I have several things in my past which I would do differently if I had the chance, but there is one thing that I truly regret: pushing my son too hard when I first started homeschooling him. Let me clarify that I don’t mean pushing, as in helping him attain the best work he is capable of.
When my son was five years old and I began homeschooling him, his little friends over in the public kindergarten were learning to read. He, on the other hand, couldn’t recognize the first four letters of the alphabet, despite the effort I made to teach him day after day. I thought surely I had to get him “up to speed”. Oh, how wrong I was.
Kids learn at their own pace, and pushing or trying to consolidate lessons to get “caught up”, will not work and may, in fact, hurt our children. In many cases homeschooled children are behind their public school peers in the first three or four years of school, but after that they begin to surpass the public school kids, and they continue in that fashion through high school.
That is not to say that your child is guaranteed to excel over his public school peers. This is just an average, and I mention it only because we cannot compare ourselves with the public school. We are teaching our child, who is an individual, with his own personal needs and strengths. We are looking for progress made, but that progress should not be measured by the public school standards.
Enjoy your child, and help them to love learning. Yes, I did say that: love learning. Don’t teach them to hate it! You may not mean to, but you will teach them to hate it if you push too hard. You are not in a race with your child’s public school peers.
Thank you for this reminder. I wish I could go back and tell my early homeschooling self not to compare my children to their mainstream schooled cousins. Also, to pay no mind to relatives comparing them either!