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Home › Articles › Special Needs › My Mom, My Teacher

My Mom, My Teacher

Home-schooling Can Be a Viable Option for Special Needs Kids

By Debora Geary

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Her success is evident in a few words from Molly. "Hi. I am Molly Marshall and I do home-schooling," Molly says. "I also have dyslexia. Personally, I think dyslexia stinks. I am glad that my mom home-schools me, but I would like to try school out sometime too. I am an artist, and since I am home-schooled I get a lot of time to work on my artwork. I also get to play a lot of sports and I have no homework in the evenings."

Considering Home-schooling?
Lenore Hayes, author of Homeschooling the Child with ADD (or Other Special Needs): Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the Child with Learning Differences (Prima Lifestyles,2002), says that many parents choose to home-school for reasons very similar to those of Caretti and Marshall. Often parents lose faith in the school system after fighting long battles to get their kids properly assessed and supported. Hayes stresses that it is not only the remedial needs of special needs kids that can be neglected in the regular school system. "Many learning-disabled children are also gifted, and the schools have difficulty dealing with a highly intelligent child who can't read well or inverts numbers in math," she says.

Hayes believes that home-schooling has both academic and social benefits for special needs kids. Academically, parents have the flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the child. "Home-schooled children are able to thrive within their areas of strength, while working toward shoring up the tough subjects without feeling like a washout," she says. Socially, home-schooling provides parents the opportunity to work on their child's social skills in "a more humane manner (in support group settings, community-interactions and such), rather than just letting the child fend for himself on the playground," she says.

Hayes has two key pieces of advice for parents considering home-scholing. First, find a local home-schooling organization and get informed about your state's home-schooling laws. Home-schooling is legal in all 50 states (regardless of what you may hear), but the states have a hodgepodge of home-schooling regulations and requirements, and parents need to know what they are getting into.

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