Homeschooling: Special Needs

Lesson 7: Problem Solving for Success

Your philosophy is created and your lesson plans are ready...but things aren't going quite as planned. Now what?

Perfection vs. Reality

When I tried to picture what homeschooling was going to be like, I imagined a glorious school, filled with exciting learning days, children who couldn’t wait to start school, zipping through the material as if no disability existed and so on. That lasted about two days. Then the novelty wore off and we settled into what the future would really be like. One day, my daughter was being overwhelmingly frustrating, having a very bad learning disability day. I was getting mad and she was getting mad. I yelled at her and said, “You would never have talked to your public school teachers that way.” She responded, “And you would never let one of my teachers yell at me the way you’re doing now.” I stopped short and declared that school was over early today. Then I went off to think. School wasn’t what I expected. Somehow, I had been sure that if her teachers had just cared enough, my daughter would be able to learn. But now I was the teacher, and no one cared more than I did. Still, we were facing many of the same problems she had experienced in school. I began to doubt myself and my ability to homeschool. What good did it do to defy convention—this was before homeschooling was popular—if I was no better than her teachers?

After a lot of thought, I realized I was expecting too much of myself. If every teacher who was not perfect resigned, there would be no teachers. I taught children at church and I frequently had days when everything went wrong. I had learned to forgive myself for those bad days and to move on. I did not expect to be perfect in any other aspect of my life. I had to give myself permission to be less than perfect as a homeschool teacher.

The challenge was that I cared so much about homeschooling and about my daughter. I wanted everything to be just right. Homeschooling, though, is just parenting with an educational flair. None of us are perfect parents, and so homeschooling sometimes won’t be perfect. There will always be days when we lose our tempers, when our children won’t work, and when the lessons are a dismal failure. There will be days when your children want to return to public school and days when you wish they would, too. There will be days when you all really want to master the subject at hand, but no matter how well you teach or how hard your child tries, nothing will happen. It’s just how it is.

It is natural and healthy to have a vision of the perfect homeschool. It gives us something to strive for. As long as we understand it is a vision, and not something we can attain every day, the dream can be good. We have taken on a most difficult task. Homeschooling is difficult for any parent, but especially difficult for parents of special needs children. We have all the challenges every other parent faces, with the added challenge of coping with some very special needs. We are trying to succeed where the professionals have failed.

Children with learning disabilities are inconsistent. One day they are brilliant and the next they can’t remember anything at all. No wonder we get mad! No wonder we consider writing notes of apology to their former teachers!

Children with any disability struggle so hard with the mechanics of daily life, even outside of the academic world. Sometimes our hearts break for them. It’s hard to keep our sympathy out of our decisions. Can we really force our daughter to try to tie that shoe or walk three steps or put on a painful brace one more time? Can we steel ourselves to their honest tears because we know that someday they will be adults and we won’t be there to take care of them? Can we be strong another hour? There are days when it just seems that we can’t. Our hearts are too full of pain, anger, exhaustion and discouragement to try again.

But we will. We’ll focus on that vision one more time, fill our hearts with resolute courage, and move on. We won’t be perfect, but we won’t give up.

These are our children. We can’t give up.

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