Life with Nin

Unschooling Kids with Unique Challenges

I am a long time unschooling parent of two teenagers.  Our daughter, now 19, has this year joined the work force and continues to live with us.  Our son, 16, has been a person with special challenges since his birth, weighing in at less than two pounds.  Even before we knew we would be homeschoolers, we knew we would be facing many challenges.  I balk at the term “special needs” since as our daughter says, ALL children have special needs.

We actually officially started homeschooling our daughter first.  We were talked into enrolling our son in the early childhood program at the local school when he was four, which lasted for a year and a half.  During that time we brought her home, so it was not that big a step for us to decide, when the school was not meeting our son’s needs, to bring him home as well.

In the beginning we had help.  In those pre-HMO days, our insurance paid for most of his therapies, physical, occupational and speech and language.  That lasted for about 4 years (ages 4-8) until we moved to another state and a less willing insurance company.  In retrospect, losing the therapists was the beginning of the best part of our journey together, the one in which we could finally acknowledge who the true experts about our son were, the ones without any other agenda:  us, his loving family.

Our daughter was a natural unschooler.  She made it clear to me early on that she was perfectly capable of studying all kinds of interesting things without my teaching them. “I’ll ask you if I need help, but otherwise stay out of my way, thank you very much.”  It took me many more years before I could hear the same message from my son, but he was telling me that all along.  I had had too many years of listening to the “experts” tell me that he was delayed in this and would always have difficulty to that, when his “strengths” were described to me as areas in which he was still behind the norms but just not as far behind.  I wondered for years if he would ever have a passion for anything at all.  It was only when I could put all that behind me and trust in his innate curiosity and drive to grow and learn that he was able to begin to bloom.  I had to make peace for myself that he would do that and all things when the time was right for him before it could happen.  For us it did not unfold until I fully embraced the unschooling approach to living.

Yes, our son has done things at a time later than society expects.  He was not an independent reader until his early teens; we put math on the back burner for years.  But he has come to every one of those areas I was told he would always have trouble with in his own time and in his own way and come to terms with each of them, but only after I stopped worrying about them and pressuring him, however subtly, about them.  He is now pursuing an amazing – to me – variety of fields at a depth I do not think even the most optimistic grandparent ever expected and with far more independence than I had ever hoped for.  He is doing algebra with his eyes on calculus, programming, horticulture and knows more about the US space program than the tour guides at Kennedy Space Center – well, almost!  He just asked me to retrieve our Latin program which a friend is borrowing, this from the child about whom we used to say that English was his second language.  And that just scratches the surface.

What would be my advice to a new family just starting out with a child with special challenges?  First, to listen to and follow your heart.  Listen to what the “experts” have to say, but if it does not ring true, remember that they can never know your child as well as you do.  They have only seen him or her in a limited, intrinsically stressful setting.  Do not expect them to recommend or support homeschooling, but do not let that discourage you.  They may be against it for reasons that make no sense to you.  Having our son in school was the second most stressful time in my life (the first was his birth and first 104 days in NICU), but the experts inside and outside of the school felt that his being in school should be giving me a much needed respite.  Obviously, they were way off base, though well intentioned.  Some will simply be uninformed about homeschooling and fear that you will have trouble with school authorities if your child is not up to grade level expectations.  If all of your experts are affiliated with the school, you KNOW they have a different agenda from yours; some will consider it their job to convince you to enroll your child in school regardless of its appropriateness for your child.

Go with the flow.  Cherish the “good” days when you feel as though you get many things done and let go of the “bad” days.  Find your escape for the bad days.  For us it was going to the park or nature walk; by the time we got home, it was not such a bad day after all and looking back, we found we had actually accomplished far more than we had expected.  Treat your child like a “normal” child; after all, whatever the challenges, this IS normal for them.  Expect no more or less of them; simply modify whenever necessary.  Most of all, love them.  They are perfect just the way they are.  No “fixing” needed here.

copyright  Carol E. Burris 1999