Customer Reviews

Homeschooling the Challenging Child: A Practical Guide

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I am a homeschooling mom to a bipolar child. While the author homeschools her ADHD child, I still found the information useful. Includes a nice overview of learning disablities with a checklist of symptoms for each. There are also well-organized chapters on discpline, different learning styles, and up-to-date resources in the back of the book. One of my favorite quotes from the book is regarding discpline, "We don't have to make our children feel bad to make them act good."

Former trial lawyer turned homeschool mother Christine M. Field presents Homeschooling the Challenging Child: A Practical Guide, written especially for parents who turn to homeschooling because their children cannot thrive in a traditional educational environment due to special, physical, or emotional needs. Chapters address how to deal with issues stemming from various learning disabilities, attention disorders, personality clashes, learning styles, discipline problems, managing stress and discouragement, how to plan a program, the importance of keeping in mind the tenets of God's love and forgiveness, and much more. Hands-on tips for managing a successful home education program, as well as how to obtain professional help from support groups and other such resources round out this superb guide for home schoolers or would-be home-schoolers of all persuasions - not just those whose child faces special obstacles.

This book covers a lot of the challenges parents face when they choose to homeschool their child if the child has a learning disability or other challenge like ADHD. This book is similar to many ways to Help for the Harried Homeschooler except that it specifically addresses how homeschooling is different for parents in this situation. She begins the book by defining disabilites, differences, discipline, personality, and learning styles. In the next chapters, she tackles teaching the distractible child, personality clashes, learning styles, and discipline. She also wisely addresses how to keep yourself sane as the homeschool parent--what are strategies you can use to cope with the daily struggles you face. She even explains how to develop a homeschool "IEP", or individual education plan, so that you can best document your child's progress. That is the goal of records--to help you and your child see how he or she grown and developed! From there she talks about planning your child's learning program and getting help. At the end of the book, there is a list of resources for phonics and math curriculums. As a book reviewer, I thought her reviews in this section were well written, thorough, and helpful.

A few weeks ago, I Heads Up Helping Heads Up Helping: Teaching Tips and Techniques for Working With ADD, ADHD, and Other Children With Challengesby Melinda Boring. That book tackled all the daily strategies that she developed over the years of homeschooling her son, who has ADHD, and her daughter, who is ADD. What I loved most about that book was how honest and down to earth her writing is. She shares many practical ways of how she helped her children learn. I noted on that review that there were topics she didn't cover. Christine Field's book covers many of those topics. The two books complement each other. Ms. Boring's book will encourage and give you an arsenal of tools to use every day. Ms. Field's book gives the big picture framework that your homeschool will operate within.

I do want to make one side note about Ms. Field's book. In one of her other books, Help for the Harried Homeschooler, she references two authors that I don't recommend, Michael and Debi Pearl. Their approach to parenting is very different than mine. I'd actually recommend Growing Grateful KidsGrowing Grateful Kids: Teaching Them to Appreciate an Extraordinary God in Ordinary Places (Hearts at Home Books) by Susie Larson instead. I have found her approach to be more filled with grace.

In Homeschooling the Challenging Child, Ms. Field includes another author that I'm a bit skittish about. The author is Cynthia Tobias. She is well known in the homeschooling community for her advocacy of teaching to learning styles. I disagree with her on matters of parenting, which obviously influence how one homeschools. Specifically, she and I disagree about submission to God and His authority, which I believe one must do. I believe there are some good ideas in what she says, but I'd recommend that you filter her ideas through how you feel called by the Lord to parent your children.

On the issue of submission to authority, Ms.Field and I do agree. She explains the importance of this in one of the chapters of her book that children do need to learn to submit to the authorities in their lives. I was very glad that Ms. Field addresses this in her book because I think it's a really difficult part of parenting and I have heard from my friends who face challenges with their children that it is particularly difficult for them.

If you are starting out homeschooling your child and facing challenges like a learning disability or ADHD, I'd definitely recommend this book to you. It's one you'll keep on your bookshelf and refer back to time and time again. If you're not homeschooling yet, but thinking of taking your child out of school and beginning to homeschool, I'd recommend both this book and Melinda Boring's book.

Please note that I received a complimentary copy of Homeschooling the Challenging Child for review from the author.

While this book has some useful information, I found it tiring to try to plow through the fundamentalist Christian babble to get to the useful nuggets of information. I agree with a previous reviewer, this should clearly be labeled as being a book with a fundamentalist Christian perspective and world view.

This book has some nice lists, but the sheer amount of religiosity is a total turnoff. I did manage to read it from cover to cover, but by 1/4 of the way through I knew that she relies too much on miracles and invisible spirits to be useful. Unless you're a fundamentalist Christian, go find another book on the subject. There are several that do not appeal to supernatural forces, prayer or religious ritual to achieve the same objective. I give it two points because I did glean some useful information on behavior management. Other than that, the book was an exercise in magical thinking.

I would not have bought this book if I knew that Christine Field is so incredibly religious. I specifically looked around the internet to find out if the book was written from a Christian perspective, couldn't find a word mentioning God or Christianity, and I thought I was buying a book written objectively. Boy am I sorry I'm stuck trudging through the God this and God that sections to get to anything worth reading. This might be a great book for someone who leans on God for inspiration. It's not the book for me, and I probably won't have the stomach to finish it.