Homeschooling a Teenager: 5 Vital Things to Know to Help Them Succeed

Homeschooling a teenager sounds a little scary: high school math, college prep, and reliving the drama of your high school years is certainly not for the faint of heart. But teaching your high schooler at home gives you an unparalleled opportunity to connect with your child through the teen years and set them up for future success.

If you’re about to embark on the journey of homeschooling a teen, here are five things to think about before you start.

1. You Don’t Have to Know All the Subjects

In the ten years since I started homeschooling, I’ve had the joy of counseling numerous other moms as they made the transition to home learning. While I maintain that homeschooling is definitely not for everyone, there are some barriers moms erect for themselves that I feel the need to tear down right away.

Say it with me: “I do not need to know every subject in order to homeschool high school successfully.”

Last week, I met with a friend whose 9-year-old son is not thriving in school. She feels compelled to teach him at home, but she came to our meeting prepared with a list of reasons why she’s not qualified to do so. At the top of her list? He needs a second language to get into university, and she doesn’t speak one.

I was thrilled to let her know this was the least of her concerns. No matter what prerequisites your child needs to get into their chosen college degree program, the onus is not on you to teach them everything they need to know.

You don’t need to have all the answers

In the latter years of your child’s homeschool journey, you become much more of a guide than a teacher. You are walking with them along a path, but nobody expects you to have all the answers.

Figure out what courses they need to take to finish high school, get into post-secondary schools (if that’s part of their plan), and explore their passions. Then help them navigate the myriad options available for each of those courses.

For example:

1. Whole-subject online classes offered by individual education companies (check out this huge list of options from Techie Homeschool Mom)
2. Smaller-scale courses offered on platforms such as Allschool and Outschool
3. Co-op classes offered by your local homeschool group
4. In-person classes offered by your local distributed learning schools
5. Dual-credit classes taken through local or online colleges and universities
6. Self-study curricula

There are more opportunities than ever for meeting your child’s educational needs, so you should never feel pressured to teach them something yourself that’s outside of your wheelhouse. However, if you love a subject and want to either teach it or learn more about it yourself, I highly recommend finding a curriculum you love (or creating one) and leading your child through it or completing it together.

2. You Need a Lot of Time…But Not as Much as You Might Think

Another common myth new homeschoolers must confront is that they need to spend the whole day learning. The traditional school system has conditioned us to believe that it takes seven hours a day to learn ‘enough’, but this isn’t true.

Much of the school day is wasted with logistical details, trying to get kids to settle down, changing classes, repeating instructions, and redoing work that students haven’t completed. With homeschooling we can skip a lot of that, making for a much more efficient school day.

On the other hand, by the time kids are in high school, they will be putting a lot more hours into their classes than they did in elementary and middle school.

A Personal Example

I saw this keenly this year. My eldest daughter, who just finished grade nine, spent the first half of last year at an art school and the second half back at home. When she returned to homeschooling, she had to get back into a groove and she also wanted to challenge herself to take some extra classes. She struggled to get into a good routine in February and March and, by April, she was pretty far behind.

For the next two months, she had to work consistently for six to eight hours a day in order to get everything done. Meanwhile, her younger siblings, who were completing grades two and seven respectively, spent one to three hours a day and had no problem finishing their work.

If my eldest had been in a good groove all year, I think she could have easily completed everything in four to six hours a day, which I think is a good target for high school. This does not include extracurricular activities, a part-time job, volunteer work, or a social life, but it does leave space in her life for all these things.

Expect Varying Degrees of Involvement

One thing that surprised me was how much of my time and attention my oldest daughter still needs from me now that she’s in secondary school. I only taught one of her classes this year—English—but she needed my help for many others. Whether that meant taking her to buy fabric for a sewing project or supplies for a science experiment, finding research books for her at the library and reading them myself so we could discuss them, or sitting beside her while she listened to math and science lessons so I could help her troubleshoot her assignments, I was much more involved with her schoolwork than I anticipated.

I suspect the amount of involvement will vary from child to child and from homeschool parent to homeschool parent. My daughter has very high social needs, so working on her own all day is painfully difficult for her. If, as her mom, teacher, and guide, I can ease that burden by sitting with her while she learns, I see that as my privilege. (On the other hand, when my second daughter completes all her work on her own and balks at my offers for help, I’m okay with that too!)