5 Homeschool Strategies: Helping Late Bloomers Thrive
Overcoming Academic Challenges: Homeschooling Solutions for Late Bloomers and Slow Learners
It can be frustrating if your child seems to be behind in a particular subject. It provokes a mix of emotions: empathy for your child’s difficulties, frustration at seeing your homeschooling effort apparently bearing no fruit, and fear about their future prospects. Dealing with a late bloomer can undoubtedly be challenging. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways you can help your late-blooming child make it over the hump of that one frustrating subject that is holding them back. This article will review five essential strategies for helping your late bloomer.
The Importance of Perspective
First, it is helpful to keep the proper perspective. ” Late bloomer” designates a child who develops a certain skill later than his or her peers. This presupposes a specific fixed time when children are “supposed” to have mastered some benchmark. We would do well not to attach too much importance to these benchmarks. When you hear things like “Children should have mastered Algebra by grade eight” or “A 13-year-old should be able to think critically about a piece of literature,” what you hear are not hard and fast rules, but averages based on aggregate data.
In real life there is a spectrum of time when certain skill sets emerge in children. Some children will tackle Algebra in 7th grade; others will still be muddling through it in sophomore year; some kids will master writing very young, while others will develop their communication skills much later. Obviously, difficulties beyond a certain point are problems; a child struggling to recognize letters by 4th grade, for example, might indicate a learning disability. But most of the time, the so-called “late bloomers” are just children on the latter side of the developmental spectrum but still within the range of what is considered normal and healthy. Keeping this perspective helps us to avoid being unduly alarmed at our children’s sluggish progress in certain areas.
Be Patient, But Persistent with Your Late Achiever
Development happens at different rates for everyone, and it can change direction suddenly. On the one hand, we have to respect this process and be patient with our child’s own developmental pace. If we exercise too much pressure on them to master something they are struggling with, our efforts may backfire, discouraging them. On the other hand, we can’t simply allow children to opt out of subjects they find difficult. An integral part of education is teaching children to overcome obstacles, persevere, and therby learn t enjoy the process of self-improvement. One needs to find a middle ground, neither exercising too much pressure nor letting your child check out entirely. It is better to make continuous progress in little things rather than insist on major breakthroughs.
By way of analogy, imagine you decide you want to build athletic, muscular legs. So you go to the gym, and you start doing squats. You do pretty well, moving to heavier weights and seeing some modest progress. But eventually, you hit a point where you can’t add any more weight; the current load is just too heavy for your muscles to handle. How can you go on from here? You can’t just keep trying to squat weights too heavy for you, or you will hurt yourself. But you cannot give up, or you’ll never reach your goal.
What you’d do is make alterations to your training: maybe swap out the squat for a different exercise you can progress on or focus on doing more squats at a lower weight. Similarly, you may have to make alterations to your child’s academic training, focused on smaller continual progress rather than trying to rush a breakthrough.
Lean Into Your Late Bloomer’s Strengths
If your child is struggling with certain subjects, a good strategy is to lean into the subjects he or she is not struggling with. For example, if your daughter is a gifted writer but struggles with math, focus on giving her opportunities to hone her writing craft and excel here while chipping away at math around the edges. There is a two-fold benefit here: first, encouraging what your child is good at builds confidence, which will benefit her overall academics, including her math. Second, leaning into her strengths can help her channel her energy toward deciding on what—if anything—she wants to pursue after high school. In other words, don’t let your child’s hold-up in one area stop you from moving forward in other areas of strength.
Don’t Sweat College
Speaking of after-high-school plans, you may worry that your child’s struggles in one content area may harm his or her ability to get into college. A few things to keep in mind:
First, there’s no timetable on which a child has to begin collegiate studies. If your child is 17 and doing poorly in writing, and you think, “I need to get them ready by next year in time for college,” well, you don’t. There’s no reason your child has to go to college right out of high school. If your child’s writing is not up to collegiate standards, take a gap year and devote the time exclusively to writing. Or even two gap years.
Today, there is pressure to start college younger and younger; I regularly see students as young as 16 who are already doing dual enrollment at a university. While that may suit some, it need not be a norm. There’s nothing wrong with holding off until 19 or even 20 to begin college. In my own life, I did not begin my degree program until I was 22. I recommend taking a look at our article “Gap Year for Homeschoolers” for more.
Navigating College Admissions
You might also be worrying about a bad SAT/ACT score in a content area. Tanking the SAT section on math, for example, can drag your child’s entire score down. Will this harm their admission prospects? Not necessarily. If your target school and program does not emphasize math (or whatever the troublesome content area is), most admissions departments take this into account. My academic advisor at Madonna University told me my less-than-stellar math scores weren’t an issue because he knew I was going into social studies, a field where I did excel. So, not all SAT scores are treated equally.
In addition, many colleges use a holistic approach in their admissions process, considering factors such as GPA, extracurricular activities, essays, and recommendations. A strong overall application may compensate for a weaker math score. Of course, if your student is taking a gap year, that year can be used to focus on bringing up those lagging scores, which is another reason to take more time before sending them off to college.
Obviously, some college programs will require a strong score in certain content areas (e.g., if your child wants to go into molecular biology but bombs the science portions of the test, then you have a problem). But unless your child is planning to major in the specific content area they are lagging in, their situation should not be insurmountable.
The Problem Might Be Elsewhere…
Finally, consider that the problem might not be with the pace of your student’s development but with other external factors, such as the curriculum or teaching style of the instructor. It often happens that children think they are bad at a subject, but what is really going on is they have a boring textbook, muddled instruction, or they are using a misgraded curriculum. This can all contribute to developing negative self-talk about a subject, reinforcing their struggles.
I personally thought I was bad at math; while I excelled at the humanities, I lagged in mathematics. It was only in college that I realized I was never really “bad at math”; I’d just had some bad experiences that gave rise to a negative dialogue in my head. I recommend reading “The Danger of Negative Self-Talk: A Math Story,” which goes into this in great detail on this subject.
Guiding Slow Starters
It can be incredibly frustrating to watch your child spin his or her academic tires in the mud. With the right finesse, however, you can guide them through their struggles to greener pastures. One of the best things about a late bloomer is that sooner or later, at a time you least expect it, just when you start thinking your kid might never progress—BAM! They have a sudden breakthrough, and all the pieces start to come together.
What strategies have you used to help your academically late bloomers? I invite you to join me and other Catholic homeschooling parents in our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the conversation!
