When your homeschooler fights you on every lesson

It is four minutes past nine. You have read one sentence out loud. Already there is the sighing, and the slow boneless slide out of the chair, and a sudden thirst that can only be cured by a glass of water from the furthest tap in the house.

By ten past you are negotiating with a small lawyer.

Every homeschool group has a mother who will tell you her kids sit down at eight and work cheerfully until noon. Do not take it personally. She is either describing one very good Tuesday in March, or her kids are five and eight and it will find her later.

Look at the work before you look at the kid

The first conclusion everybody reaches is that the child has an attitude problem. Sometimes he does. Far more often the work is wrong, in one of three fairly dull ways.

It is too hard. Resistance is what confusion looks like from the outside. A child who does not understand will choose to look defiant over looking stupid every single time, because defiant is the less humiliating way to lose. If the fighting clusters in one subject, that is a signpost, and it is pointing at the material.

It is too easy. Same behavior, opposite cause. Nothing makes a bright child more insufferable than being made to prove something he already knows.

It is boring and he is right. Some worksheets are genuinely soul-destroying. If you would resent doing it, that is worth knowing.

Try halving the day for a week

Most of this dissolves when the day gets shorter. Real academic work for an elementary kid runs somewhere between one and three hours. If you are doing six because six is how long school was, think about what those extra hours actually held: lining up, waiting, changing rooms, taking the register, waiting again. You have none of that. You only have the work.

Halve one subject for a week and see what happens. Watch what happens to the mood in the room.

Let him move

Sitting still is a rule that exists because thirty children in one room cannot all be moving. You have one. Spelling works shouted from a trampoline. Times tables work while a ball bounces off a wall. History goes in better on a walk. Nobody is coming to inspect the chair.

Use what he loves, but not on Tuesday as well

Threading his obsession through the work does help. Word problems about the game he will not stop describing to you.

The trap is doing it every day. When every subject turns dinosaur-shaped, the dinosaurs stop being a treat and become a technique, and a seven-year-old can smell a technique across a room. Once a week is plenty.

Say this instead of arguing

When it starts, try handing him the problem rather than the verdict:

"I don't think this one is working. Is it too much, or is it boring? Tell me which and I'll fix it."

Half the time you get an answer you can act on. The other half he is so surprised to be consulted that the fight goes out of him anyway.

Some mornings you just stop

If it has gone properly wrong, close the book and go outside. You cannot make a crying child learn anything, and the lesson is worth less than the two of you.

That is one of the few real privileges of doing this at home. A bad morning gets to be only a bad morning. It does not go in a file, nobody calls you about it, and tomorrow is usually fine.