Original URL: http://school.familyeducation.com/home-schooling/stress/39279.html

Helping a Student Make the Change from Public or Private School to Homeschool

The degree of difficulty your child experiences in his or her transition from institutional schools will depend largely on the child's age and personality and the relationship you and your child have. The younger the child is when you make the transition, the fewer issues you are likely to deal with. Similarly, if you and your child have a good, close relationship, it is less likely that you or your child will have problems. If your child is having behavior problems, particularly those associated with a group (such as hanging around with the wrong crowd), you are more likely to have issues when transitioning that child to homeschool.

Although there is no way to account for every possible issue your child might have with a transition to homeschool, the remainder of this section explains some of the more common issues and suggests some things you can do to deal with them.

Dealing with Social Anxiety
The most common issue your child is likely to have with being homeschooled comes under a catchall of what I call "social anxiety." The basic root of this comes from children's fears that they will no longer have any contact with other kids or that they will no longer be able to have their friends. (In some cases, like when your child has been associating with kids that you prefer they don't, this is one of the reasons you are homeschooling!)

If your child is older and has been in institutional schools for a long time, peer pressure has likely taught your child to think in "group-think." In this mode of thinking, whatever the crowd is doing is "in" and whatever they aren't doing isn't in (or "cool" to use another word for it). You child might express this as "I don't want to be weird." While homeschooling is growing rapidly, it is still possible that your child doesn't know many homeschoolers and might consider people who homeschool to be weird (translated different, which is naturally bad under group-think!).

If you have any issues with transitioning your child to homeschool, this type of issue is the most likely one you will experience. Unfortunately, you can't convince a child who is locked into the "group-think" social structure of institutional schools that homeschool will be better. But, you can do several things to reassure such a child about homeschooling:

• Help your child remain in contact with his or her friends (at least those who aren't a negative influence on your child).

• Use your homeschool network to locate other homeschooled kids with whom your child might become friends. Make it possible for your child to regularly spend time with those other homeschoolers. Not all that time has to be doing homeschool activities either. Homeschool kids benefit just from hanging around and having fun, too.

• In addition to letting your child hang out with other homeschooled kids, arrange to have your child to "interview" some of these kids to get their perspectives on the pros and cons of homeschooling.

• Emphasize how much more fun and freeing homeschool will be than institutional school. Focus on things like field trips, fewer hours in the school day, more flexibility, and so on.

• Demonstrate how they will be able to move as fast as they can to get their work done. And when they're finished, they're finished – unlike institutional schools in which they are required to be in certain places (translation: classrooms) for a set amount of time – regardless of whether anything valuable is happening or not. Many kids, especially those with active minds, get bored with institutional schools. Homeschool will be less boring for these kids because you will design the learning to match the child's capabilities.

• You might be able to help some kids by explaining that you are just trying homeschooling for a period of time, say, for a school year. Tell them at the end of the year, you will evaluate what has happened to see how it has worked for everyone. This can help kids not feel trapped into something that is going to continue forever. The odds are that you and the child will have great success so it is highly unlikely this evaluation will lead to returning the child to an institutional school.

If your child is extremely tied into the "social scene" at school and suffers from a group-think addiction, your explanations might not help too much. If that is the case, you might just have to bear with your child as he or she struggles with the transition. If you stay the course, I believe that your child will eventually grow to accept and even value homeschooling. But, in the worst cases, that acceptance can take some time so you need to be patient. It can take some time for a child to break free of the group-think way of life.

After this sometimes painful transition, your child will begin to think more independently and over time will come to not look for other people to direct his or her thinking or actions so much (and when they do, they will naturally look to you instead of other children).

Someone who has been in an institution for a large part of their life, such as a traditional school, gets used to having a rigid structure that includes someone telling them what to do and when to do it (even if they don't like that part of it so much). When a child moves to a homeschool, that rigidity largely goes away. Some children will really take to this lack of rigidity very well; though it might cause some anxiety in others.

In both cases, you can help your child with this aspect of the transition by making sure you take your homeschool as seriously as you want them to take it. You can convey this in a number of ways, including the following:

• Maintain a room dedicated to homeschool.

• Make sure they have a schedule that they know you expect that they keep – it's up to you to make sure they keep it.

• For the first month or two, keep school hours as regular as you can; introduce flexibility gradually to give your child a chance to get used to it.

• Act like a teacher/coach while school is in session. Make sure you conduct yourself like a teacher or coach when you are teaching rather than a parent. This will help your child get accustomed to you in this role.

• As you establish the proper homeschool environment, you can gradually "release the reigns" as your child begins to accept and learn to operate in greater independence.

Dealing with the Need for Separation from You
Depending on your child's age and personality, they might have a greater need for independence than others. As you might expect, this situation is more likely with older children, but it can apply to even extremely independent children. Until they understand how homeschooling works, children might experience some anxiety about having to spend too much time with their parent (that being you).

This issue is rather easily dealt with by emphasizing the independent aspects of homeschooling. For example, especially for older kids, you can allow them times of mostly independent work. You should also consider creating a study area outside of the homeschool room, for instance in a bedroom. This will allow the child to separate himself or herself when needed.

Dealing with the Need for Separation from Siblings
Another of the great things about homeschooling is that it fosters very close relationships between the siblings who are homeschooled. Although this is a good thing, some children might see this as a bad thing, especially if there is a large age difference between siblings. ("I have to spend all day in the same room with him!")

Over time your children will come to enjoy spending time together so this is another issue that is more one of perception than reality. Still, it can be a serious concern for a child who is dealing with the anxiety that a switch to homeschooling can bring.

Because you are likely to be teaching all of your children at the same time, it isn't practical to keep them separated, nor should you really try. However, you should provide some degree of separation between siblings if they express the need for it. The best way to do this is to create some independent study areas in your home where kids can work on their own from time to time.