By nature homeschooling offers us all a different pace to life. It gives us time to knit our hearts together with our children. Homeschooling allows for more focus to be placed on developing positive character traits. This is true not only for children with special needs, but also for all children who are homeschooled.
With the slower pace of life in a homeschooling environment, your child can take their time to develop to their full potential, as they work through materials chosen for them to progress at their own pace. When they get stuck with something they can stop and go over that for as long as necessary. When something is easy for them they can move along merrily.
In the same way, you as a parent can tailor-make your children’s curriculum to suit them and offer them a specialized education. Children with ASD (Autism spectrum disorder) tend to have highly focused interests, which can often become their career. Your job would then be to provide them materials to support their interests.
For example, if your child wants to get into rocketry, space flight or astronomy, you can source information for them in the younger years and in the older years set up internships with people in the industry and outings to places of interest like the Observatory or SALT.
Further to the above example, if they have a co-morbidity like Dyslexia or Dyscalculia, that becomes the place where you are more involved in helping them with remedial programs so that they can get those areas up to an acceptable level.
For children who have social anxiety, depression or other unregulated emotional disorders you can give them the freedom to let good days be good days and bad days be bad days. If they have recently come home to be homeschooled, you can allow them time, an agreed upon time, to acclimatize to the home and the new rhythm while you find your resources and set up counseling or professional appointments to support them.
You can set your boundaries with them around getting up times, screen usage, helping with chores and cooking meals. Ideally a period of “unschooling” can be pursued where there is a lot of freedom given to the child or teen, within agreed upon boundaries and for a specific time period. After this time they can then start adding in a variety of curricula to pick up their education again when they are regulated and perhaps in therapy, as well.
Another benefit of homeschooling children who are on the Autistic Spectrum, those who suffer from OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) or those with Tourette’s and other speech disorders, can be bullied at school. School-aged children, purely due to their immaturity, can be nasty and pick on children who are already struggling to fit into a social construct like school. At home there is no bullying and the freedom to be who they are as you gently coach them through life towards adulthood and a ‘settledness’ in themselves, knowing who they are, how they are wired and what their purpose is in life.
There are a myriad of other generalized benefits to homeschooling. To read more check out these links:
Home education with Dyslexia (and other labels)
Benefits of Homeschooling
The Hidden Blessing of Homeschooling
Raising Men and Women of Character
Homeschooling Research
How to Ensure Deep Learning in an Age of Digital Distraction
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