You’re not tired of teaching or your kids or your home.
You’re just tired.

You’ve got bedwetters, breastfeeders, night terrors, pin worms, teething, insomnia, thunder claps, fevers, bronchial infections, and more wrecking your sleep—sometimes for years.

Get some sleep.

• Swap with your spouse or partner.
• Bring in grandma or grandpa.
• Hire a babysitter.

Find a way to protect a night or two of undisturbed slumber.

The house-cleaning can wait. The laundry can be worn mildly dirty. What cannot wait is sleep. It is the chief anti-depressant, it’s free, and you deserve it.

If you are running on empty or are long past empty, it may be worth it to go away alone for a weekend (bring the nursing baby and no one else). Restore your mind, energize your body, revive.

Make no life decisions while sleep-deprived. Get rest. Then re-evaluate. Your kids will seem less irritating once you feel rested. Promise. I’m heading to bed early tonight. Hope you can too. 

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

I don’t care that much about a child’s behavior. I care a lot about what that child is thinking when they behave the way they do.

So I did a series of messages on Instagram stories that say what I’ve wanted to say for a long time about “parenting”—that wretched word that sets up a power struggle before we get out of the starting blocks!

What if we got curious about what our kids are telling us all day every day with their actions, their attitudes, their ideas, and their passions? What if we saw our kids as rational and reasonable?

This video compilation is almost 7 minutes long.

It’s for those who:

• keep asking why your kids watch videogamers on YouTube.
• are locked in conflict with your teens.
• have children who just. won’t. wash. their. hands. (Yep! Got you too.)
• or wonder if I’ll ever write a “parenting book”—yeah, I have already.

It’s my belief we get further with our kids if we lead from curiosity about their brilliant minds rather than scripts for how to get them to change their behavior to match our expectations.

Remember: a slight shift in how you see your kids can change everything.

Watch the Video

I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to get lathered up about every sign of unhappiness in my kids. It’s almost as if I expect everyone to be happy all the time or it means I’m doing something wrong.

But maybe just the fact that people feel free to have emotions around me means I’m doing something right!

What if today you simply lived with your children and observed their emotions and made zero meaning from them? What would it be like to simply accept everybody and everything that happens rather than using what happens as a way to beat yourself up for not being a good enough parent?

I declare today:

“The parent doesn’t have to care so much” day!

In other words: Care Less.

Rooting for you!

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

You can’t know everything your kids need to learn in advance.

They’re going to learn things they never use and they’re going to need things you never taught them.

Your chief task, then, is to ensure that your kids learn how to teach themselves what they want to know.

The ONLY WAY that happens is if you let your children and teens teach themselves the things they want to know.

That means you have to make time in the day for your child to learn what they want to know even if it means they don’t learn all the things YOU think they should know.

Now, read all of that again.

You’re doing great!

This post was originally shared on Instagram.
Watch the accompanying reel for more.

For homeschoolers, grading is pretty irrelevant. Grades were designed to help a teacher communicate with a parent who isn’t present in the classroom to know if their child is doing a good enough job keeping up with the class content. At home, you know how your child is doing. Who is the grade for?

If you give grades because you want to build a transcript for admission to a school, just know that most universities and high schools don’t trust your grades anyway! There’s no way to “norm” the grades a parent gives. Sometimes the parent is generous, sometimes punitive. How can a school rely on parent-generated grades? They can’t!

What sets homeschooled kids apart?

• Their unique interests
• The overall composition of their coursework (what they studied and how)
• Their personal narrative essays where they demonstrate that learning

Colleges, in particular, are looking for a diversity of experiences in their freshman classes. They want kids who care about learning and have shown that passion.

The bottom line is: don’t sacrifice learning for the standardized education that drew you to homeschooling in the first place! If you want that standard education, send them to school! Otherwise, take advantage of the opportunity to live a rich life of learning that is not demonstrated by grades but by mastery, passion, and depth!

More on this topic:

• Growth, Not Grades
• Delay Grades as Long as You Can
• Grading Ruins Everything