Catholic Pediatrics Blog

This week please welcome my husband, Greg Berchelmann, as my guest blogger. Everyone asks me how I am raising 4 (soon to be 5) homeschooled children while working full time as a pediatrician, especially since I wrote “18 Reasons Why Doctors and Lawyers Homeschool Their Children” and “’Are you Done Yet?’ In Defense of Our 5th Child.” I could never do it without my husband Greg and his willingness to make many unconventional life choices, including quitting his well-paid job at a major St. Louis company so that he could be more committed to our family. He’s not alone—according to 2010 census data, 17% of preschool-aged children have dad as their primary caretaker while mom is at work . This is our family story of how we grappled with gender roles and swallowed our pride so that we could spend more time with our children and be the parents we wanted to be.

I’m going public today with a secret I’ve kept for a year—my husband and I are homeschooling our children. I never dreamed we would become homeschoolers. I wanted my kids integrated and socialized. I wanted their eyes opened to the realities of the world. I wanted the values we taught at home put to the test in the real world. But necessity drove me to consider homeschooling for my 2nd and 4th graders, and so my husband and I timidly attended a home school parent meeting last spring.

At our end-of-season soccer party, all the moms  were breathing a sigh of relief that the season was over.   I think all of us moms secretly wonder why we do these after-school activities.  Will we or our children regret how we’ve spent our time once these precious years of childhood are over? 

Should Catholic parents own a gun?  We dedicate our lives to teaching our children to love one another as God has loved us.  We teach the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”  We try to model non-violent conflict resolution.  So doesn’t it seem like a mixed message to our children if we own a gun?