"Could Your Child Homeschool If S/he Wanted To?"

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My staying in school did nothing but alienate me from my passions in life, drawing, reading, and writing, and encourage me/force me to work very hard at learning how to socialise. Which, as I point out above, ( previous page) because it was not something I particularly enjoyed or naturally want to do, just led me into one disaster after another, while persuading myself all along that I was learning lots, and succeeding.

In fact "social life" took up so much of my time, energy, and creativity, that I got A,B,and D at A-level and flunked another subject, when I could easily have got all A's if I had been doing things that interested me, and with the conviction that it mattered, rather than all being just a cloak for learning how to fit in socially, but I was past all that by then.

I had learned that all that mattered was social success, fitting in, being popular, or close to someone who was. I no longer knew what interested me after a while, no longer stuck at anything longer than the length of a class/lesson.

And my degree was a farce, one long state-and-parent-funded experiment in sexual exploits, and drug consumption. ( I passed, with a 2:2, but i was intellectually capable of a first, if only i hadn't learned, with aspie seriousness, that socialising was all that counted.)

I was socially successful! That was the important thing!

It lasted until me/my brain woke up again aged 27, and began a revolution , involving breakdown, loss of almost all friends ever made in my false self, and any prospects of a professional career with it. It had all been fake, put on as crowd pleaser.

PS: It is perfectly possible to prepare for many/most college courses etc by post.

Last edited by ouinon on 19 Mar 2008, 9:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have been seriously interested in homeschooling for many years now. My ex is dead-set against it. I have been told many times by friends and professionals that he could undermine my efforts.

Having a son with AS who has been bullied, I think that having the opportunity to return to school and have things change, and have the chance to experience a better situation and recover...it's too important. He got through it.

However, I am always going to be more careful. I am not going to just sit back and assume that anything anyone says at school is the final word. I have to pay attention to things, and it is work.

I have seen some amazing homeschooling families. The relationships between the children, and between the parents and children, are so different. I mean in a good way.

One of my family members is a teacher, and I think she has seen the failures at homeschooling. I haven't seen that side of it.

There are so many networks and groups available for group and socializing as homeschooling families.

I still think it is a very promising alternative!

i remember struggling, really struggling, with my own ideas , and the school's ideas, and my son's ideas, to work out what to do. It was incredibly difficult.

The school kept up an extraordinary pressure, of how "happy he was in school, after I had gone", which it turned out on further questions amounted to his sitting still, doing what he was told, and not talking to anyone or uttering a sound.

I talked with my son, every other morning over a few weeks, discussing as positively as possible the things which were plus'es at school. He would resolve to try again. But then he would struggle and cry and even hit the teachers to try to leave with me, only to sink into this total muteness and stillness .

I dithered painfully, before deciding to leave it entirely up to him. Not to the teachers, not to me, but him. And he did not want to carry on.

I think it is noticeable the difference. There was an article a while back in the french homeschooling organisation's newsletter in which people wrote about the differences.
One was clothes; cotton, casual, light, simple, no-fuss clothing. No competition about trademarks/brandnames etc. Just comfortable stuff.
Another was mealtimes; relaxed cos much more time to do it in, with children helping, and/or choosing, and when people are hungry, not at arbitrarily fixed times depending on when school/work ends etc.
And time, so much time, so can follow obsessions, track something down, spend hours investigating one thing ... time. Bliss. Very little TV watching, because children don't need to zone out after home schooling.
etc etc

I would really like to know how many of the parents of children frequently/persistently/chronically unhappy at school could let them stay home, if the child wanted to.

I don't have anything at all against homeschooling. I used to for sure, but that had to do more with the fact that I'm Mormon, and when I was in college (30 years ago) there were a few Mormon families that I knew were keeping their kids home from school because of the bad, bad world out there, and how being in that bad, bad world would completely ruin their children (sarcasm). I didn't agree with that, back then.

I'm not so concerned with the bad, bad world (although there is some truth to that, especially lately -- wow, the things that kids know about at school are scary!).

I agree that homeschooling is not all just staying at home, being with Mom and siblings all the time. I've done enough research and talking to people to realize that there's quite a bit of socializing, classes during the week with other students and taught by other parents, or with cyber school, there are classes with a teacher and other cyber students over the web cam. Homeschooling has come a long way now -- I'm sure that it would be both fun and educational.

I also have been impressed with the level of academic success of children who are home schooled. There are too many kids who achieve all sorts of things -- geography bee winners, spelling bee winners, the author of Eragon was home schooled, etc., to not realize that many, if not most, home schooled children are excelling, getting into college, etc.

I know that my son would LOVE to study what he's interested in all the time. I would enjoy that, too. The trouble is, the world doesn't work that way. Sometimes, you have to study things you don't particularly enjoy, just as with a job, a boss will ask you to do assignments you're not particularly interested in. That's life. I think that with cyber school, there will still be parts of the curriculum that he would enjoy, and parts that he will consider less-exciting.

This particular thread is kind of turning into the same kind of debate that happens with stay-at-home Moms and working Moms -- and there are definite truths to both sides. You just have to do what's right for you and your family.

My problem is, I don't really know which option is best for my son.

Kris

ouinon, I just read your last post, and your last paragraph is another REALLY BIG reason why I think home schooling would be FANTASTIC! That sounds heavenly.

Kris

Just spotted your post while typing this:

Yep!
From your previous post:
Yes. My son goes to Karate and fencing once a week each. And we meet another homeschooling family not far away most weekends, whose 6 year old son gets on really well with T. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough. It provides the little examples in safe spaces of "other people" and connection, that teach rather than exhaust or terrorise.


He wouldn't have to. Who says he has to learn about everything? Allow him to learn about whatever interests him, and other things will inevitably sneak in at the same time as tends to happen when studying any subject.


If I were him, and I found out I could have legally stayed home I would be both sad and raging. As I was in fact as I began to realise the full implications of the fact that my parents could have let me, that they even thought about it seriously, and then didn't give me the choice.

Not Possible. I wanted to, she wanted to, and I would have loved to have home-schooled my kid - and kept her out of the public schools - but someone had to earn the rent and food money. Since the kid couldn't work, that left me.

For her first 8 years I was in university, so I had some flexibility. I worked two part time jobs and went to school full time. The fact that I was taking classes meant that I had some flexibility in my schedule (though not much) and could miss a class now and then to stay home with her. Once I left school, I had to work full time. I did work with her as much as I could - we had to have her at her bus stop at 5:50AM and we didn't get back home again every day until 6:30PM so there wasn't much time. (Her school started at 7:00am and ended at 2:30PM - she went to a supervised "after-school" program from 3:30- 5:00pm, until I could get to her after work. We used the 1.5 hours stuck in traffic every evening to discuss the day and "stuff" as much as we could. But once we got home it was cooking supper while she did her "homework" when there was any, or had some down time to calm down from her day. Then there was supper, then cleaning up from supper, then housework. Then enough time for a bath, a tuck-in, and about a half-hour to just chat about the day.

Then she had to go to sleep, I had to work on my "take home" work (second job) and then go to bed, get up, and do it over again the next day.

I ~SO~ wish I would have had the "reduce income to stay home" luxury. We missed out on getting to do so much. But when we got the chance, we definitely grabbed it.

In California, it's against the law (child endangerment) to leave a child under 12 alone all day, regardless of their intellectual functioning, so we didn't even have the option of her being somewhere half the day and then coming home and doing her schoolwork/homeschooling on her own. Which she could have managed - technically. In the neighborhoods we lived in, though, I wouldn't have dreamed of having left her alone for more than an hour even when she was an older teen. We moved to a safe neighborhood when she was 14, and she walked home from the bus stop every day - getting home at about 4:00. I didn't get in until 5:30, and though life was much easier at that point, we were both too tired and stressed to do much other than a cursory "enrichment" via one of the cable tv programs (history channel, etc.).

She's turned out well enough, but there's so much we lost, so much she missed out on, and so much she could have done with her life if things had been different. But she's happy, healthy, grown, and employed.

Ya do what you can.

Last edited by Nan on 19 Mar 2008, 10:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

I home school my kids
My eldest just tried school as she thought she might like it but she only lasted 4 days before she refused to go anymore- I dont blame her- school sucks!
Home school is great but its hard work. I think everyone should get a free babysitter with each child. ( but not school! I want to go out in the evening not the day!)

I have to say this whole home schooling topic and the attitude of the original poster irks me a bit. It's as if we had the choice to stay home and we are failing our children because we want money in the bank as opposed to having a happy child.
That is not the case for a HUGE amount of families - families like mine, we struggle every week to make ends meet. Am I against home schooling? Nope, I'd love to be able to home school my daughter. Should I quit my job and depend on the government to feed us, put clothes on our backs, and give us a house to live in just so I can home school my child - because my child is sometimes unhappy at school? Or the teacher didn't do something that she/he should have done per the IEP?
No.
The government must educate my child, for free, and my child is entitled to get help if needed, for free.
Is the system flawed?
YES!
Can it be fixed?
I hopr so - if parents would stop giving up and keep fighting for whatever accommodations it will take to get the education their child is entitled to.
I like to think that what I can accomplish with educators will only help the next family in line.

My daughter has her entire life ahead of her to have friends and be "happy". She is in school to get an education period. She has clothes on her back, food in her stomach, books to read, pencils and paper to write and draw, a bed to sleep in and a roof over her head. If she's unhappy for an hour out of her school day, so what, nothing is life is perfect and it would be a total lie to tell her she "should be" happy 24/7.
How realistic is that?
I'm not going to candy-coat the world for her - give her expectations that life would be grand if she was home schooled.

Also, people are free to complain about school here - it's how we all get the support we need, or ideas we can take with us and pass on to another.
One comment can mean the world to someone stuck in the system like us. And one comment can crush us as well.
Like Nan said "ya do what you can".
And we shouldn't be put down for it.

I would love to homeschool my son and I did for a quarter last year. The problem now is that my husband (and myself to an extent) believes that our son prefers school. His "special interest" is people and he's really attached to his "friends". The problem is that it's unlikely they are true friends. He gets in trouble because of them. The school takes kids' words over Pop's and he has been suspended based on the word of a child. If he reports an injury to an adult they don't believe him and don't follow up.

So, it's very complicated for us. I think I have my husband convinced though. Here in Tucson there is a homeschooler group that meets weekly and utilizes group rates for field trips and has a PE coach. The city has a lot of choice in sports too. So, it's not like we would be isolated.

School doesn't represent the real world. I don't understand it when people say that school prepares kids for Real Life. I've never had a job that resembles anything like school. The menial labor that relies on dumb compliance, maybe. School seems to prepare kids to accept mob mentality and fear. Classism, sexism and racism are taught there. Submission and dominance are taught there.

When we decided to have kids, we made it so that only one would work. We waited until I could quit my job and it's been that way ever since. For a brief time in California, I worked full time when my husband worked part time and was the primary care giver. There was always someone home. It's a good thing too because we have had phases where the school may call us everyday and we have to pick Pop up. We aren't rich, we have one car and I ride the bus/walk for a lot of things. We live in a little rental that is cheap. We do this so we can afford to have a child.
Afterschool programs don't have to accept autistic kids and I wouldn't leave my son with them anyways. We don't even hire babysitters to go out.

Nowadays, I go out during the day and carry a cellphone with me.

Lynn, not everyone can complain about their schools. Some schools tell the parents that they aren't allowed to come in and see their own kids. One mother here in town had the cops called on her for complaining when she found them out of compliance.
This is not wanting "happiness", this is wanting safety, fairness and that education you call "free". I think that is really unfair to simplify our position by wanting our kids to be "happy" and stating that homeschoolers "gave up". That is a really ugly thing to say when there are schools that physically abuse, restrain our kids, call the cops on 6 year olds. I watched my kid go from being bright and able to learn, to screaming and barely able to communicate because of what one school did to him. They deliberately provoked his meltdowns and tantrums and then said that he was a bad kid. He wasn't even allowed to attend all day, I had to homeschool anyways because they would pull him out of class and let him play on computers and send home his schoolwork.

It is NOT giving up. It is raising my child that I brought in the world.

Good god, that sounds like the Very Expensive Private Elementary School here in town where I briefly worked and, god help me, enrolled our son. He was only THREE at the time, yet he was in the office Every Day for "behavior." I kept being pulled out of my class (I was an aide) to go to the office to deal with whatever he was in trouble for. I was accused of abusing him (really? but you still want me to work here?), or that abuse was going on somehow in the family and I didn't know about it. I was eventually told that I was not allowed, at the end of the day when I picked him up, to even ask his class aide "So, how'd he do today?" She told me she wasn't allowed to talk to me! I had to go to the ADMINISTRATOR every single time, who hadn't been there and didn't know what was going on, except she was obviously protecting the teacher, who by now really didn't like me at all. When I'd asked his woman if she'd never had any other students like my son, she'd said "Yes, once." When I asked what happened with that child, she said the parents weren't "on board" and "he doesn't attend here any more." Her lack of empathy or compassion was just breathtaking to me. I observed the class once, and saw another kid grab my son by the face and shove him to the ground. She did nothing. The administrator recommended a child therapist. SMALL WORLD! Whaddaya know - found out she and the therapist were friends, socially. So I had a therapist who tried to dissuade me from advocating for my son at that school, with that admin. And the admin who was protecting the teacher. No one seemed interested in helping my son, so I told everyone involved where they could politely get off and I quit that job and pulled him out and kept him home with me for nearly nine months, until his old preschool had an opening and we could get back in.

Sorry. I'm really still quite pissed off about that school. It was incredibly traumatizing, to me as much (if not more) as my son. He still asks about that evil teacher from time to time (five years later) and doesn't seem to understand still that she hated him, or that he was singled out, or unfairly punished day after day.

Just because a school is private, just because it's expensive and all the parents drive Hummers and Lexi, doesn't mean it's a GOOD school. I know that should be obvious, but I was SO disgusted to see what went on there, and I don't mean just with my child. I was an aide, as I said, and spoke with many other teachers and heard and saw things that would curl your hair.

For us, I don't think it is a matter of finances (which would certainly be a struggle) as much as mental health. With both my husband and I having our own issues to deal with, I simply do not think that we are capable of having our children 24 hrs a day, every day, and still keeping the perfectly patient and consistent face they need. Obviously, if we had tried school after school and still found nothing working, I would try it, but it would be a very low option for me. I think my son thrives by being involved with educators and experts that have experience and perspectives that I do not, having us form a team with them, and social opportunities that I know I would be unlikely to give him (shoot, I am SO bad at getting him the playdates he wants already!). I simply cannot imagine myself as the best and lone teacher for my child. He would be so BORED, because already there are so many subjects where his knowledge far exceeds mine. He has always done well with the influence of others - assuming we have selected the "right" others. And, yes, right now we are very fortunate to have an EXCELLENT school, and even daycare, for my son. He is very happy in both, thriving.

Phew, good, I didn't answer the poll, lol! Just wrote a post

Still, you really should have put the option on there: "I do not feel confident in my ability to handle home schooling and keep it a positve experience for my child." Everyone has different talents, and not all parents have the talent to be the full-time teachers of their children, special needs or not.

I have no more desire to homeschool my NT daughter than my Aspie son. The balance we currently have works for all of us. Does that mean I don't have to sometimes fight to get the BEST solutions available for BOTH my children? No, it doesn't. But to do so seems more likely to have success, long run, than me trying to homeschool my children. Honestly, part of me was quite attracted to the idea for a while, just the romantic notion of it, not because either child had any reason to need it at the time, but I realized it was not in anyone's best interest.

Um, no. My Aspie husband would consider himself far less capable to homeschool than me. He would never, EVER consider it. The stress would do him in. He can't handle stress or confrontation. He can't even handle the outbursts my son will have at times over homework.