A Child Forced to Teach: Memories of Homeschooling My Siblings

During “school time,” my role was more often as a supervisor and teacher’s assistant than student.

My younger siblings struggled a lot with learning how to read. I thought this was my responsibility. I saw that my parents were too busy to teach, and I had picked up on reading easily. I was about ten when I tried teaching my next sibling how to read. To make it easier, I tried to think of easy words to spell and come back to them as keywords to review often.

I didn’t see myself as a child, and I thought I was failing my siblings.