably refusing to teach him long division before multiplication, or I might get a mischievous greeting in French. The husband assures me that I miss all the more mundane bits. All I know is that even though they used to attend a really great school, since they have been home-educated, the four children have blossomed and gained in confidence.
When you mention that your children are being home educated, the response tends to be predictable. The rarest response, but it does happen sometimes, is when people declare that it is a brilliant idea. The most common query is whether you are worried about the children losing out on the "social side of things". A few people look at you as if you are mad, and some blurt out that they are glad of the break when their children go to school, and wouldn't dream of having them around all the time.
Well, I never felt my children lacked in social skills, and they are blessed in their friends. However, at the Hen Conference, what struck me most about the children and teenagers was how free they were of demarcation lines across different age groups.
At times a huge group, aged anywhere from four to 18, took part in the same activities with great enthusiasm. A five-year-old wandering down a corridor was as likely to greet a teenager as someone closer to his or her own age. The teens, in particular, seemed very comfortable around adults.
The home-educating parents were as interesting, not least because they were a much more diverse group than I expected. Sure, a small number did look like card-carrying radicals from the 1960s, but others would have blended in seamlessly in any supermarket queue or at any school gate.
People home educate for all kinds of reasons. Some do so because they have been influenced by John Holt's "unschooling" approach, which in simple terms believes that every child has an innate desire to learn that is often frustrated by conventional schooling. Provide the child with opportunities, and natural interest will lead them in directions where they will learn almost effortlessly.
Others might have a child with special needs, or simply feel that they can provide a rich educational environment at home because they know and love their children best. In the United States, religion is often a motivating factor in the decision to home educate, but it did not seem to feature as strongly among Irish home educators.
Ironically, given the child-friendly nature of the Hen conference, in the same week there was a debate generated by statistics from Census 2006 and the ESRI that appear to paint a picture of an Ireland where having children is becoming problematic.
John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you are making other plans. In a kind of sociological variation on that theme, sometimes major trends creep up on us while we are busy watching other developments. For example, the rise in out-of-wedlock births has been the subject of commentary from every possible direction.
However, as the Iona Institute pointed out recently, the figures from Census 2006show a startling rise in the number of households without children. Few people saw that one coming. David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, stated that there has been a 146 per cent rise in couple-occupied households without children. There has been an 82 per cent rise in households with only one person, of which about one-third are elderly people.
There has also been a dramatic drop in the number of stay-at-home parents, not unsurprisingly accompanied by a rise of women in the paid workforce.
When Charlie McCreevy was minister for finance, the government took a policy decision to prioritise getting women into the paid workforce, and one of their premier tools was tax individualisation. For some reason, the outgoing government seemed unable to see that you cannot talk about social capital on the one hand, and on the other, act as if the care of children and the elderly can be sub-contracted like catering or computer services.
Parents try desperately hard to do the best for their children. Our society does not make it easy. Some people are living inhuman lifestyles, with more than 200,000 commuters spending between two and three hours a day travelling.
This must have an impact on how many children people have and how late they have them.
High mortgages are another factor that causes people to delay childbearing. The inflow of young, childless migrants, or migrants who chose or were compelled to leave children behind, also affects the statistics. Of course, many of the now childless households will go on to have children. It is still startling that there are no children in 52 per cent of households.
Let's be clear. Prosperity is better than poverty. Women having the choice to work outside the home is better than rigid role stereotyping. Ireland still has very high fertility rates, but we need to keep a close eye on whether the childless households continue to grow.
Rewarding as it is, home education will remain a minority option. What an extraordinary development it would be if sharing our lives with those emissaries from the future, our children, became a minority option, too.