The Home Schooling Option
An increasing number of parents of school-age children with OCD are opting to teach their children themselves, or in partnership with a child's teacher(s) — at home. As the home schooling movement grows in the United States, there is more support available for parents in the form of home school curricula, teaching resource materials, and cooperative parent arrangements. Schools will often provide home schooling curricula materials for children who cannot attend classes. Where other parents are engaged in home schooling in their local communities, many parents share teaching duties, tips, and encouragement for what can be a challenging undertaking.
Why Home School?
One of the primary reasons parents cite for home schooling is to protect a child with OCD from teasing or bullying encountered as a result of his “being different” at school.
Many other parents whose children are having OCD symptoms that are still too severe for them to go to school, or those who have not yet seen sufficient improvement from medication, feel their child cannot cope with the school environment. Some parents begin home schooling as a temporary measure to keep their student engaged in learning until he's ready to return to the public or private school setting.
The success or failure of home schooling depends on many factors. First, there is the issue of limited time availability for the parent who's juggling part-or full-time work outside the home, and the needs of other children in the family. Most parents who do home schooling must learn their new teaching skills “on the job” and then teach a wide variety of academic subjects. While some parents adapt fairly easily, many find it a daunting task. It's important to take your own ability to cope with the demands of home schooling into account before deciding how to handle your child's OCD-related learning needs. Each parent and child is in a different situation and must make the best decision for her family.
Integrating Home Schooling and Homebound Instruction
In many cases, a combination of home schooling by a parent and a certain number of hours each day or week of homebound instruction by a teacher works best for the parent and child with OCD. Here are some different parental accounts demonstrating different solutions and the tradeoffs of in-school versus home school learning for a child with OCD.
My son is fourteen with severe OCD symptoms, and, after having problems with him getting picked on by other kids at school, he's being taught at home by me and by one of his teachers from school. I get the books and lesson plans for what I teach (right now English and American history) directly from his school. Then his math teacher comes to teach him algebra and give him tests. In order to get his homebound instruction, we had to have a letter from his doctor sent to the school board. Some of his teachers really didn't understand much about OCD, so I brought some of the books I had to school for them to read. This is the second year we've done it this way, and he passed last year okay, so I feel this is best for him right now.
My son just can't handle public school right now. As a single mother I can't afford private school and I find it hard to manage teaching him on top of everything else I have to do. It's really hard to do at night after a long day. But the main problem with home schooling is that it seems to just add a lot of tension to our relationship. Sometimes, he just won't do the work I give him. Right now, he's got homebound instruction with a teacher coming to the house a few hours a day. He seems to do much better with that. He does the work for this teacher, maybe because he thinks of her as “the teacher” and not Mom. This is not enough for the long haul, but it's the best we can do for now.
Learning about all the options available to meet your child's educational needs is the most important first step for a parent facing the issue of schooling a child with OCD. Again, no solution is right for every child. Likewise, each child's needs change as he matures and as he gets a better handle on his OCD.
