Building Your Child's Confidence with Recognition

As we start into November in the midst of a global pandemic, you may be one of the many parents out there who have made the tough decision to start homeschooling your child - a difficult feat for any parent, but even more so for parents of a child with a learning difficulty.

On top of stressors like curriculum design, lack of usual classroom socialization, and household management, your child may see learning as not only a challenge, but also a chore – or worse, a hit to their overall sense of confidence.

Nothing creates a positive emotional output in the brain quite like progress toward a goal. Conversely, a perceived lack of progress can make anyone feel less confident – especially when a learning difficulty is involved. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your child with a learning difficulty like dyslexia, dysgraphia, or ADHD gets proper recognition for the progress that they do make.

Traditional methods of evaluation tend to focus on the learning gap, or what the student got wrong. However, in order to help build confidence, it’s helpful for homeschooling parents to focus instead on the gains your child makes over time.

For example, instead of simply correcting a paper and focusing on the fact that your child made 3 spelling mistakes today, you might focus on the fact that they improved upon the 5 spelling mistakes they made yesterday. You still correct the spelling mistakes, but you also help them build confidence over the words they learned to spell correctly.

In order to help yourself see these incremental changes, try writing out itemized goals with your child. You might set a goal of 2 mistakes instead of 3, set a list of 10 words to learn, or aim to spell a certain word correctly for 3 days in a row.

Over time, you will hopefully begin to see greater progress, and then you can also recognize learning milestones – such as learning an entire vocabulary set, or going a week without making a certain type of error.

Recognizing your child’s progress will help them learn to recognize their own progress – which will not only help them start to feel good about learning, but also ultimately build the confidence they need to tackle bigger challenges down the road (which is all any teacher can ask for).