How To Handle Homeschooling As A Single Parent

May 3, 2009 by  
Filed under Home Schooling

The toughest task one can set for themselves is deciding to homeschool their child without having a partner to rely on. Most parents in this situation will find that the need to earn money to support their single parent family comes first, and leaves little to no time for homeschooling. Private schools, especially good ones, are often completely out of one’s income bracket. What next?

However, there are thousands of single parents who find a way to deal with this problem and end up successfully homeschooling their child. These parents find that all the trouble is definitely worth it, once they see their kid’s superior performance on standardized tests, which helps them get into top-of-the-league colleges.

The first factor to be considered is time management. If you’re organized, you’ll find yourself having more free time to dedicate to your child’s education. This is quite true, especially if you calculate the amount of time dedicated to your child in public schools. Take a six hour day, remove the time spent for lunch and class breaks, and you have a total number of hours that are quite optimal for compensation, especially if you make them all count!

And when you take into account the holidays, weekends and summer, then the time scales easily tip in your favor! Yes, kids do need time off for relaxation and other things, but why not take some of that time to educate via fun? Home schooled kids tend to be more self-motivated, and will take pleasure in learning by enjoying! So add up all the time in your favor, and you’ll find your child getting ahead of his peers by more than a grade!

There are plenty of homeschooling approaches which are quite unstructured and free-wheeling. Using these approaches gives a single-parent more time and peace of mind when it comes to homeschooling, since they don’t continuously have to monitor the child.

Using this approach, children can be free to make their own choices regarding what they want to learn, and do so at a pace conducive to them. Another approach of this kind is to give the child all the material and provide guidance to them, so that they do a lot of independent study. Thus, the single parent can dedicate some time in the evening or on weekends to check results and alter the course of the study as required.

Another key option for single-parents is having a tutor to homeschool their kids. Tutors vary from in-home teachers to those who provide resources and guidance online. In a lot of cases, tutors are quite reasonably priced, and may even be lower than day care charges! Sometimes you can have a tutor who does double duty with day care.

There are lots of single parents who have started home-based businesses. For them, this is more feasible if they compute the costs of day care, gas and car maintenance and time spent commuting. And when one takes into account the tax savings from the extra write-offs, you’re good to go. If you want to spend your time homeschooling your child, try to get into a business that doesn’t require a lot of start-up resources, especially time, as this will give you more time to dedicate to homeschooling your kid!

With the advent of the net, this is more possible than ever. Today, affiliate marketing pays upwards of $50,000 per annum. Building websites and writing newsletters requires few technical skills, as does advertising of products and services.

With a lot of research and a bit of inspired thinking, single parents will realize that they can have both the time as well as the resources for homeschooling, if they would only dare. And daring is something that most single parents have in abundance!