If you’re a homeschool parent, chances are you’ve wrestled with this question more than once:
“Is it the curriculum… or is something else going on?”
You’ve tried switching math programs. Reading games and hands-on manipulatives are regular purchases. You’ve adapted the schedule, built in movement breaks, and even taken full weeks off to reset.
But your child is still struggling to learn.
When that happens—when your child keeps hitting a wall no matter how much personal attention, encouragement, or curriculum tweaking you give—it’s time to look deeper. Because the problem may not be what you’re teaching or how you’re teaching it. The problem may lie in how your child’s brain is processing the information in the first place.
Let’s explore how to know whether it’s the curriculum—or their brain.
The Homeschooler’s Curriculum Conundrum
One of the most common challenges we hear from homeschool families is frustration around choosing the “right” curriculum. With so many options—classical, Charlotte Mason, mastery-based, literature-rich, workbook-heavy—it’s easy to feel like you just haven’t found the one that clicks.
And yes, curriculum matters. But it’s not the whole picture.
If your child is still struggling to:
- Remember what they just read
- Follow multi-step instructions
- Spell or sound out simple words
- Solve math problems they’ve practiced repeatedly
- Stay focused on a task longer than a few minutes
…it may not be because you picked the wrong curriculum. It may be because the underlying brain skills required to learn—like attention, memory, processing speed, or logic—are weak.
Cognitive Skills: The Hidden Foundation of Learning
Every learning task your child takes on—reading a passage, solving a math problem, writing an essay—relies on a set of underlying cognitive skills.
When even one of these skills is weak, it can make learning inefficient and frustrating—no matter how excellent your curriculum or how patient you are as a teacher.
That’s why some kids appear “lazy” or “unmotivated,” when really, they’re working twice as hard to compensate for weak cognitive skills.
Personalized Attention Isn’t Always Enough
One of the huge advantages of homeschooling is the ability to offer a personalized education. You get to teach at your child’s pace, choose topics that interest them, and give them one-on-one support.
But when your child continues to struggle despite all of this customization, it’s a red flag that the issue goes deeper than teaching method or pace.
It’s not you. Nor is it the curriculum. It’s their brain.
How to Know What’s Really Going On
Before you buy yet another new program or scrap your lesson plans altogether, consider this:
Instead of asking what to teach or how to teach, ask this instead:
“Is my child’s brain ready to learn what I’m teaching?”
The best way to answer that question is with a cognitive skills assessment.
At LearningRx, we use a research-based brain skills assessment that pinpoints which cognitive skills are strong—and which ones are holding your child back. This insight can be a game changer for homeschool families who are stuck in the cycle of curriculum-hopping and still not seeing progress.
Stop Tweaking and Start Targeting
When you know what’s going on in your child’s brain, you can stop guessing—and start addressing the root cause.
With brain training at LearningRx, we work one-on-one with students to strengthen the exact skills needed for learning success. And as those skills improve, so does your child’s ability to focus, retain information, and learn with confidence—regardless of curriculum.