School Yard- Home Schooling: Our Adventure in Home Schooling
by Shawnee Bowlin
FeedTheVillage.com - School Yard- Home Schooling: Our Adventure in Home Schooling
My daughter has always had separation anxieties, which began to cause physical stress for her in school. By her seventh grade year, I was making several trips a week to the public school to take her things like ankle braces, Tylenol, and so on, because she was mentally stressed and creating symptoms. She felt these physical stresses as a part of dealing with the social issues in public school. Always shy, my daughter did not know how to make new friends. She had friends, but they had begun to change because of the age bracket of the early teen years. The school had cliques, which made it hard to approach others to try to make new friends. She also would become very upset if a teacher would yell at her or express anger in any way. The teachers did not have a personal vendetta against her. They only dealt with their own stresses of public school life in the only way they knew. Although she seldom had any issues with teachers, anytime something did happen, she would become ill as a result. She was not only stressed if anything happened personally, she would become stressed when anything negative happened with the other classmates. The kids in the public school system were not bad kids. They only reacted to the environment and what had become acceptable around them. Social status was a big deal. So, if you were shy and middle to low income, you didn't have much of a chance to shine. It was a dog-eat-dog world in the eyes of a young teen. Since she was totally uncomfortable with any kind of confrontation, she was easily upset by any negatives in her daily life at school. The seventh grade year, which is in my opinion one of the hardest a child faces in public school, was our needle that broke the camel's back. I had become frustrated myself with trying to help her handle the stress and was stressed myself as a result. It was not a situation where she was sheltered. Her father and I made efforts to help her become stronger and have more courage. She made honest attempts to overcome her anxiety, trying whatever we felt might help her at the time, over and over again. We finally were mentally tired and out of ideas. This is when I felt God step in and take over my perspective. He guided me to make the decision to homeschool, something I had always been against. So, I began to do what I do best. I dug up information in every channel I could, I read everything I could get my hands on about homeschooling, and I contacted people I knew would have any information at all regarding homeschooling. We had friends who had begun to homeschool who attended our church, so we visited them and asked what they felt the pros and cons were. Click here to read or post comments.
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