A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

The easiest way to avoid disrupting your flow of thoughts, activities, and plans is to put off your children’s ideas for fun. Inevitably they seem

• impractical,
• expensive,
• messy,
• exhausting,
• time-consuming,
• and off-task.

We don’t want to seem “mean” so instead of saying “No,” we fudge: “That sounds fun. Maybe later.” Then later never comes, and pretty soon your kids run out of good ideas. When you ask them to fill time, they say they’re bored and can’t think of anything to do.

The habit of creativity is cultivated when we say yes and believe in the possibility (no matter how outlandish).

Your child will say: “Can we build a tree house right now?” And you imagine nails and blueprints and danger. Yet NOW is the moment of greatest commitment to the project. NOW is when your child is the most likely to problem-solve and imagine.

The best way to say yes and show your child you take her seriously is to say “Right now is a great time.” Right now when it’s inconvenient, hard to do, difficult to imagine. Perfect! That means your child will lead the way!

When my kids wanted to build a tree house, we gave them hammers, nails, boards we had collected in our basement, and pointed to a tree. It was no Disney Channel tree house. But the joy of boards to climb to get up a little higher and the thought process that guided the decisions and the hammer swinging and collaboration was worth those several days of creative hard inconvenient work.

Start small. Say “Right now is a great time” to the board game suggestion or baking cookies or turning on the sprinklers to run through them. Stop your plans for a fairy house project or making a blanket fort or learning calligraphy. Right now is a great time to peel the wallpaper so you can paint your room honey. Yes!

Begin dropping everything for a child’s idea once a day (or if you’re super type A, baby steps—once this week). Simply try it once. What would happen if you stopped pushing the day along, and found yourself doing origami tutorials right now instead?

Right now is a great time to find out.

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

Homeschooling is a way of life. We don’t master a way of life, we practice it. There are good days and hard days and pleasant days and sad days.

Each day has a lesson—whether fractions or how to play nicely with a terrorizing toddler.

Each day offers a chance to grow—whether a garden of vegetables or patience.

We learn and live, as a family. We don’t master parenting or marriage either. We can, however, become more skillful, more in tune, more aware of how to create a beautiful life together. That’s what a way of life offers—a context for becoming.

We discover more about the homeschool way of life day by day. The finish line may appear to be the end of high school, but even that marker is artificial in home education. Not all kids choose a traditional high school path. And for children who leave home at 18 for college, you’ll notice that your homeschool way of life continues

• in conversations,
• on holiday breaks,
• and well into adulthood.

Trust me on this. It’s gorgeous.

Education becomes embedded in the details of your relationships—the currency of family intimacy and love.

Rest easier. Be more curious about how you learn and grow together and less concerned with getting enough done or mastering a method.

Welcome to the homeschool way of life.

Your child is frustrated.

• Won’t do what you’re asking.
• Your suggestions feel like insults.
• You offer to help and are rebuffed.

What do you do?

The temptation is to require cooperation or to abandon the task. Neither are satisfying long-term.

Instead, ask your child to engage his imagination.

Imagine an easier way to do this work. What would that look like?

You can encourage full-on fantasy solutions like “My brain would suddenly know the answers without trying” or “I’d have a magic pencil that would write my words for me.” Even these fanciful wishes are clues—he needs a way to feel smart, she wants a transcriptionist.

Your child might say: “It would be easier if I didn’t have to do it.” Gently rejoin: “That wasn’t the question. I’m curious what your imagination would do to stay with this problem, to solve it.” Then give a little space and time for the child to creatively problem-solve.

Sometimes the answer will come quickly. “I’d use a calculator.” “Ah! Good. Me too. Let’s try that today.” OR, a child may say, “I’d lie on the floor while you quizzed me.” Now you have a plan—a way to move forward. Not all ideas will work, btw. That’s okay too. That’s how your child learns about how he or she learns.

When we engage the imagination, we release

• optimism,
• collaboration,
• and creativity.

We shift the responsibility to the child to find solutions and to be resourceful. Test all ideas. See what happens.

Become a student of your student.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

You may find your child cooperates more readily with more control over his or her learning experience. Most kids know there are lessons to complete or a set of problems to finish. When they refuse to do what they’re asked, or when they whine and complain, parents get into power-over thinking—requiring kids to do what we say or else. If we shift to a power-with attitude, we tap into a child’s self awareness and desire to grow.

So instead of “assigning” twenty math problems or six sentences of copywork or three pages of reading or five grammar declensions, pause.

Ask your child:

• “How much do you feel you can do?”
• Or “How many do you have the energy to complete?”

In other words, give your child a chance to look inside to see how much energy and commitment your child has for the task.

She might say: “One problem.” You know, to test you. To see if you are interested in what she’s willing to execute.

If you reply saying, “Great! Let me know when you’re finished and we’ll high five,” she may be stunned into silence. She may even find herself doing more problems (I hear this a lot). Permission to pay attention to energy level is a powerful tool in the learning kit!

Another child might be overly ambitious saying 50 math problems. When he loses steam after 12, affirm all he got done and remind him he can set a lower goal tomorrow.

The purpose of this is to slowly, subtly shift responsibly for learning over time from you to your child. When we show respect for a child’s energy as it undulates day to day, we teach our kids how to be disciplined and self aware people.

We create a partnership of learning, rather than “doing education to our children.”

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