Many parents experience times when their child struggles with a subject in school. Instead of paying for a tutor, seeking out community resources, or sending your child for after school help, you might choose to tutor your child yourself. After all, who knows your child better than you?
Unfortunately, for many families, this is a bad idea.
Here’s why:
You may not have the academic knowledge or teaching expertise needed.
You might think teaching a child to read is simple – we all know how to do it, after all! However, teachers go to school for years and engage in lifelong professional development sessions to constantly hone their craft and improve their teaching techniques. Just because you might understand a concept doesn’t mean you’ll be good at explaining the concept. In fact, often it’s just the opposite.
It’s hard to explain a concept you’ve known for decades, especially if you never struggled through the process yourself. You also might not be explaining things in the same way that your child is learning at school. Instead, you explain in the way you learned, all those years ago. This disconnect can often confuse children who are already struggling. This tends to happen particularly often in math, where specific strategies are often taught in the classroom.
You may not have the patience.
It might be easier for a stranger to be patient with your child than it will be for you, and your child might be better behaved for a stranger than for you. Often, children act the worst around the people they feel most comfortable with. Unfortunately for parents, that’s usually you. Teachers and hired tutors can more easily separate the behavior from the child and exercise patience with a frustrated or struggling child.
Finding a tutor will also give you a break from the nightly homework struggle and allow you to have a more positive relationship with your child. Children are often reluctant to have their parents involved in their schooling, so trying to tutor them in a subject with which they’re already struggling is asking for a power struggle.
You don’t start from the beginning.
The great thing about hiring a tutor who knows the subject matter inside and out? This person knows the basics of the subject as well as the complex details of the subject. If you’re just tutoring eighth grade math, you’ll just know eighth-grade math, not the seventh-grade concepts that preceded or the ninth-grade concepts that follow. Teachers and tutors are trained and skilled at building the appropriate foundations and filling in the appropriate gaps; you might not have this understanding and might not know where the holes are and how to fill them.
You won’t have time.
You may think an hour once or twice a week isn’t a big deal, but it can be a challenge. Your regular parenting and adult responsibilities take time, and if you’re a single or working parent it’s even more difficult. You may only have a few precious hours when your child is out of school and you’re available.
While it is possible for parents to tutor their own children, it’s not always the best idea. Before you embark on your own tutoring journey, consider whether you have the teaching and subject expertise, the patience, or the time to tutor your own child.
