Most people automatically assume the material/teaching is the hard part about homeschooling aka am I smart enough to teach? That’s not it. The real hard part is discipline, especially schooling teenagers. Being the teacher and the principal and meting out the punishments, then sticking to your guns. Teenagers are professional soldiers when it comes to emotional battles and influencing guilt, and it’s all too easy to get stuck in trench warfare with them. All teens are different. However, homeschooling teens aren’t as sassy, gum poppin’, eye rolling brats like a lot of public schooled children, but they are stubborn all the same. They are having the usual difficulty (denial) in getting back into the new/old routine of school, and they make everyone pay by shirking work and walking around with silent but dark thunderclouds over their heads. Anyone could agree being this way in some way at that age.
This is what a local Tampa homeschooling mother had to say about her daily homeschooling routine at the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year, "as you know, I already warned them not to try last year’s shenanigans, but they’re doing it anyway. Neglecting subjects A, B, and C because they are at their mother’s house those days, and she doesn’t sit on their shoulders (like us) and ensure they complete all their work by the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t crack a whip behind them all day shouting, 'Heeyah mule!' I write out the days work in a notebook and leave them to do it during the day. When it is finished, then privileges begin like having friends over and TV watching. If it isn’t done by 6 PM they have to stop for the day, do some push-ups (disciplinary action), and roll the work over into the next day and even into Saturday if need be.
"It’s times like these Marcus, my husband, and I fantasize about throwing in the towel. And I do mean fantasize. 'Hey honey the kids are in school! What do you wanna do today? Drink ice cold beer at the beach? Done!' Then we wake up and stick to our guns for one more day, then another, and another after that."
Megan provides a point of view of what it is like to homeschool. The most important elements of being a successful homeschooling parents are patience, perseverance, and consistent participation. However, implementing the nonaggressive principle is imperative for the survival of the parent-teenager relationship. Without respect, there is no point in implementing a homeschooling program at all. Parents must live their lives with their children within the nonaggression principle, i.e., no spanking, no yelling, no aggression of any sort. If parents want their teenagers to hang around long after they have graduated from highschool, they must develop a relationship of trust, even if their behavior during those tough school years spell nothing but rebellion and backtalk. Parents must teach by example, and treat their children better than they would treat anyone else.
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