Tricks that don’t work on this home school mom

Children have a natural talent to circumvent anything they perceive as drudgery. If you are like me, you feel accountable for the quality of education you supply to your children. Unfortunately, what we perceive as opportunity and responsibility, children sometimes see as (they say in the vernacular) a drag.   As a home schooling parent, I can not let this happen with home school activities (or any other part of the household, for that matter!) since chaos shortly follows and then no one benefits. Here is a list of common stall tactics my students use:

• Constant interruptions (changing the subject, too many questions, asking for drinks, etc.)
• Negotiating to do the least favorite job last (then they do everything else so slowly that they never get around to the last job)
• Playing possum (pretending to not feel well)
• Conveniently misplacing things needed to do the job
• Amnesia (conveniently forgetting to do it)
• Shabby work (partially done, sloppy, or not even the correct assignment)
• Plain Stubbornness (just refusing to work)
• Tit for Tat (wanting something extra for cooperating to do the undesirable job or offering to do extra chores to get out of the undesirable job  – this can be tempting, but in the end, everyone will lose)

Sometimes children will do these things without really thinking about them.  Other times, they have well laid plans.  Either way, making sure you do not reward these behaviors is very important to ceasing the perpetuation of the objectionable behavior.  Usually, the entire point is to put off a task, so here are a few ways I deal with it:

• Make the task due immediately (I call this ’stopping the world’ – absolutely nothing else happens until the task is done, with the exception of breathing)
• Make it the least-liked assignments the first items on the to do list (I like to teach ‘just get it over with.’  Google the term “If+you+have+to+eat+frogs”)
• Require the task to be done more frequently (if you try to get out of writing science definitions at my school, you will end up writing definitions in every subject)
• Assign multiple copies of the same task to be done, without access to the prior completed ones (repetition  = boredom)
• In some cases, I have been known to ‘alter’ an assignment when there has been demonstrable cause to do so.  Being reasonable shows your students how to adjust to changing circumstances.

As usual, the best way to equip yourself for dealing with children is to know each of them well.   Children give us the chance to be like angels.