Discipline for Homeschooling

To discipline thus means to instruct a person to follow a particular code of conduct "order." Consequently, "in the field of child development, discipline refers to methods of modeling character and of teaching self-control and acceptable behavior." To disciple also gives rise to the word disciplinarian, which denotes a person who enforces order.


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Maintaining Discipline in Homeschooling

There are certain issues of discipline at stake. When the child stays at home all day, and mommy is the teacher. It is easy for he child to misconstrue the freedom he has at home and feel that homeschooling is just a long summer holiday.

This is a potential landmine and children need to be disciplined right at the start. Homeschooling gives you and your child a truly immense amount of flexibility. You and your child decide where to learn, how much to learn and when to learn. But,these should be decisions made at the beginning stages. If your child is too little to take an active part in the decision, chart out a few hours of the day for the various activities, and stick to it. When there is no outside agency to supervise and no exams to answer, it is easy to get sidetracked.

If your child is old enough, consult him and find out when he wants to learn. Apply your parental discretion and come up with a timetable. Homework is also a part of homeschooling. What this means is that once lessons have been taught, the child should be asked to do some part of the course work by himself without your guidance.

You will need to make sure that your child sits willingly and finishes his work. Courtesy, manners and punctuality are some of the various facets of discipline that a child has to imbibe in the early years of his life. The school where he interacts with his peers, his seniors and juniors and his teachers mould these values quite automatically.


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At homeschool, the child should be taught the importance of speaking and behaving in a proper manner and appropriate corrections need to be meted out if behavior is unsatisfactory. It is advisable to keep aside a particular room or a part of the room for your homeschool. The child should be expected to reach his desk at the appointed time, in proper attire with all the necessary material.

It is easy to allow the school to become an extension of play if these ground rules are not laid out and followed. As the teacher, supervisor, principal and janitor rolled into one, you should also approach the study area with a cool professionalism. Homeschooling is doomed to fail without patience. In spite of all the precautions and steps one takes, it is easy for a child to get familiar' at home school. At such times, it may be difficult to discipline the child and get him to listen to you attentively.

When this happens, switch to something new. Allow the child to take a breather and enjoy a break yourself. Homeschooling requires a lot of hard work and patience, because it's not easy. The very informality of the whole procedure sometimes works against it by making it too easy. Your homeschooling experience will be a huge success, if you take steps to establish rules at the very beginning and adhere to these rules.

Children and Violence

How far does violence extend, how do we determine exactly who is responsible for the violence that children are seeing on television and in music. What about video games, who is taking the responsibility for the violence and awful things that, are occurring right before the eyes of the youth today. Many politicians are looking to eagerly blame the media and entertainment industry.


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Is that the correct place to lay the blame? Perhaps parents are the people ultimately to blame. More parents today than ever before are working longer hours just to stay afloat financially. This alone results in phenomenal numbers of children being left with a television as the babysitter in charge of teaching right from wrong.

How does a child learn the difference between right and wrong, when their parents are nowhere to be found? Where does the parents’ responsibility to parent a child and the governments’ right to parent a child merge? Does the government even have a right to parent children? Should the government be allowed to determine what is appropriate for all children to watch, or should that be ultimately left up to the parents to decide on their own?

There have been television shows, movies, musical artists, and even books banned because the government does not approve. Where is the line drawn in who controls what the children are watching? Is it really up to the parents, or is it left to the children to decide on their own? When did parents lose the ability to control what their child watches, and when did the parent become subject to the child's own opinion?


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While some advances in technology have been wonderful, there is also much effort by the government to control what a parent does with their own child, and it is this more than anything that has caused controversy on a civil liberties basis. There have been several inventions and developments that are able to help parents monitor their children; from the v-chip to programs that log instant messenger programs.

These developments are great for the parents looking to monitor their child themselves, but what about the music industry. Most parents are constantly told that the violence their child is exposed to is the fault of the music industry. The blame is placed on the singers and producers for releasing the music. Much blame is placed everywhere but the parents for taking responsibility for their own children and determining what is best for them. With politicians attempting to punish some area of the entertainment industry each time a national tragedy occurs, it puts a major crimp on the ability of parents to decide for themselves what is acceptable for their child and what is not.

Many are left to allow their child to choose from the options that are left, once the government has omitted the choices that are bad. Is this censorship, or helping raise children? Many seem to think it leans heavily towards censorship, a place the governments should not be treading. Many others tend to feel that it should be a high priority of the government to protect everyone from something that can potentially be bad, without even giving people the option to make their own decisions. The issue as to what extent the government should intervene with the way in which we live our lives is hotly contested, and it works in a much larger circle than just the control of our children.


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Should the government take a step back, and allow society to use its freedoms and powers for self regulation, or is there a need for intervention to ensure the greater good and justice for the welfare of society as a whole? For the time being, it seems as though the most pragmatic approach relates somewhere in the middle, although it will be interesting to see developments in this area over the coming years.