Challenges

"Share your greatest challenge."



I have faced many challenges through the years on our homeschooling journey but the greatest was unlocking the key to learning for my youngest with Down syndrome (DS). We decided early in her life that the system in our area could not meet her learning needs and began our homeschooling journey. Children with DS commonly have auditory processing challenges with impaired short-term memory, difficulty with attention, delayed language acquisition and articulation issues, impaired cognition, and gross/fine motor delays - significant issues.

I, like most other parents who have children with special needs, spent a great deal of time in research about my child's condition. The more I learned, the greater confidence I felt that I could parent this child AND meet her learning needs by homeschooling her.

Homeschooling is a natural extension of what parents do to care for and nurture their child's growth and development - homeschooling begins at birth. A child with Down syndrome needs specific instruction in skill acquisition and development in areas that are often taken for granted by parents of typically developing children due to the challenges they face. Fortunately for families with children with DS, our children face etiology-specific (specific to DS) learning challenges and DS is the most well-researched syndromes that causes intellectual impairment. There is a great deal known about the way children with DS learn BUT it takes an information junkie and a great deal of persistence to find it. I confess to being an information addict which has blessed our lives in the knowledge I gained.

So, overall I am very pleased with where we are on our journey. I can't take away the challenges my daughter faces but I can give her the tools to help her be more functionally competent in this world. More challenges remain but I have faith that the joys will continually outweigh the discomfort that challenges bring.

See more about Home Education Week at: Principled Discovery