A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

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

If you suffered while learning to read, write, or do math, you might associate pain with effective learning. It doesn’t have to be that way however. Research shows that when a child is relaxed and alert, they are learning the most.

The appropriate level of challenge is similar to what a child feels when they’re trying to solve a puzzle, beat a level in a video game, or build a block tower that doesn’t fall over.

Make the challenge smaller and look for the hook—what makes it interesting and relevant to a child.

Wonder how to do that?

As you grind to the end of the year, be extra careful of creating pain related to learning. It’s easy to push push push thinking about the summer break ahead. Instead, use this time to indulge fresh experiences:

• stomping in rain puddles,
• looking for birds’ nests,
• visiting zoo babies,
• making lemonade from scratch,
• FaceTiming with grandma and reading a picture book to her,
• drawing a picture of a child’s favorite activity from the past year.

Your most sacred trust is protecting a child’s curiosity about each and every subject. That’s such a big job and it’s not easy to do!

Certainly some kids just need a break (they’ve done the deed, they’ve mostly completed the workbook, they’ve read the hard-to-read novel, they’ve handwritten umpteen pages). This is the time for that break. You can ease into the rest of the year paying special attention to cries of boredom or discomfort.

I wish we all cared more about preserving a child’s curiosity in each subject area than getting through and getting done. If you achieve that even in one subject, Gold Stars for you!

Keep going! But slow down. I’m rooting for you.

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

Sometimes our expectations are unreasonable.

We imagine that there’s an actual set of practices and plans we can execute and our kids will never:

• fight,
• cry,
• resist
• or be bored.

At that point, we might felt insulted—“Can’t you see how much energy I am putting into homeschool for you?!”

I’m here to tell you…

That’s utterly NORMAL. Don’t judge your homeschool by each day’s experience. Kids are sometimes as moody and tired of the routine as you are. It’s not you. It’s not even them. It’s just life.

Roll with it. New energy will return. It’s okay to be disappointed. Shake it off.

Rooting for you!

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