By Shari McMinn

When your child struggles with one or more homeschool subjects for years, how and when do you decide to accept things as is or continue to push through toward progress? Perhaps your struggling learner “hates math” or “can’t read.” Even highly gifted students can be stuck in their struggles with time management or verbal communication. So what’s a homeschool parent to do? Because, when we are stuck and not progressing, we suffer — both parent and child!

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:3-5).

The Scripture passage above describes how the Holy Spirit uses our suffering to produce endurance, character, and hope. (Even if we are not rejoicing about it, right?) Did you consider that this also applies to our students who are miserable while they endure their schoolwork? God intends it to also be a means to build their character and develop hope for their future. It is not just a trial for us as homeschool teachers, but also for our students.