Homeschooling the Difficult Child

I have discovered that, to the best of my knowledge, the website where I had quite a bit published is now defunct. Since I was never paid for the articles I wrote there, I'm going to repost a few of them here over the next few weeks. I would like to be able to link to them every so often.

This particular article was written back in February of 2015, so quite a bit ago. I am still glad today that I made the decisions I did back then.

Homeschooling is a wonderful thing when your children are generally cooperative and life is relatively calm. If only it were this way always. Here’s the reality: some seasons of life are harder than others and some children are harder than others. It’s just how it is and I have found that it is a far more productive use of my time to learn to accept the season or the child rather than to struggle to change one thing or the other.

While each child has their own strengths, quirks, and challenges, a few of mine have more than their fair share. Due to less than ideal beginnings, these children face a host of challenges which can make homeschooling difficult. The children who have learning difficulties seem easy, though, compared to my son who faces even greater emotional challenges. A few years ago I had to ask myself some hard questions. Why was I trying to homeschool this child? Was I hurting our relationship by doing so? Was I harming him educationally by doing so? These are not easy questions to face, but I wanted to do what was best for him, so forced myself to answer them.

Why was I trying to homeschool him? This question was pretty straightforward. I wanted to be able to tailor his education to what he needed. English was not his first language, and while he is now fluent, I still find gaps in his language abilities every now and then. These are very subtle and by being the one teaching him one on one, I was able to catch them. They would be far less obvious in a group situation. This son does best with one-on-one teaching, where the distractions are fewer. And when it came right down to it, I wanted to homeschool him for the same reason I homeschool all my other children: I love them, enjoy them, want to spend time with them, and share the joy of learning with them.

This led to the next question: was I hurting our relationship by homeschooling? I wasn’t nearly so sure of this answer. Attachment issues have always been part of our story and I was very concerned that I do everything I could to further attachment. By trying to add homeschooling into that equation, was I creating harm? This I wasn’t so sure about and I was torn. If I sent him to school, there would be all those hours in the day we didn’t share. It might become too easy for him to avoid his parents with other social outlets during the day. On the other hand, maybe school would be easier because someone else was asking him to do the things he didn’t want to. I really couldn’t give myself a definitive answer, so I moved on.

The last question: was I harming him educationally? was a bit easier. I knew he was capable of doing schoolwork, but had developed such an immediate negative reaction to anything that looked like school, I wasn’t sure that even going to a different place would help. It might at first, but I could see it quickly becoming an issue at school as easily as it already was at home. Schoolwork triggered his fear response and once he was there, all was lost. I also felt pretty confident that once he decided he wanted to learn something, he would learn it fairly quickly.

With all this in mind, I created a plan for the next school year. This plan involved focusing on relationship far more than academics. I knew that an emotionally healthy child was far more important in the long run than one who could do division quickly. After a lot of thinking, I came up with two things I could do which might make the difference. The first was that me telling him to do something (well, anything at this point) meant that it wouldn’t get done. It was a knee-jerk reaction. I needed to figure out a way that seemed to take me out of the equation. A modified workbox system was my solution. I would fill his boxes (or in our case, file folders) with his work and he would be responsible for moving from one thing to the next. I wasn’t asking him to do the work; it was just there. This system was enough removed to allow him to accomplish something.

We did this as a team. I explained my concerns and what I thought might be a solution. He was on board and we picked out the box which would hold his folders together. I also spent a lot of time figuring out what would go in those folders. It was actually very little. There were four folders and perhaps two of them would have textbook type work. The other folders would contain coloring pages or puzzles or directions to read a book for 20 minutes or to go play his guitar or the piano. They were all short, some he even considered fun, and the activities and order changed daily. My goal was to keep it short, interesting, and doable, so that when he thought of schoolwork, his brain didn’t immediately go to that panicked place.

It was also completely optional, at least in my mind. I had to take any expectations that he would do something on any given day off the table. If I became concerned about it, it would immediately cause him to spiral in his behavior. I would mention it was time to start work, I would answer questions or explain what he was to do, I might even remind him what he was supposed to be doing, but if he balked, I let him put it away. Initially, it seemed like the antithesis of good homeschooling, and I wondered if I should be experimenting on my child.

I am happy to report that my gut proved to be correct. By the end of that school year, he had a new attitude towards schoolwork. He was doing most of it willingly and could even ask for my help. (This was something that I would have said was impossible a year earlier.) When it was time to work on the next year’s school schedule, I asked if he wanted a regular schedule like his brothers and sisters or did he want another year of our box. He wanted regular work and could even talk to me about what he thought would and wouldn’t work. So that’s what we’ve been doing. On the whole, he has been doing quite well. He does work every day and maintains his equilibrium. He has also shown a tenacity that I hadn’t seen before. There was a page of division problems (his personal nemesis) that involved solving a puzzle. He spent three days doing and redoing the problems to get the puzzle right. He complained, but kept working. As long as he was working on it, I stayed out of, only giving help when asked. I also didn’t push him to try to do more than the 20 minutes he was spending on it each morning. But he finished it. I was so proud of him. For him, it was as if another of my children was doing calculus as a 10 year old. That’s how huge this was.

Now, my little homeschooling experiment was not the only thing to make the difference. We saw a therapist and worked on relationships and healing in all realms of our life. It is also still very much a work in progress. But the difference between now and two years ago is that I have hope. I truly believe that keeping him home and spending those hours with him made the difference.