How to keep your homeschool teens motivated (and how it worked for me)
Article By Carter Cada - Written 7/16/2025
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and everything’s right in the world. You have your cup of tea, freshly brewed, a few tests to be graded on your lap (all legible, this time. Wonders never cease.) You sigh contentedly as you uncap your pen, ready to…wait a minute.
You furrow your brow as you rise and make your way to the schoolroom. There you find your three sweet angels…and one of them is carving a sculpture from an eraser with their pocket knife…again.
It’s probably the greatest challenge of a homeschool parent: keeping their kids on track (or, it was for mine, anyways. I know that for a fact). But just how do you do it?
Until I have a few more years of homeschooling experience under my belt with my own children, I can’t say that I have all the answers. What I can do is give you three principles that my parents used to help me.
1) What’s their distraction?…I mean, passion?
One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that children can find their passions at a much younger age than their public schooled peers. I’ve known teens who were amazing artists, musicians, photographers, and designers.
Everyone has a passion and a purpose. As homeschoolers, we have the joy of discovering these as a family.
As a parent, you have the unique privilege of being able to guide, direct, and foster these passions into something…more productive than eraser sculptures. Does your son get excited about the World War Two documentary you recently watched as a family? Make a note of that. Maybe your daughter has started doing her own research into the lives of famous biologists. It’d be worth jotting that down.
Once you find what your kids are passionate about, it’s not such a great leap toward channeling that excitement into something useful, such as figuring out-
2) “Their schedule”, not “a schedule”
As a homeschool teen with a lot of energy, staying on track wasn’t hard. It was remembering that I was supposed to be on track at all in the first place that was hard. It was a good day if my parents could go more than five minutes without reminding me of a task I was supposed to be working on…that was supposed to be done yesterday.
Despite my (and many other students’) struggles with schedules, they are important. What was hard for me was being forced to do things I didn’t feel were necessary (not saying this is an acceptable way of thinking, but hey, I was a teen, can you blame me?) or interesting.
There were a lot of day’s I’m sure I made py parents feel like sending me back to school. I am very thankful they determined not to give up.
Eventually, my parents acted on some advice they’d gotten. They created a schedule that intermixed the things I wanted to do, the things I had to do, and the things I hated to do. They put the reading portion of my history class, my favorite part of the day (it’s just reading a book. What’s not to love?) at the end of the day, saying if I didn’t hit other expectations, it would be cut for something else.
However, if I finished everything early, I’d be able to spend more time on whatever subject I wanted. Not as a gift, but because the reality was that if I finished more school earlier, there was simply less to do.
As time went on, I began to realize that this was a system that a lot of other families were using. Many of my friends and their parents were finding success through what amounted to a very simple system of balancing “want to’s” with “have to’s”.
By the time my younger brother was in high school, the system had been perfected. He ended up finishing his sophomore year a month-and-change early and was able to spend a lot of time enjoying the outdoors while the rest of us were finishing our studies.
And no, I’m definitely not still salty about that…
3) Celebrate progress, not perfection.
Once a parent gets their children’s scheduling situation figured out, it’s all smooth sailing from then on out…said no homeschooler ever.
Sigh.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but the reality is that no matter how good your system is, there will be days where it does not work. Does that mean it’s a bad system? No. Does it mean you should give up on homeschooling? No. Does it mean that you should drop your children off with a relative for two months while you visit luxury spas to try and recover? Well, maybe that one is okay.
Not every day is going to feel perfect. Most won’t. But what you might lose in “perfect days” you’ll more than make up for in “cherished years”.
No, you don’t need to throw in the towel, or even get frustrated (though, you probably will get at least a little frustrated). Children are just little adults; the same way adults are just grown children.
Each child is different. Some are more forgetful than others. Some are more stubborn than others. My parents were lucky, they got both when they got me. But regardless of how much or little progress you see, the important thing is to remember that there is progress.
Like anything in life, good things do take time. No one falls in love right away. No one gains mastery of a subject all at once. In the same way, no child’s character is going to be reformed with one idea, no matter how good or well-constructed it is.
Help your kids (with patience!) and watch as, in time, they bloom. And who knows? Maybe someday you’ll be applauding your child as they receive an award for best sculpture in show…and you’ll know exactly where it started.
About the author
Carter John Cada is the founder of and head author at Quips from the Quiver. In his free time, he loves to read, cook, read, hike, read, write, read, and read.
He also enjoys eating.
