"He takes the lead, and I just try to keep up.”
Parenting is
a 24/7 job, with no time off for good behavior.
What
happens when you put that dedication and commitment in a pressure cooker on
high? You get a snapshot of Bob Muller’s exceedingly above-average approach to
parenting.
“I
have been a stay-at-home dad since Day One,” Muller says. “My wife loves her
job as a librarian at the New York Public Library, so we decided that I should
be the one to stay home with Truth when he was born 14 years ago.”
Little
did he know the wild ride that awaited.
“Staying
at home is a 24-hour-a-day job, no doubt,” he said. “But then I decided to
home-school Truth, and it became a 48-hour-a-day job.”
Muller
chuckles as he describes his attempt to best guide, corral and curate the
passions, interests and cerebral activity of his 14-year-old polymath son, Truth.
“He
takes the lead, and I just try to keep up.”
Muller
never envisioned that his journey as a stay-at-home dad would include
homeschooling his son, but he and his wife quickly discovered that a
traditional structured school day was not a venue in which Truth could exert
his formidable intellect and energy.
“We
sent him to public school and when he came home, he would never talk about it,”
Muller said. “He was normally so effusive, but he just didn’t have much to say
about it either way.”
It
soon became clear that Truth was well ahead of his classmates. The Mullers
worried that Truth’s full potential would be stymied by a conventional
education.
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“When
Truth told me that he learned more from me at home when he wasn’t in school,
that did it,” Muller said. They decided to homeschool him, and they’ve never
looked back.
What’s
a typical day like in the Muller household?
“We
build our own chemistry set and do a few experiments in the kitchen, we follow
animal tracks in the woods, we hit the library and check out 10 books on
Vietnam, he spends an hour reading a fantasy novel like ‘Treasure Island’ and
then my wife gives him a French lesson when she gets home from work.”
The
Mullers also learned early on to foster Truth’s love of the outdoors.
“We spend
a lot of time outside, especially working, volunteering and studying at the
Basha Kill Area Association,” says Muller. “Truth is involved in 4-H, we are
both Eagle Watch and Nature Watch educators, water test volunteers. We’ll visit
old trails, historical societies and museums and one thing leads to another.
We’ve launched countless scientific experiments and history projects with our
days in the fields of the Hudson Valley.”
Especially
notable is Truth’s remarkable work with bats.
Truth
founded the program Buddies for Bats after learning that 93 percent of New York
State’s bats have perished from the deadly fungus White Nose Syndrome, putting
our ecosystem in peril (bats are one of the world’s top pollinators). Buddies
for Bats won him a $1,000 from the Pollination Project for his education and
outreach program, as well as a profile on the White House’s “For the Win” blog
series.
He
also regularly gives lectures in classrooms and libraries all over the Hudson
Valley. To find out more about his work with bats, or to attend one of his upcoming
talks, visit his Facebook page.
And if
you want to tear a page out of Muller’s parenting playbook, his advice is
simple: “Just support your kids, focus on reading, take advantage of the great
outdoors and try to be as in-tune to their interests as you can. And most of
all, listen to your own instincts as a parent.”
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