LAY Hongly, SOY Seyha, & IVSOKHA Serei Vathana

Lecturer CHHAY Pov

BUE 215
May 17, 2018

Role Conflicts and Role Strains of Homeschooling for Parents

Modern societies have been given the role of providing an education for all of their

members. This education is conducted in schools. However, there are some people returning to

the ways of older societies and teaching their children at home rather than sending them to

schools because of the concern over current institutions’ environment. A number of parents in

the United States of America choose to homeschool their children, that is, they do not enroll their

children in public or private educational institutions. In the 2011-2012 academic year, more or

less, 3 percent of American school-aged population was homeschooled (Redford, Battle &

Bielick, 2016). Most of the educational activities are conducted by the parents. Consequently,

role conflicts and role strains may occur. This essay will showcase role conflicts and role strains

experienced by those who choose to homeschool their children.

Homeschooling is a form of education in which parents shoulder the responsibilities to

educate their children at home as a replacement of sending their children to either public or

private schools (Martin, n.d). It is surely a committing and difficult work. The parents have to

set curriculum, teach lesson, give quizzes and exams, and plan other activities. All of these take a

great deal of time. Simultaneously, they have to provide financial support to the family, which

means they need to work. Are they able to stomach these two roles at the same time?

Undergoing role conflicts means we are pulled by several directions as we try to fulfill

our responsibilities in the multiple statuses we occupy (Macionis, Gerber, John &

Linda, 2010). As ones can see in the previous paragraph, people who pick alternative education

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like home education for their children easily find themselves juggling between being

breadwinners and teachers. To uphold to the status as breadwinners, in most cases, parents must

go out and work for eight hours a day. When they come back home, exhausted, they may need a

little nap. After that, they have to make dinner, and then it is time for bed. However, they have to

fulfill the responsibilities of being their children’s teachers. As it is described above,

homeschooling is a time consuming work. It is virtually impossible to prepare the lessons in the

short period of time the parents have from work. It is rather difficult for parents in

general families. Some people may argue that one parent can stay and teach their children while

the other parent goes to work. However, in the present situation, a family with only a source of

income may not do well in term of finance. In addition, in the case of a single-parent family, it is

without a doubt that the parent could not find the time to play these two roles at the same time.

The other role conflict is being a parent and a teacher. One of the countless roles of being

a parent is to be a person in whom children can confine. Parents are the people to whom children

turn when they run into problems. Nevertheless, to achieve this kind of trust from children, the

parents have to earn it by being forgiving and understanding. Meanwhile, however you are a

loving, forgiving, and understanding teacher, you have to be rather authoritative to get work

done sometimes. Parents should have a grave concern about one scenario which is children

cannot differentiate the time when their parents are their teachers and the time when their parents

are not ones. What if the parents shout at them when they cannot perform well academically, and

they hold a grudge towards them for it? They stop confining in the parents. The children cease to

tell their problems because they are afraid of being blamed again like the time when they cannot

achieve good grades. Even worse, they may resent their parents in every way possible; for

example, they do not even want to be in the same room with the parents. However, if they keep

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being loving and understanding parents, even though their children’s academic performance

is terribly unacceptable. Does it not mean the parents fail themselves of being teachers? Worse

yet, they fail their children as the children cannot go to a prestigious university because they

have gotten failing grades. Their futures are bound to doom. Therefore, parents really need to

balance the roles they have to play for the statuses they hold carefully because if they are in favor

of one status over another, it means they fail one of the positions they occupy.

Regarding role strain, while its definition is very similar to role conflict in a sense, it has

a distinct difference. Role strain exists when individuals finds themselves in a troubling position

when they cannot meet the responsibilities of a particular status at one point in their lives (Serva,

n.d.). In case of sickness, normal teachers would call in and ask to have substitute teachers to fill

in their positions. However, for parents who choose to homeschool their own children, they

would have to wait until they get over the diseases before they can perform their roles as teachers

again. In this situation, they may feel like they are incompetent and inefficient as they cannot

play the roles of teachers well, and their students’—children’s—education undergoes a stagnant

condition in which they have no one to educate them.

In conclusion, role conflicts and role strains as described above easily occur for those

parents who choose to take control of their children’s education. They are pulled to several

directions as they try to respond to their responsibilities accordingly. Thus, the parents should be

aware of all of these problems before making such a big decision.