Edited by Mimi Rothschild
But what can I do when my homeschooled child has a temper tantrum, or refuses to eat a meal time, or refuses to do his schoolwork? What can we do to ease this and other types of behavior that appear rebellious to parents and may have become a favorite past time for the child as a means of gaining negative attention from the parents. Children have manyways o getting what they need. They can appear at times vary at step two at pulling out and using just the one that will be the most irritating at the precise moment. The child, through these tactics, is really saying that he wants to be the center of attention for a while.

Sometimes parents take the attention-getting antics of the child too seriously. What can parents do with these trying times,? A good principle to keep in mind is that there are some things that a parent must learn to it nor. A next-door neighbor of ours used to tell us. You see too much where your child is considered quite seeing so much. Some of the behavior problems of your child which were you so much will be taken care of by time and the process of the child growing up. This neighbor was not a child psychologist and yet we have found that he was giving a sound advice.

Things will go a lot smoother if we can understand of a six-year-old will usually act like a six year old, and that when the same child gets to be 10 years of age he will usually act like a 10-year-old. To say to the child don’t be childish is about as effective as saying don’t breed. All children can vote missed the mark at times. This is because they are children and need time to learn how to conform to the requirements of their social world, time to learn how to control their emotions, time to learn how to get along with other people, time to learn how to make the most time. If parents can remember this, it will help in keeping the child’s behavior in proper perspective.

When the homeschooling child’s behavior becomes too unruly. Too frequently, it might be a good idea to look at his daily routine. Does he have enough opportunity to play with other children? Is there enough variety in his day? Does he have space and equipment for active play? Is he fenced in with too many unnecessary restrictions? There is a difference between the child’s natural exuberance and his misbehavior. The youngster is by nature adventuresome, curious, energetic cop, inclined to explore. When he has these tendencies curbed by parents who are too restrictive, the child naturally responds in some form of a bilious behavior.

In coping with the behavioral patterns which say “I want your attentio”, homeschooling parents sense of humor can be indispensable. Give the child’s attention temporarily and then channeled the incident into something amusing.

Another means of avoiding complex problems over his unacceptable behavior is by setting up a set of rules for conduct which the child clearly understands. If the child can see with these rules are not simply that are made necessary for the welfare of all concerned. And by the very nature of the situation itself, he is much more likely to go along with them. A word of caution: if the rules are too numerous to rigid and unsuited to the child’s present level of development, he is likely to thumb his nose at them, figuratively and perhaps even literally.

In all of this effort to deal with the child who is missing the mark, the parent who can retain his emotional equilibrium, is the parent who is in the best position to win. In order to keep his emotional control, it may be necessary for the parent simply to walk away from the situation and not deal with it until he has cooled off and until he can get the proper situation into proper focus. Here again a sense of humor can be a valuable tool. A smiling parent who can see, and can lead the child to see, the ridiculousness of a situation can often change and emotion packed atmosphere into a serene one and can do it much more satisfactorily than a scowling and threatening parent.

There is no more dynamic power in a child’s life than the need for his parents wholehearted approval and recognition. The child may hide the truth so that it is not easy for a parent to perceive it. He will often relinquish some of his strongest and most wholesome urges in order to adhere to parental instructions, if he knows that disobedience for the sake of independents will gain for him the disapproval of his parents. Even the child’s “I hate you” is the desperate plea of the youngster who has a worthless peeling that he is so hopelessly trapped by his extreme need for approval and acceptance that it compels him to acquiesce to the domination of his parents. Because they are children, children will fail to measure up to our expectations sometimes. How we as parents behave when our children misbehave is the real test of parenthood. If we can pass the test most of the time, we can breathe a sigh of relief by feeling that we are normal parents after all.

A mother and her son were admiring some baby chickens. The son picked up one and held it so tightly that it almost smothered. It struggled a until it succeeded in escaping. Casually, the mother said, if you hold a cheek to tightly, it wants to get away. Try holding one gently. The next little chick nestled quietly in the Sun’s open palm, while the mother injected a timeless truth: you know, son. People are the same as chicks. If we told those we love too closely to us, Bailey. They will struggle for freedom. Hold them with open hands and they won’t feel smothered.

That mother had shared a truth that valuable football parents: when are chicks, our children, missed the mark, let us deal with them with the open hand of overall love, understanding, and honesty.

By Mimi Rothschild

Lets take a look at the central objectives of an outstanding Christian homeschooling program.

The central objectives of any good homeschooling program should be:

1) to assist students in the understanding and development of their own strengths and weaknesses,

2) To perceive, respond to and participate in God’s continuing activity and revelation in the human and Christian communities. If they deal with their continual life involvements of becoming an independent adult,

3) to provide a wide range of stimulating resources and tools that will enable students and parents to fully explore the world God has created,

4) to assist members of the Christian community to learn how to become change agents in the world, and

5) to explore ways in which homeschooling students can become social activists.

It is crucial to exist within a supportive believing community for the support necessary to become a change agent in society. The central objective of a good homeschool plan starts with the assumption that believers within the Christian community can become change agent much as Jesus commands us to be salt and light in the world

One temptation when developing the Christian homeschool curriculum is to try to copy the same educational system that most of us grew up with. Many homeschoolers set up desks and blackboards in their kitchens and tried to duplicate the educational process that exists in most public and private schools. I would like to propose that homeschooling does not have to replicate the traditional learning process and can and should in many cases reinvent the process so that more appropriately adapt to the needs of the individual learners.

In a traditional school system, students are grouped together by their chronological age. Every student that was born in a specific year is put in that grade level. Your respective of their intelligence and their mastery of the material. This alone create enormous problems for the teachers. The fact that everyone in the classroom was born in the same year means that both the curriculum and the teaching processes is usually dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. In other words, the teacher is often forced to teach to the slowest child in the classroom. What happens to the rest of the children in this scenario? It has been said that a one size fits all education, it’s no one. This is where we, as homeschoolers, have tremendous freedom.

One of the central objectives in creating a reinvented homeschool program is to forgo the notion that just because children were born in a certain year. That means they should have acquired certain skills and should be learning from certain books. That’s completely rethink the idea that children need to be at a specific place at specific times. It’s learning a race? Who determines when and why might eight-year-old has to learn XYZ. Exactly when he’s eight? This basic philosophy stems from the need in an institutional setting to herd large groups of children from one task to the other at the same time. In a great homeschooling program, we can jettison this notion altogether and concentrate our efforts on meeting the individual needs of our children.