Quote:
|
Originally Posted by chickymum
... When she is at school she becomes so devious with stealing and hiding things and lying. When she comes home I try to talk to her and teach her what is right and wrong but that confrontation causes her brain to pretty much shut down. ...
|
Oh that sounds hard on both of you. Have you read the Love and Logic books (and/or books-on-tape)? They have lots of good advice on dealing with lying and stealing and stuff like that. Also the authors have had foster and adopted children, so the techniques aren't just for emotionally stable kids.
If you are trying to teach her right and wrong in regards to her behavior at school, she may be picking up the message that she is bad, and very likely she agrees and so no wonder her poor brain shuts down.
Regarding school, I found homeschooling my daughter very nice for having time together (at least until she turned 11 and entered the 'reject-mother' phase - she's back in public school now!).
Bonding requires eye contact, laughter, movement, and a couple other things that I forget (maybe feeding and sweets? I remember reading a few bonding exercises, like putting a donut on your finger and you and your child eating it, or using a drop of hand lotion to stick cotton balls on your noses and trying to blow them off each other).
'Schooling' isn't likely to promote bonding, but if you did 'unschooling' you would take away the 'schooling' stress. That is what I did with my daughter, I enrolled her in a private 'distance learning' school that was supportive of 'unschooling' methods. Since she was enrolled in private school I didn't have to worry about homeschooling laws or requirements, private schools can set their own curriculums. It only cost $45 a year for enrollment, and I had to report 'attendance' quarterly and submit a few page summary once a year of what topics she'd studied.
There are lots of other homeschooling options if unschooling is too radical for your tastes. Public schools provide (at least they do here in Colorado) online schooling for elementary ages (maybe older too but I was only interested so far in elementary). I didn't go with that option because then you have to follow the school curriculum.
Another option in the Denver area that I'd never heard of until after I was homeschooling, is a one-day-a-week elementary school. For a while my daughter was both 'unschooling' with the private school and simultaneously enrolled in the one day a week public school. But you can't have them in two public schools at the same time.
Another nice thing about the private school was not having to do the every other year standardized testing that homeschoolers have to do.
Or, if money is not an object, there are some private schools that are very relaxed; I toured one Montessori school that only gave one math problem a day and one vocabulary word a day, and the kids could spend most of the afternoon out in the playground in nice weather. And that was the combined 4th/5th/6th grade class so who knows how child-friendly and undemanding the lower grades were. Of course they had lots of educational toys and books and stuff like that, but they weren't into the sit-at-a-desk style of education. It was heavy into freedom (self-direction) and interactive learning.