Homeschool: Ever Have One of Those Days?

Ever have one of those days when your pre-teen digs his/her heels in and refuses to work on a particular assignment and doesn't really care what privileges you take away or if he/she gets an F for not completing it? I have had those days lately...4 of them to be exact.


I began to wonder what it was going to take to motivate the child. Privileges were taken, the option of taking an F was revoked. He was told he would do the assignment, period! We dealt with this for four days without any progress.


I was in tears, crying out to God for help and wisdom. I had to run an errand and was contemplating not even going back home, but instead going to Starbucks to drown my frustrations in a Green Tea Latte. I resisted the temptation. It was a blessing, later, to go to the homeschool group meeting and find other moms deal with the same thing sometimes. I was in good company!


The good news is that we finally had a break through. After going through probably 50 story ideas and none of them were good enough, I gave him a story idea and said this was it. He was going to use this since he couldn't come up with his own and none of the others were "good enough". He didn't like my idea either. It wasn't "good enough", but I said, "That's too bad. No story idea will be good enough for you because you just don't want to do this assignment. So you are going to take this story idea and you are going to work with it and come up with a story from it whether you like it or not." He did.

You, see, I think he was testing me, to see just how far he could push me before I'd cave in and let him get away without doing what he didn't want to do. So, I won the battle. I am just praying that I will win the war in the long run and he will come out a better kid for it.

Parenting isn't for cowards, it's for warriors! It'll either make you or break you. It will drive you to your knees, crying out to God for help. But in between the battles, life is sweet. I love my kids. I want them to grow up to be responsible adults, and God wants to change me and grow me up into a Christlike, sanctified saint. So He uses my children to grow me up while He uses me to grow my children up. It's boot camp all around and boot camp is hard.