Unemployment's Silver Lining: An Opportunity to Home School Your Children for the Summer

There are many reasons why parents might want to teach their child at home during the summer, even if the child attends public school during the regular school year. Unemployment is one reason to consider summer home schooling, and the reasoning behind it may surprise you at first.

It is unfortunate in countless ways when a family becomes economically compromised due to the sudden unemployment of a parent. Many parents are struggling along on one income (or less) these days, and you are far from alone. Some unemployed parents continue to job-hunt, others decide to stay at home indefinitely, while still others consider change career paths entirely. Some overhaul their entire lives, others fall into despair, others discover gratitude for what they've achieved and a sense of relief in not being at work anymore. Most unemployed people will feel most of those things at one point or another. That goes double if the unemployed person is a parent and feels obliged not to despair but to keep up hope. This can be difficult in the face of losing both your routine and your paycheck.

You may be looking for frugal but entertaining things to do with your child this summer. Last summer you were able to sign your child up for two or three summer camps. This summer you can only afford one, or none at all. You're busy much of the day, both with childcare and with figuring out where to go from here when it comes to working. You're frustrated by having both too much to do and too little to do. Your kids are on you 24/7 to entertain them. Your self-esteem might not be in the tank yet, but it's dangling its toes over the edge. You're getting advice that you need to cut back on expenses, but you've done everything you can, and now you're looking at your kids and you wonder how much longer you'll have to disappoint them. You're worried.

Yet, amidst all this frustration and uncertainty, there is at least one useful thing you can do. You have the choice to view this time between jobs as an excellent educational opportunity for your children. If your child's final report card left anything to be desired, you can redirect his or her education while you have the time. Even if they got straight As, kids forget a great deal of what they've learned over the summer without any practice in those subjects. This causes a child to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing the previous year's information when he or she goes back to school in September. I believe this to be a pointless and preventable waste of time.

Go look at your child's last report card: you probably still have it somewhere. So he got an A in reading but only a C+ in writing? Why is that? Did he bring home a folder full of work? Go look through it. Right now. Do you see any glaring errors being repeated, such as using the wrong homophone (there instead of their, your instead of you're)? You can do something about that. More to the point: you should.

There are plenty of informal anecdotes about this "summer learning loss" as well as some actual hard evidence and professional opinions. These can be found by using a search engine with the above phrase or a similar one in quotes. I will provide further references at the end of this article.

Traditionally, summer vacation has been viewed by parents and children alike as downtime: a nearly sacred time for a child to do nothing on purpose. Those who oppose year-round schooling are likely to suggest that without a completely unstructured summer, our children would never lie on the grass and look at the clouds. Even if they thought to do it, they would be far too occupied in their studies to ever have the time. If there were things to learn in the summer, the children would never ride bicycles or chase down the ice cream truck or run madly about the neighbourhood with the neighbour kids until the streetlights come on.

I disagree. I see no reason why these ideas need to be in opposition. A child can take a half hour to do some spelling work or to play a math game with his father and still have plenty of time to go play at the park. Surely, we are not talking about home schooling the child for 6 or 7 hours per day. A typical classroom could have 18 to 30 children in it: yours may have one or two or three. You will not need anywhere the same amount of time that the public school teacher needs in order to do the same work. An hour is plenty. A four day school week is plenty. That's four hours a week. There's plenty of play time left.

A note for city dwellers: Times have changed for many families, and I'm not just talking about job loss. You may have been raised in a small town or in the suburbs 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. You may be raising your own children in a big-city apartment, where it's unlikely the children will be running through sprinklers all summer, because you haven't got a lawn in the first place. You may live in the suburbs, but too near a busy road for small children to play safely on the sidewalk.

If your apartment-raised kids don't get to run through lawn sprinklers all summer, it is truly no big deal. if your kids can't safely bike around the block, oh well. You've already figured out that they can do these things or similar things elsewhere, and that they have lots of equally fun things to do at home. You've learned not to listen to people who are critical of your parenting when that criticism is about inconsequential things. What's happened is that you may not be your best self right now, and so you're kicking yourself over things that do not matter. And so if you have concerns about your child's education, you may be listening to the voice that says "what exactly do you think YOU can do about this, huh?".

You will need to rely on your own creativity. Like most things to do with parenting, this is an exercise in using the brain Nature gave you to come up with creative solutions. These solutions may not look like other people's solutions. And that's okay. You might even want to embrace this fact!

What one considers to be appropriate varies according to what's available in the times we live in: if you look through a decades-old cookbook dedicated to inexpensive meals, you will find Cheddar cheese used instead of hamburger meat, and huge numbers of eggs. This isn't modern thinking for modern times. It's outdated. It verges on absurd! Just imagine suggesting today that a casserole which uses 12 eggs and two pounds of Cheddar cheese is economical! Oh dear! Never mind the cholesterol! Yet it was truly frugal advice years ago in different times.

Perhaps in these times it is also no longer modern thinking to plan for your children to do absolutely nothing academic until school resumes in September. Yet, because of your weakened finances, it becomes more and more important over time that your child continues to receive opportunities for intellectual stimulation year-round. A series of videos from the Canadian public television station TVOntario states that the average learning loss due to extended summer vacation is approximately one month's worth of knowledge. It also states that children growing up in poverty are likely to lose much more than children who grow up in a more financially comfortable environment.

Now, even though you are unemployed, you might argue that your family isn't poor, or even particularly disadvantaged, at least not on the long-term. You think that description would likely be an exaggeration. Perhaps you wisely budgeted and saved what you could while you were employed. You're not in danger of losing your house. The kids have enough to eat. They have nice clothes on their backs, and you are able to take them to the zoo once in a while. So what's the problem? Besides, you say to yourself, all those studies about children losing educational ground during the summer are referring to the disparity between the poorest and the richest children. You yourself are hanging in there, although not as comfortably as before: neither rich nor totally impoverished. Well, that's excellent! But like many things which seem to be about money, it's really not all about money at all.

If you used to do activities together which you can no longer afford to do, your child will notice. You don't make so many trips to the toy store. You don't eat out often. You see fewer movies at the theater. So, one reason to provide structured lessons is that the child will have a semblance of normalcy and consistency throughout the summer while you are undergoing a job hunt or skills development course. They're used to being at school. They like things they are used to. It's not much of a stretch to have a bit of school at home. School provided day to day structure for him until the school year ended, even when life at home changed. He could welcome the familiar routine of a worksheet or a book report here or there.

There is still great value for you in the idea of temporarily home schooling your child. You might want to give your child a very firm grasp on basic math and language concepts so that they always have those skills at the ready. You could by this point be silently acknowledging the practical aspects: your child loses so much learning over the summer and then needs to relearn it. But, you don't need another stress in your life, as you're already stressed enough. I'm suggesting that abit of home schooling here and there will serve to alleviate stress, not cause it. And wait... won't this just cost more money? It doesn't have to. Use the library. Use internet resources. Read to your kids. I'll have further suggestions in my next article.

There could be fuzzier reasons to teach your children at home in the summer: heartfelt reasons. You may have a yearning to do something with your child which will last, when other things you've tried to build have fallen. These ideas aren't any less important than the practical reasons. They're just less easy to define. "I think it would be fun, and I think it would bring us a bit closer together" is a fine reason to try a few lessons here and there. Really, that's good enough.

The heart of the matter when it comes to the emotional part of it is this: it does neither of you any good for both of you to appear idle for months at a stretch. Even though you are job-hunting, and keeping the house up to health codes, and printing up resumes, a younger child will not see that as actual work. Obviously it is! -but it is truly not apparent to the child.

Housework is never finished. Your child didn't help you write that resume and doesn't come with you on interviews. He doesn't see any results from the work you do at home. As far as he knows, you've lost your way, and this could frighten him. He's not stupid. He knows something's changed, he probably at least half-understands, and he knows you're stressed. You will be surprised by your child's concern that you "do nothing all day".

When you begin teaching your child at home, you are united for a common purpose: interacting with one another and enjoying each other's company. This is not only good for his intellectual well-being, but he will be emotionally comforted by your leadership. While it is not the primary reason to home school for the summer (one must be thinking of what the child needs first), you could also be comforted by the work you create. When you've been working at finding work, and/or excavating Mount Laundry in between printing off resumes and making phone calls, it is heartening to have direct, visible work which can be conceived and finished within a day or two. It's about a realistic sense of accomplishment for both of you.

You can do this. What you cannot do is do the very same thing all day every day without losing your mind. That goes for job searching and housework and idle play and running through sprinklers and anything else that you and your children might currently just have too much of.

You have a double-sided problem: 1) you're unemployed and not able to outsource fun educational things for your kids to do, and 2) your kids are losing ground over the summer without anything educational to do. But, when you look, you can see that within the first problem lies the answer to the second one. You might not be able to send your kids off to learn things, but you have the time to teach them at home, and they need not fall behind at all. The worst that can happen is that you end up spending some quality time together focused on something that matters to your child.

In my next article, I will give some solid ideas for interesting summer home school activities. Until then, keep your chin up and pat yourself on the back: you've come this far, and you're going to do something worthwhile with your time until you find a job. Who knows, maybe even after you find one, you'll still want to sneak in a lesson here and there just for old times' sake.

TVOntario Summer Brain Drain videos: http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoparents/index.cfm?page_id=483&event_id=1745