Homeschooling presents particular problems for single parents, and many dismiss the idea as simply being impractical. Many thousands of single parents do however home school their children because the problems are often quite simple to overcome.
Homeschooling is not an easy option at the best of times but if you are a single parent then you may well be tempted to simply dismiss the idea as being impossible. Before you do so however you should know that there are literally thousands of single parents of both sexes homeschooling their children today and doing so very successfully.
For most single parents the biggest problem is simply one of finance because their primary goal has to be to get out and earn a living to support both themselves and their children. Surprisingly enough however the real problem is often not money but time.
We tend to think of homeschooling as being a full-time job along the lines of eight hours a day five days a week but in reality it is far from that. To begin with the normal public school day in most counties is just six hours and this includes such things as lunch breaks, breaks between classes and a lot of time spent sitting around doing nothing of any real value, bringing the true 'working' day probably down to no more than about four hours.
But that's not the end of it because you also need to figure in such things as weekends and school breaks, including the long summer holiday. Spread this out across the year and you will probably be amazed to find that your child is only studying for an average of about two hours a day.
Against this background it is easy to see that with the right time management it might well be possible to fit in both a job and homeschooling. You may still feel however that this is going to leave you with no time for anything else and feeling more than a little drained at the end of the day. Until you consider just what homeschooling entails.
The majority of homeschooling parents do not follow the tradition classroom teaching approach but center learning very much around the child and his or her strengths and weakness and likes and dislikes. And here we see one of the surprises for many homeschooling parents.
Children who are given the resources and guidance but otherwise left largely to pursue the subjects that they enjoy at their own pace will, in most cases, develop an enquiring mind and a love of learning which will allow them to study very effectively and very successfully on their own. They will of course need your help and you will have to check over the work and provide correction and on-going guidance, but this can often be done quite easily and quickly in the evening and at weekends. Above all, you will find that there is certainly no need to sit with the child while he or she is studying and the child can simply be left to get on with the necessary work.
If this seems a strange thing to say then believe me it's quite true. Many studies have shown that home schooled children are on the whole extremely responsible and adopt a very mature attitude towards learning.
But that of course this not the end of the story because the other thing that you need to consider is the fact that you don't have to tackle homeschooling on your own even if you are a single parent.
Many parents, single or otherwise, make use of tutoring services and, while this is a subject in itself and not something to get into in this article, tutoring services range widely from employing in-home tutors to using online Internet tutoring. Costs also vary widely but a tutor can often cost little more than day care and indeed can often be combined with day care.
Another option for many single parents is to elect to work at home. This could be as simple as running your own business out of your home or looking for a job that allows you to work at home. Many companies nowadays employ telesales or customer support staff who are able to do their job over the telephone from their own home. These options won't suit everybody of course, but they are an option worth considering.
And how about running your own Internet business? If you are starting from scratch then building an online business is not perhaps as easy or as fast as many people would have you believe and is certainly something that needs research in terms of both the investment required and the time that it would take to get up and running. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of people making a part or full-time living online.
Homeschooling undoubtedly presents its own special problems for single parents but as you can see from just the few examples given here there are ways to overcome these difficulties. In some cases it may be just a simple matter of organizing your time while in others you may need to consider tutoring or getting together with other homeschooling parents in your area to pool your time and resources. Whatever your particular problem though you will find that there is almost always a solution which will allow you as a single parent to give your children the homeschooling education that will set them on the right path for their future success.
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