Burnout in Home Schooling

By Gail Jones

It doesn't matter whether you are learning in a traditional school or in a home schooling environment, there will come a time when you will come across burnout. This is something that you have to prevent so that your teaching progress is not affected.

Here are a few useful tips that you can use in order to prevent an occurrence of home schooling burnout:

Know your limitations. From the very start, you should already know your limitations and your child's limitations. You must be capable of taking things slowly sometimes, especially if your child is still young since you have to consider your child's learning capacity. Most students are average learners, obviously, so you have to take the lessons based on your child's learning pace. Never expect your small child to read complicated reading selections nor your teen to ace SAT exams.

Don't adopt strict schedules, as this can put undue pressure on your child. You should just set an interesting routine for your child to follow. Children spend most of their time doing routine activities like getting up, eating large breakfasts, reading books, practising writing, doing light chores, etc. You must insist that they finish their routine activities before they can play outside or with the computer. Even these routine activities change from day to day, but you have to make sure that your child follows these routine activities. You can add in occasional incentives or fun activities if they finish their routine tasks earlier.

You should try to get into the spirit of home schooling with your child, since it is a good method of developing a strong relationship with your child and if you and your child can relate to each other, you will find it very much easier to handle curriculum struggles and motivation issues later on. Besides motivating and guiding your child, you can also follow some of your own hobbies like gardening or cooking. If your child sees you pursuing your own interests, then he or she will also be inclined to do the same.

Since your child is into a home schooling program, you should not try to mimic a traditional schools environment. Try to use unusual methods when teaching your child. Home schooling is also about flexibility and creativity, so if you can achieve a light-hearted atmosphere, you can probably avoid burnout.

Just always try to remember that with home schooling, you don't have to structure your teaching methods in the scholastic way. You can simply do things in an enjoyable way especially when teaching very young children, so that they learn easily. Ensure you keep the day in the right balance to prevent burnout. Although your children may forget some of the day's lessons, that's all right too because somehow children develop their intelligence as well as their stature.

For sure, your children will always look back on your moments together and remember fondly how well you treated them. The old song goes: "... there's no place like home" and for little pupils, home is the best place to learn the first lessons of life. If your teenagers are already in high school or in college, they can still pursue home schooling if they want to. That would also a good decision because you'd get to keep an eye on your children's performance.

Parents always try to look after their children's best interests, so, if after careful thought, you still think that home schooling is the best option for your family, then run with it. Just follow the advice mentioned previously to prevent burnout. Make time for enjoyable activities from time to time in order to prevent monotony. - 30443

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