I can’t even tell you, if I wrote pages and pages,  how much I hate conflict with my kids.  And how much I hate conflict with each other in my household. 

It makes me insane. 

It’s one of life’s very long lessons for me, that head butting is something children do.

It’s not even bad.  It can GO bad, for sure, depending on how we respond to it.  But head butting in and of itself isn’t bad.  It just feels bad.  Super BAD.  But, that all said, they are supposed to do it.  They are supposed to butt heads with the people they love and respect because they are trying to find their other-ness, their separate-ness, their adult-ness.  It’s a stupid and annoying way to adulthood, but I didn’t make up the rules about this.  I would have made up different rules.  Easier rules. 
When we butt heads with our kids, three bad things happen. 
1) the child annoys us profoundly
2) we are embarrassed that we could stoop so low as to be bugged by the annoying child, and because we find ourselves arguing with someone so much younger and less reasonable than ourselves.
3) completely ignoring anything like logic or charity or any other reasonable response, we get really, really mad

I digress.  All that aside, that butting heads is natural, normal and annoying, that we react badly to it, that every household is dealing with it…should it be the reason we choose not to homeschool our children? 

If you want to homeschool your kids, but think that you couldn’t get along well enough with them…I think that’s a pretty good reason TO homeschool them, so you can both get lots of practice. 

Because becoming whoever you want to become (or whoever you want them to become) takes a lot of practice. 

Breathe.  Deeply.  Every five minutes.