A homemade birthday cake is delicious, unless you eat the whole thing in one sitting.
A hot bath is lovely, unless the water overflows the tub and drips through the floorboards to ruin the room below.
A scenic drive is beautiful, unless the driver stops every ten feet to set up a tripod for the photo op.
Are you doing enough. . .or too much?
What does this have to do with homeschooling? Everything—particularly if you labor under that continuous sense of vague guilt that you are not doing enough. How much are we, as homeschool parents, supposed to do? How do we prepare our kids in homeschool to be successful? And, how do we recognize when we cross the line between enough and too much?
In each of the examples listed above, things got out of hand when the person in charge did not recognize the boundary, did not recognize the effect of continuing past the point of enjoyable/healthy/reasonable.
It’s the same thing in homeschooling. We may not recognize when we are crossing a boundary—taking our child beyond “enough” to “too much.” So here are some guidelines:
- Pay more attention to your child’s emotional and intellectual maturity than to the demands of the textbook, schedule, or program. You have observed and know things about your individual child that textbooks/schedules/programs do not. And, because you’re homeschooling that child, you have the freedom to say, “Enough!”
- Learning is HARD WORK! So, be sensitive to when your child has reached their limit of mental effort for the day—and then say, “Enough!”
- Believe it or not, your goal is not to finish the textbook. The goal is for your child to learn how to learn, to love learning, and to retain what they are studying. So ask yourself if those goals are being reached. It not, say “Enough!” (And find a better-fitting approach for your child, one that invites a love of learning to grow.)
Remember, stay relational!