Concerns About Summer Home Schooling

For the summer, some parents may decide to teach or school their children rather than sending them to their regular school for the summer, or to a summer camp. While there are some reasonably good reasons for doing this, some issues of great concern do exist.

It is possibly that some parents believe home schooling this summer will improve their children's relations with other adults. But more significantly, it may help to drastically reduce or even avoid today's strong peer pressure culture on their kids. So for example, the peer culture of excessive premarital sex, drugs and alcohol can be avoided through home schooling during the summer when kids often have more freedom to do additional activities. This peer culture pressure is often the concern of religious parents who desire to protect their children from being abuse, so they will adhere to the religious dimensions of their faith.

More direct and personal teaching (and attention) is also possible. One important point is that bright or brilliant students can be adversely affected by slower students and the progress of teaching in the public school environment, for example. So a mother, father or guardian will tend to teach the child at home so as to enhance their true potential and development. The bright child, for example, will then be relieved from possible boredom or even hatred for school work out of frustration that may result form receiving school lessons at a slower pace or kept from accelerating base on his/her true potential.

There is little doubt that family support will be better during home schooling during the summer. The stress of getting-up and going through the daily school routine, confronting traffic, dealing with diverse personalities at school and all the other problems of the school daily life can now be avoided. Children schooled at home will most likely tend to know more about their siblings and even their parents, simple because they are now exposed more often to them and for greater periods of time in the day. We also need to know that closer family relations will give children a greater capacity to confront, interact and deal with general principles of adult life in the world at a later time. The possibility to discover a very good and potentially satisfying vocation, for example, will be possible. Children will be able to concentrate under a more receptive environment that may very well allow them to think and discover their real interests and themselves.

But although there are good reasons for home schooling this summer, it may function as an artificial process that, for example, shield children from the realities of the world, such as violence and abuse, that they may very well have to confront as adults. Interactions with real people is a must in real life, and if we do too much to shield kids from this, they may have a problem later in life.

Some parents may decide to take summer home schooling a little further and keep their kids at home during regular school times (that begin in August or September when school commence for the new school year). If parents are not skillfully trained to deal with the full time process of teaching their kids, this may not be the best or most ideal thing for their children. The public or private school system then becomes absolutely necessary in the interest of the child. Maybe proper screening of schools by the parents is better to find the most suitable one for their kids.

Children often need to know more about other kids their own age and interact with them. If a child is an only child, for example, this will not be possible at home, especially if that only child is the sole person being taught by the parent. Keeping kids at home for schooling beyond the summer period will also hinder their abilities to have access to and accept a broader perception of views and life in general. This is achievable at regular schools with other kids, teachers, administrators, guest teachers and such alike.

The adult education system is so structured that at a later time in life, the child who becomes a teen may have problems entering a college of his/her choice. If the Standardized Testing at the regular School System was not adhered to by the child because he/she was kept away from this reality while at home longer than intended, this can be a major problem. Sometimes the acceptance or admission to a college may be difficult to be judged and approved by the college officials because the child was kept from the regular school educational testing system and extra activities.

Parents are always concerned about the acceptance of their children in the general population or society. So children not properly exposed to a complex puralistic society like, for example, the United States or France, will have difficulty in life. Children often better able to learn respect for others with public exposure, rather than from being kept as kids from real life and living.

These are some of the issues parents and guardians need to remember this summer as they prepare to home school their children. Home schooling is good, but it has to be done in line with other factors and reality of life in modern societies. This must be done in the interest and wellbeing of the child.

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