You have excitedly prepared for the upcoming year of homeschooling. You begin working with your child, and as the days pass, they moan, cry, shut down, and resist working. You question whether you might lose your mind, wondering why your child hates homeschooling and how to turn them around?
Here are 8 reasons why kids hate school:
- Your school day is too structured.
- The learning environment is negative.
- A lack of social interaction.
- Children feel academic pressure.
- The learning environment is unstable.
- Your child thinks they do not need school.
- Your child lacks proper sleep.
- Your child lacks variety.
There’ll be kids who fight and resist every day in homeschooling, which can be challenging for teachers and students alike. Beyond learning issues, social concerns, or emotional problems, there are reasons why some kids react negatively to the learning environment. This article will explore 8 reasons why kids hate school and how to help make the learning experience a positive one.
1. Your School Day Is Too Structured
Some structure is good, but too much control or overplanning in a day may make some children likely refuse to work with their parents or act like they just don’t care. The same could be true for a traditional school environment. Some kids just don’t like to be told what to do, how to do it, and when.
How to Help
Evaluate your schedule. By default, parents that grew up in a traditional school may apply the same techniques replicated in homeschooling.
Schools teach in timed minutes and hourly blocks, with over 20 kids sitting for hours in hard chairs in the classroom, aiming to teach standardized skills homogeneously at once. There’s a high demand for control and structure in this environment. This draconian setup should be drastically different from your homeschooling routine.
All kids need breaks, with younger ones needing even more frequent movement. Change your schedule after evaluation, and remember that homeschooling gives you the flexibility to let your children move around and take breaks. They can pursue learning in a way that appeals to their interests and learning styles.
Change your lesson planning. If your focus is on checking off boxes in your lesson plans, take time to refocus your planning around your child and what they need, working at their pace.
Comparison steals joy. Don’t compare what other families are doing and try to do the same. Their standards may not work for your family. Put your children’s needs first. Homeschooling lets them be individual learners.
2. The Learning Environment Is Negative
Your attitude towards learning can directly affect your child. Everyone has bad days, even parents, but your mood must set the tone for your children as the leader and teacher.
Do you stare at your lessons thinking:
- “Do they understand what’s at stake here?
- “Will they regret not putting in effort until it’s too late?”
- “Will this prevent my child from going to college”?
Your teaching style and attitudes may not align with your child’s learning style and future goals. Each child is different, and you should put your own agendas aside and find the teaching style that best engages your child.
Trying to force your child into your ideas of success could result in behavioral issues, distractibility, anxiety, and academic struggles.
How to Help
Avoid placing your struggles and concerns on your child. And if you’re feeling grumpy or stressed, take a break, enjoy each other, and share kindness. Homeschooling gives you the flexibility to step away from stressful moments.
Find ways to incorporate intentional positive encouragement into the day. You don’t have to laugh all day, but you can say uplifting and positive things to your child.
You can’t control the future or your child’s choices, so focus on the now. You’re doing a good job, have already committed to homeschooling, and you’ll all get to where you need to be.
Are you giving homework? Practice is essential for learning skills, but does it have that traditional public school homework feel? Consider if homework is taking away from other necessary skills or adding any value to learning.
Homework should never be the majority of time spent on school work. If your child can master the skills, this type of work may not be necessary. Move on to more learning, expansion, and other topics instead.
Get to know your child and observe them if they start to act up. Their behavior could be a clue into how your teaching may not align with their learning style. Monitor and adjust to meet their needs.
3. A Lack of Social Interaction
Children can and will experience ups and downs in social interactions with peers. They can feel lonely as well. Establishing and maintaining friendships can be challenging throughout life. Your child may be craving interactions with others, and school is getting in the way of those interactions.
How to Help
Talk with and encourage your child to share their feelings. Give your child opportunities and time to explore the world, pursue personal interests, and develop friendships.
Schedule playdates and fun get-togethers outside of the school routine for relaxation and fun. Get involved in sports teams, church and community groups, and volunteering. Local libraries often provide activities for all ages of children to come together.
If you notice anxiety or a withdrawal from social opportunities, it may be time to work with a counselor as well.
Your child spends a large part of their days with you and the rest of the family. Give them a break and interact with others outside of the homeschool environment. Don’t forget to socialize yourself as well.
4. Children Feel Academic Pressure
Children may feel like they can’t meet the expectations placed upon them. Additionally, they may feel like they don’t have the support to accomplish tasks. This frustration can be especially true for those with slower processing speeds, poor working memory, ADHD, and other struggles.
This pressure can cause a student to shut down due to stress. A stressed brain can’t learn when cognitive demands are beyond what it can handle. Survival instinct may take over, and the child may want to fight, run away, or freeze and stop working.
How to Help
Replace the negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Instead of saying, “This is hard.”, say “I will persevere.”
Try an easy-hard-easy pattern of breaking up the work, giving students a mental break before and after complex or challenging tasks. This flexibility promotes success in conjunction with perseverance.
If a learning disability might be the cause, bring your concerns, questions, and observations to your pediatrician. They can help you find the right professionals to see if there’s an underlying cause.
Take note if your child complains about headaches, itchy eyes, blurry vision, or isn’t making progress with reading. Do they cover an eye, lose their place in the text, or tilt their heads? Do they hold the book at varying distances or feel nauseous after detailed work?
It might be time to visit an optometrist for a vision exam. Vision problems are common, and your child may need glasses.
5. The Learning Environment Is Unstable
Now, this may not be referring to gun violence or bullying like what may occur in a public school. But your child could be experiencing anxiety over something happening at home. Maybe your relationship is going through a negative patch, house repairs are making the home busy with strangers, or someone in the home has a long-term illness.
Perhaps the homeschool classroom or work area is uncomfortable regarding temperature, work area, or noise levels.
Anxiety over feeling uncomfortable or unsafe can make people feel like they have no control. This stress can lead to shutting down, acting out, or acting like they don’t care to cover up and cope with the feelings.
How to Help
These feelings are authentic and valid for the learner. Consider counseling or family therapy to get to the root cause of any anxiety. Just having a safe place to work on anxiety-management strategies can make a world of difference for a child. These strategies can translate into the home environment and beyond.
Adjust the work area to a suitable temperature and sensory experience catered to the child. Let your child be a part of the design or set-up. This engagement helps create a sense of ownership over the environment, meaning they’re more likely to work well there.
6. Your Child Thinks They Do Not Need School
Your child may wonder why they need to write a paragraph about what they ate for dinner. Your teen may wonder why you ask him to do algebraic equations. Besides, they want to play with a toy or video game, see friends, or do anything that doesn’t involve schoolwork.
Your child may wonder how they will use the lesson or skills you’re teaching them in their current or future lives. Youth have exposure to information and examples that show successful people don’t always follow a traditional educational path.
Therefore, the content you present seems irrelevant to their non-academic career aspirations. And some just don’t know what they want to do when they grow up.
How to Help
Often students show a lack of interest in content when it holds no meaning for them. You can’t keep pushing your child just to do it, and you’ll need to consider a different approach.
Ask your child some questions to gather information for your lesson planning. Make this a conversation more than an interrogation to keep the words flowing.
Inquire more about their non-academic interests and plans. Use this information to integrate their interests into the curriculum.
For example, if your child wants to be a singer, show how math ensures finances are managed or how reading a contract ensures that people don’t take advantage of you. You can integrate skills through play, games, and movement activities for younger students. You‘ll find that this integration of skills and interests not only brings out your creativity but your child’s as well.
Sometimes the integration of interests with skills isn’t enough. Consider reframing your thoughts about schooling in general. Create excitement about the act of learning. Seeing the process to learn and accomplish things rather than the subject matter and grades has more value.
Learning how to learn will build life-long attitudes towards gaining new knowledge. Metacognition, thinking about thinking, is a valuable and teachable tool to reflect on the learning process and resulting experiences which helps to guide and change future progress.
You may implement metacognitive strategies everywhere for any subject. Edutopia.org offers some tips that you can use to promote metacognitive strategies in your homeschool lessons. These tips include debate questions, goal setting, reflection prompts, and learning journals. The goal is to help your child understand that they can do what it takes to achieve success in any area.
At times, you may need to let your child have the space to fail at something. This experience can allow them to see the impact of their own decisions and implement problem-solving for future success.
You can also encourage career exploration, finding ways for your child to connect to those that do the things they want to do. These people can provide insight into the skills they need to be successful beyond what your child may see. This new insight could just be the perfect catalyst in helping your child find that spark for learning.
Continue to foster a solid and supportive relationship with your child. This relationship will encourage them to learn about how they learn, what they want out of life, and how to get there.
7. Your Child Lacks Proper Sleep
Sleep is essential for cognitive functioning. Lack of sleep can mimic symptoms of ADHD, anxiety, and depression. If your child is yawning throughout the day or complaining of being tired, you may need to investigate why with help from a pediatrician or counselor.
How to Help
Generally, school-aged children benefit from 9-11 hours of sleep, teens need 8-10 hours, and young adults need 7-9 hours.
If the lack of sleep isn’t due to something more chronic, consider asking questions. Did your child stay up late playing video games? Are they starting to get sick? Are you living in a neighborhood that is noisy at night?
If lack of sleep is a rare occurrence, you may need to alter plans just for that day, offering breaks and a shorter workday. Perhaps you may allow some nap time to make your student more amenable to the learning process.
Make good sleep practices a priority in your home, and model it yourself as well. Stick to a consistent bedtime routine. Turn off screens before bedtime and do something relaxing and quiet. Store electronic devices out of and away from the bedroom.
8. Your Children Lacks Variety
In addition to the schedule changes mentioned above to allow breaks in learning, children also need variety in their days. Younger students may need breaks as often as every 10-minutes and, as they age, can work for more extended periods.
People need breaks from learning to retain focus, increase productivity, and reduce stress.
How to Help
Try the Pomodoro technique. This technique is a time method management where you use a timer to work for 25-minute chunks and then break for 5-minutes. You should reserve the break for something fun and non-work-related. A quick stretch, playing with the dog, getting a quick snack, or doing a fun physical activity are all options.
Be careful, though; if the timer creates anxiety or rushed work, this might not be the right strategy for your child.
You can chunk work into short segments with praise and encouragement geared towards effort and perseverance. Show respect for effort over outcomes, which helps to instill internal motivation.
By using scheduled breaks or staying in tune with when your child starts to act differently, you can help your child make learning progress.
Here are a few other “brain break” suggestions:
- Tell a silly joke and laugh together.
- Go outside for fresh air and quick physical activity.
- Try fitBoost from Sanford Health to get fun and quick moves that get kids warmed up, moving, and then cooled down before getting back to work.
- Stretch and move to a new location for the next part of the lesson.
- Practice another language such as American Sign Language (ASL) or greetings in Spanish.
- Do something artistic like coloring in part of a coloring sheet, or create a quick doodle.
- Play a favorite song and dance to it.
- Do anything that caters to the unique individual that your child is, taking a well-deserved mental and physical break.
Final Thoughts
Homeschooling need not be a constant struggle, with both you and your child losing out in the end. Making changes to the learning environment and making your lessons more fun and flexible will help your child engage more in their schooling. After all, learning should be a mix of hard work and fun in order to be a productive experience.
Sources
- Child Mind Institute: How to Help Your Child Get Motivated in School
- Manhattan Psychology Group: Five Reasons Kids Hate School and How You Can Help Them
- Reader’s Digest: What to Do When Your Child Hates School
- Impact Parents: When Your Child Really Doesn’t Care About School
- The Muse: Take It From Someone Who Hates Productivity Hacks—the Pomodoro Technique Actually Works
- Edutopia: Research-Tested Benefits of Breaks
- We Are Teachers: 50 Educational Brain Breaks
- There’s No Place Like Home: Help! My Child HATES Being Homeschooled
- Find Your Mom Tribe: 20 Things to Try if Your Kid Hates Homeschooling
- Brookings: Strategies for teaching metacognition in classrooms
- Edutopia: Metacognition: Nurturing Self-Awareness in the Classroom